Klee (1994), Belief Content, Donald Davidson, Rationality, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Delusion

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KLEE / WHY SOME DELUSIONS ARE NECESSARILY INEXPLICABLE BELIEFS ■ 25

© 2004 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

Why Some Delusions

Are NecessarilyInexplicable Beliefs

Robert Klee

ABSTRACT: After presenting and criticizing recent theo-retical work on the nature of delusional belief, I arguethat the works of the later Wittgenstein and DonaldDavidson offer heretofore underappreciated insightsinto delusional belief. I distinguish two general kindsof delusion: pedestrian and stark. The former can beexplained as cognitive mistakes of various kinds,whereas the latter I argue are necessarily inexplicable.This thesis requires the denial of the Davidsoniandogma that rationality is constitutive of mental con-tent. I claim that the dogma holds only for normalcognition and is violated precisely in the case of starkdelusion.

KEYWORDS: belief content, Donald Davidson, rational-ity, Ludwig Wittgenstein

A Brief Guide to Models of

Delusional Beliefs

IN HIS MUCH-ADMIRED textbook published in

1913, General Psychopathology, Karl Jas-

pers—then solely a clinical psychiatrist and

not yet the existentialist philosopher he was to

become—provided the concept of delusion withits classic “rationalist” construal. In Jaspers’ view,

a delusion is a false belief maintained with incor-

rigible certitude in the face of massive objective

evidence of its falsity (Jaspers 1963, 91–108).

This notion of delusion, with various technical

adjustments, has passed into psychiatry down to

the present day. The Diagnostic and Statistical

Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition

(DSM-IV), for example, defines a delusion as “a

false belief based on incorrect inference about

external reality that is firmly sustained despite

what almost everyone else believes and despite

what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious

proof or evidence to the contrary. The belief is

not one ordinarily accepted by other members of

the person’s culture or subculture” (American

Psychiatric Association [APA] 1994, 765).

In recent years, a number of specialists in the

field have pointed out that this standard concep-tion of delusion in all its sundry versions is prob-

lematic (Berrios 1991; Dudley, John, and Young

1997; Garety and Hemsley 1994; Huq, Garety,

and Hemsley 1988; Moor and Tucker 1979;

Sedler 1995; Walkup 1995). Delusional beliefs

need not be false, firmly sustained with subjec-

tive certitude that comes close to incorrigibility,

contrary to overwhelming and available counter-

evidence, or considered utterly implausible by

the majority of one’s cultural peers. In short, it is

alleged that none of the presumed necessary con-

ditions in the standard conception of delusionalbelief are genuinely necessary—although the con-

junction of them would appear to be logically

sufficient.

Brendan Maher (1988) has argued that delu-

sional beliefs are attempts by the deluded person

to explain something the person otherwise is

unable to understand. This hypothesis was first



26 ■ PPP / VOL. 11, NO. 1 / MARCH 2004

espoused by the French psychiatrist de Cleram-

bault in 1942. He argued that delusional persons

may experience uncanny, bizarre, and generally

anomalous internal sensations, due perhaps to

anomalous neuropathologic factors. These per-

sons naturally seek to explain to themselves theseanomalous sensations, and the result is delusion.

A sophisticated and detailed variant of the Ma-

her hypothesis has been suggested by C. D. Frith(1987, 1992) in which the delusional beliefs of

schizophrenics are held to be the result of a

dysfunction in normal cognitive self-monitoring.

The idea is that there is ordinarily a higher-order

functional element in the cognitive system that

monitors willed intentions and thereby identifies

them as self-originated rather than external in

origin. When this cognitive self-monitor is dys-functional and misrepresents a willed intention

as not originating in the self, the schizophrenic

person becomes puzzled about why they are sud-

denly acting in a certain way or undergoing cer-

tain contextual experiences because they cannot

correctly identify the intention upon which they

are acting as their own. The person then seeks an

explanation to remove the cognitive discomfi-

ture, and the explanations tend to attribute re-

sponsibility for the current, intention, action, or

context to external sources generating the typi-

cally schizophrenic delusions of thought control,external manipulation, and so forth. This is ob-

viously a variant of the Maher hypothesis, be-

cause delusion is attributed to the need to explain

away something inwardly cognitively discomfiting.

