Delusions: What Cognitive Attitude Are They?

This entry focuses on the debate over whether subjects with delusions should be thought of as believing what they seem to assert (for example that their loved one has been replaced by an imposter), or whether they have some other kind of cognitive state, like an imagining. The debate has arisen partly as a result of differences in emphasis concerning empirical facts but primarily because of different approaches to belief and what is required to differentiate belief from other cognitive attitudes. In section one, I illustrate the somewhat confusing observations concerning subjects with delusion and move on to discuss the nature of cognitive states and how beliefs should be characterised within the proposed framework in section two. In the third section, I review the three most widely discussed approaches to the characterisation of subjects with delusions, two of which take them to believe what they seem to assert. I argue that until the attribution of a non-doxastic cognitive state is properly predictive and explanatory, as opposed to being simply descriptive of the phenomena, it is better to develop further our understanding of the conditions in which beliefs may fail to display their expected cognitive role.