Philosophical Psychopathology: Philosophy without Thought Experiments

215 Pages·2013·2.66 MB·English

by  Garry Young

Philosophical Psychopathology
Also by Garry Young
DELUSIONAL MISIDENTIFICATION
ETHICS IN THE VIRTUAL WORLD
The Morality and Psychology of Gaming
TRANSCENDING TABOOS
A Moral and Psychological Examination of Cyberspace (co-authored with M. T. Whitty)
Philosophical
Psychopathology
Philosophy without Thought
Experiments
Garry Young
Nottingham Trent University, UK
© Garry Young 2013
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First published 2013 by
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Contents
List of Figures vi
1 Introduction 1
Part I The Role of Consciousness in
Intentional Action
2 P hilosophical Issue 1: Conscious Inessentialism 11
3 B lindsight and Other Visuomotor Pathologies 25
4 P hilosophical Issue 2: What Makes an Action Intentional? 42
5 A narchic Hand 57
6 A lien Control 74
7 P hilosophical Issue 2 Revisited: The Conscious Decision
to Act and Free Will 91
Part II Thought, Subjectivity and Rationality
8 P hilosophical Issue 3: What Makes a Thought My Thought? 101
9 T hought Insertion 112
10 P hilosophical Issue 4: What Is It to Be Rational? 126
11 T he Capgras Delusion 136
12 T he Cotard Delusion 150
Part III Knowledge How and
Epistemological Reduction
13 P hilosophical Issue 5: Ryle’s Dichotomy and the
Intellectualist Challenge 161
14 V isuomotor Pathologies Revisited 173
E pilogue 183
References 185
Index 205
v
List of Figures
2.1 A schematic showing the cause of pain behaviour as
posited by identity theory 16
2.2 A schematic representing the functionalist account
of mental states 20
3.1 The images show Helen who could accurately grasp a
raisin courtesy of information processed through her
visual system despite her complete cortical blindness 26
3.2 The cortical and sub-cortical pathways, including the
ventral and dorsal streams that branch out from area
V1 of the visual cortex 28
3.3 (a) In the Titchener illusion, the centre circles which are
surrounded by different size circles are the same size,
although the one on the left appears larger than the one
on the right. (b) When participants in the Aglioti et al .
(1995) study were asked to estimate the size of the centre
object with their thumb and forefinger (cylindrical blocks)
they succumbed to the illusion 38
5.1 Medial and lateral views showing supplementary motor
area (SMA) and pre-motor cortex (PMC) 64
6.1 A contemporary model of motor action incorporating
inverse and feed forward components 79
9.1 Frith’s model of defective self-monitoring used to explain
thought insertion 117
11.1 S howing a skin conductance trace 138
11.2 S hows the application of Ellis and Lewis’s (2001) model
of face recognition to the Capgras delusion and
prosopagnosia 138
11.3 Graph showing mean skin conductance response (SCR)
to familiar (grey bars) and unfamiliar (black bars) faces in
three patient groups 139
14.1 A n illustration of the type of task DF was able to carry out
despite her pathology 174