Other attempts have been made to mine the

Maher/Frith model for explanations of particu-

lar delusional beliefs (Breen et al. 2000; Currie

2000; Gerrans 2000; Langdon and Coltheart 2000).

In my view, these Maher/Frith models of delu-

sional belief share the same failure: in accounting

for the cause of delusions by appeal to the suffer-

ers’ attempts to explain particular anomalousinternal experiences, the accounts put forward

never succeed in explaining why the delusions in

question have the specific thematic contents they

do. The Cotard delusion is a case in point. The

sufferer believes that he or she is dead. A Maher-

esque theory of the Cotard delusion put forward

by Gerrans (2000) suggests that Cotard sufferers

are severely depressed (a genuine clinical correla-

tion) owing to the global malfunctioning of cer-

tain emotional circuits in the nervous system that

otherwise provide perceptual inputs with emo-

tional meanings. The global lack of emotional

meaning to all the sufferer’s perceptual experi-ences is subjectively anomalous, and the delusion

is the sufferer’s supposed explanation of it all to

himself. A fine and dandy story, but it does notexplain why Cotard sufferers come to believe

they are dead rather than say, a number (num-

bers have no emotive feelings either), or a large

rock (ditto), or a tub of dirt (again), and so on.

Essentially the same complaint about Gerrans’

one-stage model is noted by Andrew Young and

Karel de Pauw (2002). This is the key cognitive

issue, and in the literature on delusions it isalways the point in the story where the theorists

opt out to some vague or ultimately circular

notion of contextual background beliefs or attri-

butional-style biases to account for the choice of

specific delusional content. But these technical

phrases simply relabel the problem, they do not

solve it or shed any further light on it.

Gerrans classifies his model of the Cotard

delusion as a one-stage model of delusions (Ger-

rans, 2002). This is to be contrasted with a two-

stage model of delusions, explicitly defended by

Young and de Pauw (2002). The difference turnson whether it is possible—indeed, whether it is

conceptually coherent—to posit that raw percep-

tual experience contains its own intrinsic the-

matic content (one-stage) or whether, instead,

thematic content is always supplied by a distinct

stage of cognitive interpretation (two-stage). Ger-

rans maintains that any delusion explicable by a

two-stage model is explicable by a one-stage

model, and that the issue is empirically testable,

at any rate. Young and de Pauw deny that the

two models coincide in explanatory power, and

they claim besides that the one-stage model Ger-rans advances has in fact been falsified clinically.

I note that in this paper the arguments I put

forward presuppose that any conceptually coher-

ent model of delusions with even modest explan-

atory power must be a two-stage model. My

views here are thus consistent with Young and de

Pauw’s account, but not with Gerrans’ account.




The Maher/Frith models have met with even

more radical criticism to the effect that they all

seriously misconstrue the ontological nature of

delusions. This criticism argues that delusions

are not beliefs of any kind—that they are not

beliefs at all—hence, they certainly could not beused by the deluded person to explain anything

(Berrios 1991; Fulford 1991; Sass 1994). This is

an intriguing hypothesis given how much typicaldelusions seem to resemble other token proposi-

tional attitudes that are clearly beliefs. The stan-

dard view holds that delusions are beliefs be-

cause they appear to function like beliefs in the

behavior of the deluded person: often a deluded

person acts in a rational manner on the basis of

the apparent content of a delusion, a delusion

that is itself irrational given external reality.Ironically, we render the sufferer’s behavior ra-

tional by attributing to him or her a belief that is

itself irrational. By contrast, one feature Sass

emphasizes that distinguishes delusions in schizo-

phrenia from those in nonschizophrenic psychi-

atric disorders is the failure of a significant pro-

portion of schizophrenics to act on their delusions,

a kind of cognitive indifference to their content.

