MoL-2016-04: Understanding Schizophrenia: A Wittgensteinian Response to Double-Bookkeeping

MoL-2016-04: Bellaar, Rick (2016) Understanding Schizophrenia: A Wittgensteinian Response to Double-Bookkeeping. [Report]

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Abstract

This thesis aims to render intelligible the puzzling phenomenon of double-bookkeeping in schizophrenia. Double-bookkeeping is a term that is used to capture the fact that some patients voice their delusions with unshakeable certainty, yet do not act according to the delusion. The puzzle this poses to the understanding, it will be argued, arises out of a narrow folk-psychological conception of delusions as beliefs. Such a conception will be challenged in this thesis. It will be argued that when we take into account the context of the life in which such delusions occur, different conceptions of delusion in general become conceivable. In particular, proposals that account for delusions in terms of either a suspension of ordinary, or an endorsement of alternative ’bedrock certainties’ will be discussed. It will be argued that these accounts fail to understand the patient’s words. In the final chapter, a new conception of double-bookkeeping delusions will be suggested. The proposal put forward here stresses the difference between the expressive and the descriptive use of language. It will be argued that we need not take the patient’s words as descriptive, but can rather see them as expressive of an experience of meaning akin to that of aspect-seeing. On such a conception, we need not take the words of the patients to be claims about public reality, and need not expect him to act in accordance with them.

Item Type: Report
Report Nr: MoL-2016-04
Series Name: Master of Logic Thesis (MoL) Series
Year: 2016
Uncontrolled Keywords: Schizophrenia, Delusion, Double-Bookkeeping, Wittgenstein, Bedrock, Certainty, Aspect-Seeing, Experience of Meaning, Secondary Sense.
Date Deposited: 12 Oct 2016 14:39
Last Modified: 12 Oct 2016 14:39
URI: https://eprints.illc.uva.nl/id/eprint/976

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