vi
1
Introduction
In this chapter I explain what is meant by the term p hilosophical psycho-
pathology , what thought experiments are and what their role has been
(and continues to be) within the philosophical tradition. I then move on
to outline the book’s aim which is to show how, in light of the growing
availability of case study evidence documenting rare human pathological
conditions and our ever-increasing neurological understanding of how the
brain works, it is possible to engage with certain philosophical issues in
the absence of thought experiments. It is not therefore my contention that
thought experiments have no place in philosophy; rather, I aim to show
only that pathological case study evidence amounts to a rich but, at present,
underused resource, and that this resource merits a more prominent role
within philosophical inquiry.
1.1 What is philosophical psychopathology?
Philosophical psychopathology is the ‘investigation of philosophical issues
arising from consideration of various sorts of mental disorders’ (Graham
& Stephens, 1994, p. 4): for such is the peculiar and divergent nature of
psychopathological phenomena that they constitute a valuable tool for use
in contemporary philosophical research. Again, in the words of Graham and
Stephens:
Some of the most arresting and puzzling phenomena described in the
clinical literature on psychopathology are the disturbances of self-
consciousness that frequently accompany, and sometimes seem to consti-
tute the essence of, various mental disorders ... Though one would suppose
that these ... would represent an invaluable theoretical resource, they have
seldom been exploited in traditional philosophical accounts of human
mentality. Fortunately, this surprising gap between clinical observation
and philosophical theorizing has been closing dramatically in recent
years. (1994, p. 1)
1
2 Philosophical Psychopathology
Philosophical psychopathology, as the name suggests – and as Graham and
Stephens describe – uses as a substantial resource for philosophical inquiry
various forms of mental disorder. These psychopathologies include delusional
states such as the C apgras and C otard delusions, as well as delusions of control
such as t hought insertion . Yet in addition to these p sychop athologies, this book
discusses pathologies of the brain which are not held to be (crudely speaking)
forms of mental illness. Someone suffering from a narchic hand, for example,
may say of their hand when ‘behaving’ in an uncontrollable way – “It is as
if it has a will of its own” – but this does not mean that the patient actually
believes that the hand is being controlled by another’s will. In other words,
these patients are not delusional. Compare this to a condition known as a lien
control in which the patient believes that someone else is controlling their
movements and therefore that another’s agency is being expressed directly
through their actions. Here, the patient is judged to hold a delusional belief.
Both cases are examples of pathologies, and each is unusual and even
bizarre in its own right, but only the latter should be construed as p sycho -
pathological. Case studies involving often unusual and bizarre patholo-
gies (whether psychopathological or not) provide a constant source of data
which act to stimulate pertinent philosophical questions and perhaps chal-
lenge (although they may support) traditional or contemporary theories and
conceptualizations. In fact, such is the peculiarity of these pathologies that
they resemble in many ways concrete examples of the kinds of hypothetical
circumstances that feature in philosophical thought experiments.
1.2 What is a thought experiment?
Thought experiments tend to begin with the word “Imagine”, or certainly
lend themselves to such a beginning. Imagine a world exactly like our own
except for a difference in the chemical composition of water, for example. Or
imagine that your brain is transplanted into the body of another without a
brain, or that one day lightning strikes a dead tree in a swamp which results
in the creation of a physical replica of yourself called Swampman, and so
on. Thought experiments are in a sense imaginings, but if they are to be
successful as thought experiments then they are imaginings constrained by
conceivability and so by logical necessity. They are suppositions intended to
support or more likely challenge a particular theory or conceptualization;
but, in doing so, they are bound by the same rules of logic, the same depend-
ence on conceivability, said to be at fault within the theory or concept under
scrutiny.
Importantly, then, for a thought experiment to be conceivable it must not
be conceptually confused or contradictory. To illustrate: it is not legitimate
(as a thought experiment) to say “Imagine a four-sided triangle” because
it is not conceivable that such an object could exist. What we refer to as a
triangle necessarily has three sides (no more, no less; or three-angles to be
Introduction 3
precise, which we equate with having three sides). Similarly, given that the
word ‘all’ is understood to mean ‘completely’ or ‘in its entirety’ or ‘the total
number’, it is illegitimate to “Imagine being at the same time all black and
all white”: for it is a logical contradiction that one could be entirely one thing
and entirely another.
One of the oldest recorded thought experiments concerns the universe
and the concept of infinity (found in Lucretius’ D e R erum Natura [The
Nature of Things]). It asks us to consider whether there is a boundary to the
universe. That is, whether it is finite or infinite. Even now, as was certainly
the case in the ancient world (from where this thought experiment origi-
nated), we are unable to test this supposition d irectly through empirical
methods (for example, by travelling in search of the end point, should it
exist). Nevertheless, it may be that an answer can be postulated through
a priori reasoning alone. If the universe (conceived to mean ‘all that there
is’) is finite then there must be an end: a cosmic boundary. So begins the
thought experiment: Imagine that there is what looks like some form of
cosmic boundary. If one were to throw a spear at it then logic dictates that
one of two possibilities should arise: either the spear would pass through
the boundary or it would be repelled (to bring the example up-to-date, one
might replace the spear with a laser or phaser blast). If the former, then the
cosmic boundary does not signify the limit of the universe, as the spear is
able to continue past it into something else and therefore the universe is not
all there is. If the latter is the case, and the spear is repelled (or even disin-
tegrates), then there must be something on the other side of the boundary.
Either way, the thought experiment (as conceived) leads us to conclude that
the universe is not finite and so must be infinite.
Thought experiments must adhere to what is l ogically possible, otherwise
any theory or concept within a theory cannot easily be undermined by them.
Based on how we conceive of a bachelor, for example, it would be hard to
defend the claim that all bachelors are unmarried men if one were allowed
to say with any credence “Imagine a married bachelor”. Likewise, there is no
logical contradiction in saying that Fred Bloggs is awake or that he is asleep,
but it would violate the rule of contradiction to say Fred Bloggs is awake
asleep, at least based on how we conceptualize these two terms individu-
ally. As such, we could not imagine being awake asleep because this is not
something we can conceive clearly ‘in the mind’. David Hume (1739–1740;
2007) makes essentially the same point when conceiving of a mountain:
‘Tis an establish’d maxim in metaphysics, That whatever the mind clearly
conceives includes the idea of possible existence, or in other words, t hat nothing
we imagine is absolutely impossible . We can form the idea of a golden moun-
tain, and from thence conclude that such a mountain may actually exist.
We can form no idea of a mountain without a valley, and therefore regard
it as impossible. (§32; emphasis in original)