This might seem to count as probative evidence

that certain kinds of delusions are not beliefs

(Sass 1992).

But there is an even deeper theoretical reasonwhy someone might think that certain kinds of

delusions are not beliefs: no one could literally

believe what they say they do when they appear

to be asserting a belief containing bizarrely delu-

sional content. Suppose that Sergei, an ordinary

nondescript citizen, believes with adamantine in-

tensity that each day’s local newspaper headline

makes a secret but deeply personal and humiliat-

ing reference to him (delusion of reference). Now

the rest of us believe that Sergei cannot really

believe this literally. He cannot believe this if,

that is, he holds a vast array of further everydaybeliefs—among them beliefs about the general

properties of newspaper publishing, about the

general activities and interests of typical editors

and reporters, about the anonymity of an ordi-

nary life lived in a large modern industrial soci-

ety, and so on—beliefs that the rest of us hold

also. For if he holds these other beliefs, he cannot

possibly believe consistently with them that each

day’s local newspaper headline makes a secret

but deeply personal and humiliating reference to

him. Hence, some theorists suggest that delu-

sional discourse is not indicative, and that delu-

sional persons are not asserting beliefs when theyappear to be doing so. But there is a reverse

inference that can be made, one that is more in

keeping with current philosophical theories of meaning and interpretation inspired by the work

of Donald Davidson. It is precisely because so

many of the rest of Sergei’s beliefs are correct,

that his background beliefs are mostly the same

as everyone else’s, as Davidson would put it, that

we can attribute to him the apparent foreground

belief at the core of his delusion. It would be

arbitrary and groundless to attribute to him therest of his beliefs, yet suddenly to withhold attri-

bution only for the foreground delusional belief,

when the same kinds of interconnections among

belief contents that license the former attribution

hold also for the latter.

I shall assume that delusions are beliefs, based

on the considerations just now canvassed. That

still leaves us in a paradox: Sergei cannot literally

believe what he otherwise appears to believe; yet

he does believe it. Thus it is that a conceptual

analysis of delusional beliefs appears to founder

inside the clinic. Perhaps we should take a freshapproach, and a more philosophical one at that.

There are two philosophical approaches that may

be helpful in understanding delusional beliefs,

one associated with the views of the later Wit-

tgenstein, the other associated with the views of

Donald Davidson.

Wittgensteinian Bedrock

At the end of his life, Ludwig Wittgenstein

wrote on a clutch of epistemological issues in-

spired by some previous papers of G. E. Moore.A manuscript dealing with these issues, on which

Wittgenstein had been working at the time of his

death in 1951, was eventually published in 1969

as On Certainty.

Wittgenstein argues that there are particular

beliefs that have a very special cognitive status.

They are beliefs immune to doubt, yet we cannot

be said to know them or to be certain of them—



28 ■ PPP / VOL. 11, NO. 1 / MARCH 2004

that is, their propositional contents are not pos-

sible objects of knowledge. No other beliefs jus-

tify them because they are the bedrock beliefs

that make any kind of justification possible in

the first place. Hence, they cannot be proven to

be true. They are beliefs that, as Wittgensteinvividly puts it, “stand fast” (feststehen) for us

(Wittgenstein 1969, §116, §234–235).

Now other philosophers have also defendedthe view that there are so-called foundational

beliefs immune to doubt. Rene Descartes famously

identified a class of beliefs that also stand fast for

us. But Wittgenstein is no garden-variety foun-

dationalist like Descartes; for, unlike in typical

foundationalist epistemologies, Wittgenstein’s

foundational beliefs are not justifiable. Descartes

held that his foundational beliefs were justifiableby the natural light of reason (Descartes 1985,

vol. I, pp. 10–12; vol. II, p. 27). By contrast.,

Wittgenstein insists that no purely intellectual or

cognitive process, be it a rational one or not, can

serve to make what stands fast for us justifiable

or knowable (Wittgenstein 1969, §204, §253,

§475). Wittgenstein discusses several examples,

among them the belief that the earth is very old

and the belief that he (Wittgenstein) has never

been on the surface of the moon. These beliefs,

he argues, are immune to doubt yet he cannot be

said to know them to be true or to be certain of them, for the concepts of knowing and being

