Double Bookkeeping and Doxasticism about Delusion
In this post, José Eduardo Porcher , Research Fellow at the Rutgers Center for the Philosophy of Religion working primarily in the philosophy of psychiatry and philosophical psychology, outlines his target paper “ Double Bookkeeping and Doxasticism about Delusion ” in the newest issue of Philosophy, Psychiatry & Psychology. Doxasticism about delusion is the theoretical stance according to which delusion is a kind of belief. Although doxasticism is taken for granted in the psychiatric literature, it has been a major point of contention in the philosophical literature, where it has faced many objections and alternative accounts (see e.g. Bortolotti, 2018 ). In my paper, I show how double bookkeeping , a distinctive characteristic of delusional patients, motivates two kinds of argument against doxasticism. I then examine these arguments and find them inconclusive. So what is double bookkeeping? Consider the following excerpt of an interview with a patient who showed symptoms of Capgr...