Posted by alexandra_k on August 22, 2005, at 19:19:51
In reply to Re: From Experience to Belief, posted by alexandra_k on August 22, 2005, at 19:16:34
What seems to be in common to the accounts considered thus far is the notion that the delusional subject is taking their autonomic response to be informing them of the further fact that they have died. What I want to consider, however, is that this may not be the case for most subjects who maintain that they are dead. Instead of considering the subject to be attempting to make a false claim about reality on the basis of their experiences perhaps they are simply trying to report or express their experience as it seems to them to be where the anomalous experience is the loss of autonomic response. If this is indeed what some subjects are doing then this would make sense of why it is that they are so very certain about what they are saying. If they are reporting on their experience then they are indeed entitled to be certain that things are in fact the way they seem to the subject to be.
One of the problems with construing the subject as making a false claim about reality was the point that they did not seem to consider it to be relevant to what they were saying that they were still able to walk around. Perhaps they did not find it relevant because they did not draw the implicit steps. It would seem that a more likely explanation for this, however, is that it might be because facts such as their being able to walk around are indeed irrelevant to their utterance. If they are reporting on their experience then those facts would indeed be irrelevant as facts about the external world are irrelevant with respect to providing supporting or disconfirming evidence for the subjects experiences.
Campbell writes that delusional beliefs seem to have been elevated to the status of Wittgenstinean framework propositions by which he seemed to mean that they were immune to supporting or falsifying evidence. Some delusional beliefs seem to have taken on this quality. I would like to maintain that this is because reports of experience and that these are indeed immune to supporting or falsifying evidence from external reality. If this is the case then it would seem that the delusional subject is simply playing a language game in which the external world is disregarded as irrelevant. If they are simply expressing their experiences then they cannot be wrong, which may be why the delusion is held with such conviction. Their utterances would also not be in conflict with what they previously held to be true.
The most obvious objection to this line would be that the delusional subject does not preface their utterances with ‘it seem to me as though’ or ‘it is like…’. Why doesn’t the delusional subject simply say ‘I have the experience of emotional death’ or ‘I feel dead’ or something a little more like that? This is indeed a tricky problem for the line that they are reporting on their experience. One response might be that these expressions do not convey the sense of conviction that the delusional subject feels. Indeed the subject with depression might start out making claims like this, but if their depression continues untreated they may progress to claiming they are dead. Typically we don’t take pains to distinguish between a claim about reality and a claim about our experience. Typically we don’t need to because they coincide. We don’t say ‘it seems to me as though I am in pain’ because the first half of that just seems redundant. To make it clearer that the subject is attempting to report on their experience rather than a state of the world would also require them to acknowledge the external world. I think the problem is more that their experiences have taken on such an intensity and captured their attentional processes to the point that the world really has fallen out as irrelevant.
If one had lost interest in the nature of reality and instead was only focused on ones anomalous experience then this might conceivably lead to the kinds of delusional utterance that subjects actually make. The problem might not be that they have taken their experience to be veridical when they have rational grounds to doubt. Rather, the problem might be construed as their being fixated on reporting on their experience to the extent that they are playing a different language game, one in which the external world has been disregarded as irrelevant.
poster:alexandra_k
thread:543149
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/write/20050807/msgs/545316.html