certain only apply where a doubt is at least possi-

ble, and in these cases doubt is impossible. It is

impossible, that is, if one is not profoundly men-

tally ill such that one doubts that the earth is

very old or that an ordinary person would doubt

that he or she has never set foot on the surface of

the moon. Wittgenstein is aware that there are

individuals for whom such beliefs are in ques-

tion, and he suggests that rather than speaking of

such individuals as making a mistake in these

cases, we should see such individuals as exam-ples of mental derangement (Geistestörung). He

might have said delusion in place of derange-

ment; at least, that is the suggestion I want to

explore. The point Wittgenstein is groping after

in his remarks is that a certain kind of bizarre,

deranged belief—what we can consider a delu-

sional belief whose content involves a denial of

something that stands fast for us—is not a mis-

take of any kind (Wittgenstein 1969, §67–73).

One can only be mistaken about what one could

possibly be in doubt about, and what stands fast

for us is not something open to doubt. That

would help to explain why clinically it is so oftenpointless to try to reason with deluded individu-

als about the evidential specifics of their delu-

sions: when the content of the delusion involvesa denial of something that stands fast for us, no

given piece of evidence is any more relevant than

another, because evidence has no specific role to

play in justifying what stands fast for us (because

nothing justifies what stands fast for us—justifi-

cation involves what we could possibly be mis-

taken about). Wittgenstein himself put the point

forcefully when he suggested that when a personhas a deranged belief of this kind, one does not

know what would count as evidence for or against

the belief for that person. Indeed, Wittgenstein’s

view calls into question the very coherency of

one-stage models for any kind of belief state,

delusory or not. As he famously put it in On

Certainty (§141): “When we first begin to be-lieve anything, what we believe is not a single

proposition, it is a whole system of propositions.

(Light dawns gradually over the whole.)” Beliefs

are born networked together in complex rela-

tions of support and countersupport. One can-not believe any one thing without first believing

much else besides, just as the light of the sun

dawns gradually over the whole of the morning

scene and not on one blade of grass or one tree at

a time. It is precisely these networked intercon-

nections that are pathologically absent or other-

wise distorted in the case of delusional beliefs.

But not all delusions are deranged beliefs in

Wittgenstein’s sense. Some delusions are what I

call pedestrian: they do not involve content de-

nying something that stands fast for us or that is

metaphysically bizarre in any way. They are inthat sense mistakes. For example, simple delu-

sions of spousal unfaithfulness are pedestrian

delusions in this sense, as are some delusions of

persecution by governmental authorities. A Wit-

tgensteinian model of delusions as deranged be-

liefs clearly does not fit the case of pedestrian

delusions. If Wittgenstein is correct, then we can-




not clearly understand how a deranged belief

connects with what else the deluded individual

believes correctly; for Wittgenstein argues that

such fitting in with what else the person knows

aright is precisely the mark of having made a

mistake and deranged beliefs are not mistakes of any kind (Wittgenstein 1969, §74). This goes

against clinical experience. It is often the case

that a savvy psychiatrist can in some way fit thepedestrian delusion into what else the individual

believes, including what is believed aright. In

some cases, the individual constructs an elabo-

rate system of buttressing beliefs surrounding the

pedestrian delusion whose purpose is to render it

understandable via creative interpretations that

are consistent with what the deluded person be-

lieves aright. The sufferer’s deluded cognitiveworld is thus sometimes learnable by another

person; one can imagine pretending to be the

deluded person for a while, and this should not

be possible for a nondeluded individual if pedes-

trian delusions are deranged beliefs in the Wit-

tgensteinian sense. This ability to simulate pedes-

trian delusions fits more accurately Donald

Davidson’s model of psychological interpreta-

tion, to which I turn next.

