Delusions and Self-Knowledge (by guest blogger Lisa Bortolotti)
Suppose that Chloe suffers from a delusion of erotomania and believes that President Obama is secretly in love with her. Chloe has never met him, so how does she know about his feelings? When probed, Chloe may offer no reason in support of her belief or offer reasons that others would consider unsatisfactory or irrelevant (e.g., “He is sending me love messages that only I can decipher”).
One explanation is that the belief is so certain for Chloe that she doesn’t feel the need to provide a justification for it. John Campbell argued that at least some delusions play the role of framework beliefs, a notion introduced by Wittgenstein in On Certainty. Framework beliefs (e.g., “The Earth existed long before my birth”) are central to our world-view and become virtually indubitable. They are the pillars on which the rest of our belief system rests, and can’t themselves be justified on the basis of beliefs that are more certain. However, they are manifested in our way of life - we wouldn’t believe our grandparents’ war stories if we thought that the Earth had come into existence at the same time as we did. In my view, delusions are unlikely to play the same role as framework beliefs. Framework beliefs are typically shared by an entire linguistic community, delusions are not. Framework beliefs are perfectly integrated in a belief system, whereas delusions are often in conflict with other beliefs.
What puzzles us about those delusions that seem to come out of nowhere is that the person reports them with conviction but doesn’t seem to genuinely endorse them, whereas there is no doubt that framework beliefs are endorsed. Richard Moran developed the notion of authorship which captures the sense in which we know what our beliefs are on the basis of the fact that we endorse their content. We can introspect some of our beliefs. We can infer some of our beliefs from our past behaviour. But at times we know that we believe that p, because we have made our mind up that p based on evidence for p. This mode of knowledge is direct like introspection, but it’s not as passive as perceiving a belief floating around in our stream of consciousness, and doesn’t involve looking inward, but looking outward, at the evidence for p. I know that I believe that the death penalty should be abolished because I have good reasons to believe that the death penalty should be abolished.
When I justify my beliefs with reasons that I regard as my best reasons, according to Moran I’m the author of the belief. The notion of authorship combines aspects of rationality and self-knowledge that we tend to take for granted. We expect that, if Chloe is convinced that Obama is in love with her, she must have some reasons to believe that, and she must be able to justify her belief on the basis of those reasons. But in the case of delusions, authorship can be fully or partially compromised. This suggests that people like Chloe experience a failure of self-knowledge.