Delusions and Other Irrational Beliefs

While the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is psychiatry's premier guide to classifying and treating mental disorders, it is also renowned for the history and implications of its errata. Regarding delusions, the DSM partially defines them as ‘false beliefs based on incorrect inference about external reality’. But correctness is not a property inferences can bear, strictly speaking; and falsity cannot be a defining property, as some delusions can be accidentally true (e.g., conspiratorial beliefs that the government is recording one's conversations), while some firmly entrenched inferentially based false beliefs either are not delusions (e.g., beliefs that the sun sets in the west) or are delusions that are unjustifiably excepted from the definition (e.g., a magic man lives in the sky, listens to our thoughts, and occasionally demands filicidal sacrifice). These and other mounting conceptual difficulties have led several philosophers to doubt whether the DSM definition of delusions is viable (e.g., Stephens & Graham (2004).

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• Alief and Belief

  Tamar Szabó Gendler, Inc Journal of Philosophy•The Journal of Philosophy•2008

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