Davidsonian Fragmentation

Donald Davidson’s model of intentional ac-

tion and psychological interpretation has exert-

ed an enormous influence in contemporary phi-

losophy of mind and philosophy of language

since the 1960s. The central insight of the David-

sonian model is that human behavior is ordinari-

ly explained by citing the beliefs and desires of

the person in question in such a way as to make

that person out to be a rational agent pursuing

their ends in a causally efficacious manner (David-

son 1967, 1973, 1974,1975; Lepore and

McLaughlin 1985). Suppose we observe Red-mond attempting to eat his hat. To explain this

strange behavior of his we must find some way

of attributing beliefs and desires to Redmond,

consistently with the rest of his behavior, so that

his eating his hat contributes to the achieving of

his ends in an efficacious way. Perhaps he made a

bet with a close friend that he would eat his hat if

he lost, he now believes he lost the bet, and he

also desires to be perceived as honorable by his

friend and believes that carrying out what he

said he would do will best preserve his honor in

the eyes of his friend. Or perhaps he belongs to

an obscure religious cult whose members eattheir hats on a certain day of the year, he believes

it is now that particular day of the year, and he

desires to fulfill his religious obligations as a cultmember and believes that eating his hat will

achieve that end. Better yet, perhaps he strongly

desires to gain the attention of the significant

others currently in his life and believes that doing

something bizarre like eating his hat will best

achieve that result. And on and on run the possi-

bilities, constrained as they are by the rest of

Redmond’s behavior. The Davidsonian modelconstrues standard psychological explanation as

having this structure: the fitting in of the fore-

ground mental state in question with respect to a

larger network of cognitive states, usually beliefs

and desires. The fitting in is typically that of

efficaciously facilitating the means-to-ends rela-

tionships between the component beliefs and de-

sires in the network. More importantly, in the

Davidsonian model the fitting together of cogni-

tive states is held to be constitutive of state con-

tent: we cannot tell what cognitive state a person

is in—for example, whether it is a belief that X, afear that Y, or a wish that Z, for some specific

subject matters X, Y, and Z—minus that cogni-

tive state’s coherence with (its fitting in with) the

larger portion of the rest of the person’s cogni-

tive states.

One consequence of the Davidsonian model is

that paradigmatically irrational phenomena, such

as delusions, present special problems; for one

essential aspect of psychological explanation un-

der the model is that the rationality of the person

whose actions are being explained must be max-

imized, and that requires in turn that the beliefsattributed to that person be internally consistent.

Consistency would seem to be violated in delu-

sional experience. Davidson’s response to this

problem—discussed in the context of trying to

explain everyday self-deception, not frankly de-

lusional belief—was to suggest a partition model

of the cognitive system of the person in question



30 ■ PPP / VOL. 11, NO. 1 / MARCH 2004

(Davidson 1982, 1998). The other beliefs of the

self-deceived person that are inconsistent with

the belief at the core of the self-deception are

postulated to be cognitively isolated from it,

walled off in other cognitive compartments.

Davidson imagines the contents of these variouscompartments as constantly shifting and nonper-

manent (in that sense his partition model is dis-

tinguishable from classical Freudian models, inwhich the content of the id compartment, for

example, is fairly fixed by childhood). Hence,

self-deception is explained by fragmenting the

cognitive system into partitioned compartments

between which there is no current communica-

tion. Presumably, delusions might be treated in a

similar way under a fragmentation model.

Davidson himself has noted a peculiar tensionthat besets his model when it is used for dealing

with deeply irrational phenomena. Irrationality

is only detectable against a background of ratio-

nal cognition, so the irrationality in the deranged

person cannot be, as it were, too irrational; that

is, it cannot be so irrational that there is no

background of rational cognition left in the psy-

chotic person against which to detect the fore-

ground irrationality. Worse, one explains the ir-

rational by rendering it rational to some extent,

in the sense that one explains it by fitting it into

other beliefs and desires the person holds in anefficacious means-to-ends way; but it cannot fit

in too well, or it ceases to be irrational at all.

Simon Evnine (1989) has explored this feature of

the Davidsonian model in further detail, arguing

for a striking conclusion: deeply irrational mad-

ness—what I call psychotic cognition—is located

at the point where the background of rational

cognition has disappeared completely, taking the

foreground irrationality with it. In cases of deep-

ly irrational psychopathology, one cannot even

claim that the psychotic person is in fact delu-

sional, for not enough rationality is left againstwhich to detect irrational cognition in the first

place—not enough is left to allow the attribution

of any beliefs and desires at all to the person,

including bizarre ones. The psychotic person is

just an incomprehensible blank to us, for we

cannot attribute any content at all to the person’s

mental states. The state of mind in which a deep-

ly psychotic individual dwells is thus unintelligi-

ble, as Jaspers in fact suspected; but, unlike Jas-

pers, the Davidsonian model holds that we now

have a better theoretical understanding of this

unintelligibility, of what it takes to arrive at such

a condition, psychologically speaking. To Jas-pers, the unintelligibility of deeply psychotic cog-

nition was a theoretically opaque clinical phe-

nomenon in the sense that he as a clinician simplysubjectively experienced the psychotic person as

unintelligible. The unintelligibility for Jaspers did

not fit into a general theory about the nature of

psychological interpretation, it did not have an

intellectually understandable characterization

based in a general account of the boundaries of

the psychologically explicable. All Jaspers could

say is “I can’t understand this person’—not “norational creature could possibly understand this

person because the conditions required for any

psychological interpretation of the behavior in

question do not obtain in this person’s case.” If

Evnine’s conjecture is correct, then not even an

omniscient rational deity could understand deep-

ly psychotic cognition.

Evnine’s Jaspersian account of madness has

an air of disturbing paradox about it: the very

fulfilling of the criterion that makes cognition

deeply psychotic is what strips it of having any

identifiable thematic content of a psychotic kind.The impossibility of intelligible comprehension

of the mad person’s behavior/state of mind is

what marks it out as intelligibly psychotic. One

inference that follows from this model of mad-

ness is that the presence of delusional beliefs—

having identifiable thematic content as they do—

indicates that the person is not deeply psychotic.

Or, to put it another way, it indicates that what

psychosis, if any, the person has, is psychologi-

cally compartmentalized. Hence, we return by a

circuitous route to the Davidsonian fragmenta-

tion metaphor.Does the fragmentation model accord with

clinical experience? Not always. Recall Sass’s

observation about the significant proportion of

deluded individuals who seem to possess some

level of awareness that their own cognitive house

is not exactly in good order. That does not sup-

port the compartmentalization hypothesis if com-




partmentalization is taken to imply a complete

lack of communication between distinct cogni-

tive compartments, as Davidson says it does.

And Davidson says it does for a very good rea-

son. Even a minimal awareness would likely be

too much awareness, because even a minimalawareness would seem to imply conscious aware-

ness of one’s own inconsistency, something the

Davidsonian model cannot tolerate because itrequires maximizing the rationality of the person

whose behavior/state of mind is being explained,

and conscious inconsistency is the nadir point on

the rationality scale.

A Constraint on Models of

Delusional Belief

I suggested above that what I have called

pedestrian delusions are ultimately explicable asmistakes in Wittgenstein’s sense, the causal result

of poor reasoning, mishandling of evidence, emo-

tional clouding of thought, pursuit of secondary

gain, sequelae of depression, and so forth. Such

delusions more or less fit in with what else the

deluded individual believes aright, in good David-

sonian fashion, and they do not involve denying

or doubting anything that stands fast for us.

Profoundly bizarre delusions, what I call stark

delusions, are another matter, however. TheDavidsonian view that content attribution is se-

riously undermined in such cases is not in the

end clinically plausible. Clinicians usually have

little trouble identifying the content of stark de-

lusions, delusions that do involve denying what

stands fast for us, even when there are many of

them cobbled together in the same individual.

And stark delusions simply do not fit in with

what else the deluded person believes aright.

Whether the clinician’s ability to attribute con-

tent is due to some implicitly unconscious use of

a crude causal theory of reference I shall leave tothe philosophers of language to debate. For my

purposes what matters is that fitting in with

what else is believed aright is not necessary for

attributing thematic content to stark delusions.

In this sense, rationality is not across-the-board

constitutive of mental state content attribution.

Score one against Davidson. Stark delusions are

more like deranged beliefs in Wittgenstein’s sense;

but, unlike Wittgenstein’s own conception of such

beliefs, they contain understandable content that

negates what stands fast for us. Hence, it is

comprehensible to imagine that, for certain un-

fortunate individuals, what stands fast for us isdoubtable, even deniable. Insofar as Wittgen-

stein seems to have thought such a situation was

incomprehensible to us as observers, score oneagainst Wittgenstein.

Both points scored imply that an individual

can be massively stark deluded. More to the

point, stark delusions and the psychological de-

rangement they represent, are, I want to argue,

necessarily inexplicable. If I am correct about

this, then score one against Evnine. For Evnine

suggests that deeply psychotic states of mind, thesorts of states of mind exemplified by massive

stark delusions, come at the point where all iden-

tifiable mental state content vanishes. On the

contrary, mental state content does not vanish in

the vast majority of such cases—it is readily

identifiable in the clinic—so Evnine’s suggestion

is trumped by empirical fact; rather, it becomes

necessarily inexplicable, and one could not say

this if deeply psychotic cognition failed to have

any identifiable content. There is a putative ex-

planandum—mental content to be explained—

but there is no possible explanation of it. Theinexplicability is a necessary one for a double

reason. First, the Davidsonian reason: beliefs are

explained by their relations—rational or nonra-

tional, as the case may be—to other beliefs (and

desires); but the present case is precisely one in

which there are no possible relations (rational or

nonrational) that could serve to fit the stark

delusion into any other mental states attribut-

able to the psychotic person. Second, the Wit-

tgensteinian reason: if the stark delusion involves

content that negates things that stand fast for us,

the stark delusion cannot be explained becauseexplanation begins from what stands fast for us.

An example will help here. Suppose Perse-

phone believes with an utterly steadfast willful-

ness that she is able to control the local weather

by personal mental command (grandiose delu-

sion), that her left ear is a second fertile womb

(somatic delusion), that the last three Popes have



32 ■ PPP / VOL. 11, NO. 1 / MARCH 2004

secretly been married to her (erotomanic delu-

sion), that many of her body hairs are electronic

antennae receiving broadcast thoughts that are

maliciously controlled by alien beings in space-

craft hovering near the Earth (delusion of alien

thought control), that her eldest son was in therecent past replaced by an artificial machine made

exclusively out of metals with atomic numbers

greater than 11, and so on. These beliefs arestark delusions in the sense I have tried to expli-

cate. All of them negate or question something

that stands fast for us. Certainly none of them fit

into what else Persephone believes aright. And,

we can be sure that there are limitless things that

Persephone does believe aright: that thunder-

storms form suddenly in fronts and are subject to

chaotic behavior, that fetal development takesplace in the uterus, that modern-day Popes are

always career ordained priests, that body hair is

a poor electrical conductor and easily cut with

barber’s scissors, that her eldest son drinks water

and eats regular food like other human beings,

and so on. Under these conditions, Persephone’s

stark delusions are necessarily inexplicable be-

liefs. The framework that makes any kind of

psychological explanation possible is missing. To

appreciate this point, note that the utter inabili-

ty, the impossibility, of predicting the content of

a stark delusion is not due—as it is in the case of explicable phenomena—merely to temporal facts

about when the phenomena occurred relative to

when the attempt either to explain or predict

occurs. Even had we known Persephone prior to

her illness, known her with as much psychologi-

cal intimacy as is possible, we could not have

predicted the specific content of her subsequent

stark delusions. That is the thesis I am suggesting

here. It follows that the failure to explain the

kind of bizarre cognition evidenced by stark de-

lusions is not due to mere epistemic limitations on

human observers. It is a necessary failure based onthe nature of the reality targeted for explanation.

Is Rationality Constitutive

for Mental Content?

The thesis I have proposed directly challenges

something that has become a bit of a dogma in

contemporary philosophy of mind and language.

This is the dogma that rationality, or perhaps

rational coherence would be a better way to put

it, is constitutive of mental content. As a David-

sonian I once heard long ago hyperbolically put

the dogma: the only evidence there can be for abelief is another belief. As Davidson himself put

the dogma, “nothing can count as a reason for

holding a belief except another belief” (David-son 1986, p. 315). Davidson even held that no

purely perceptual mental state has any specific

thematic content at all—raw perception does not

directly issue in cognition: that happens only

after the perception has been processed into the

level of the belief–desire system of the perceiver.

Thematic content cannot be read off of purely

sensory neural signals, for it arises only in therelational context of other preexisting themati-

cally contentful mental states. Note that this puts

Davidson squarely in the camp of those who

advocate two-stage models of delusion. There is

something correct about this dogma—for nor-

mal cognition, certainly. My thesis is that deeply

disturbed cognition, such as stark delusion,

achieves that status precisely because it is cogni-

tion—that is, it has identifiable mental content—

but it falls below the normal standard of rational

coherence among the person’s mental states that

is otherwise necessary for healthy cognitive oper-ations. A serious objection may now be heard

that my thesis is itself incoherent: for thematic

content cannot be present minus the minimal

rationality necessary for its occurrence. This is

an ontological issue, not an epistemic one. It is

not merely that we cannot tell what content is

there because of our position as third-party ob-

servers, runs the objection; rather, there is no

content there to be discovered or attributed.

I am going to call the objection’s bluff. Chris-

topher Cherniak, arguing in guarded support of

the dogma, held that rationality is constitutive of mental content because “a cognitive theory with

no rationality restrictions is without predictive

content . . .” and because “rationality [is] part of

what it means to be a person: the elements of a

mind . . .must fit together or cohere” (1986, 6).

But, if I am correct, the delusions of starkly

deluded individuals have that status in part be-




cause no one could possibly have predicted the

thematic content of their delusions: unpredict-

ability in principle is constitutive of stark (as

opposed to pedestrian) delusions. But that in-

volves Cherniak’s first, and epistemic, point. What

about his second, and ontological, point? Cher-niak might presumably object that, under my

thesis, starkly deluded individuals risk being

mindless, and hence may not be persons at all onthe principle that having a mind is a necessary

condition of being a person. But starkly deluded

individuals clearly are persons, clearly are pos-

sessed of minds; therefore, something must be

wrong with my thesis.

This would-be refutation is too hasty. It trades

on the vagueness of the notion of fitting together

and on the vagueness of what it means to possessa mind. Having a mind is not a monolithic phe-

nomenon, the same for all minded creatures.

Minds come in all kinds and degrees: healthy, ill,

fragmented, sharp, dull, dysfunctional, primi-

tive, truncated (think of various forms of clinical

dementia). The contents of a mind do not have to

fit together in any strongly rational sense except

when the mind is functioning well. The whole

Davidsonian approach skews matters toward the

healthy side of the ledger—the model of mind

that flows from Davidsonian principles makes a

large number of serious mental/neurological ill-nesses intractably anomalous—we have already

seen that this is so. Why would that fact not in

itself call into question certain core principles in

the Davidsonian model of mind; in particular,

the principle that rationality is constitutive of

mental content across the board, not only in

cases of normal, nonpathological cognition? Un-

less we adjust Davidson’s dogma and restrict the

constitutiveness of rationality for mental content

to cases of healthy cognition, we shall never

obtain a correct interpretation of stark delusions

while retaining the vital role for rationality itmust have in our general cognitive theory.

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Documents

Klee (1994), Belief Content, Donald Davidson, Rationality, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Delusion