The Real Definition of Delusion

Nevertheless, we read almost everywhere: definition consists of the specification of the genus proximus and the differentia specifica.

(Rickert 1888, 197)

Let me begin by thanking both my commentators. However, because Gipps raises a number of questions to which I cannot respond adequately here, and because Stanghellini seems to me to misrepresent my argument at various points, I am going to take this opportunity to respond to the commentaries principally as an opportunity to respond to his, Stanghellini’s, ‘Jaspers on “Primary” Delusions’ (2012).

First, a trivial point. ‘Karl Jaspers on delusion’ is not what philosophers would call a “conceptual analysis.” It is merely an attempt to give ‘Delusion and Awareness of Reality’ a conceptual framework that makes better sense of what Jaspers had to say about delusion than the one that is usually foisted on to it. Second, and more important, my purpose is not to explain Jaspers’ “critique of the definitions of delusion current in imperial Germany.” Let me make it absolutely clear, therefore, that the definition of delusion that was familiar to Jaspers, and to his forerunners and colleagues (namely ‘pathologically falsified judgment’), was not contested by him, his forerunners and colleagues. What Jaspers contested, in my view, was the conventional attribution of properties (qua propria) to delusion: namely, absolute conviction, incorrigibility, and impossibility of content. For Jaspers, his forerunners and colleagues, the properties (propria) of delusion would be of the essence of delusion—an essence that I identified as its specific difference, the pathological. Hence for Jaspers’ forerunners and colleagues ‘absolute conviction, incorrigibility, and impossibility of content’ would be of the essence of delusion, that is, of the pathological: for Jaspers, however, they most certainly were not of the essence of delusion. Or, to put it yet more clearly, he saw no real, epistemically significant, distinction between (say) the incorrigibility exhibited by a delusion holder and the incorrigibility exhibited by any other judgment holder (whether their judgment seemed to be falsified or not).

Next, I stand by my assertion that our understanding of what Jaspers meant by the term ‘primary’ is enriched and enlarged by taking the philosophical sense of it into account. To recap, it is important to recognize that a primary delusion, or a delusion proper, is a pathologically falsified judgment (whereas a delusion-like idea is merely a falsified one). Unlike a delusion-like idea, therefore, a delusion proper is a primary phenomenon because it has an essence that is unanalyzable or indivisible. Although psychopathologists and psychiatrists had been—and, it seems, still are—impressed by certain similarities between falsified judgment and pathologically falsified judgment, those similarities, according to Jaspers, are incidental. As I understand him, nothing in our experience resembles the pathological experience of delusion proper (and this, supposing the analysis to be correct, is what rules out the ability to arrive at a static understanding of delusion proper). As I see no earthly reason why Jaspers’ use of the term “primary” could not respect both the medical and the logical sense of ‘primary,’ there is no formal “inconsistency” here (although, as Stanghellini points out, there are certainly differences in emphasis in Jaspers’ use of the term in ‘Delusion and Awareness’). However, pace Stanghellini, my statement that “the pathological . . . had no parts, and, consequently, could not be analyzed—[that is] be defined” (Gorski 2012, 86, endnote 1), does not warrant the conclusion “that according to Jaspers there cannot be a definition of delusion . . . especially of delusion proper.” As I have said, the definition of delusion, and more especially of delusion proper, was ‘pathologically falsified judgment.’ What could not be further analyzed (defined) was simply the specific difference, the pathological—and, as I have just reiterated, that is what underwrote the static ununderstandability of the phenomenon.

There are several more perhaps minor errors in the position attributed to me by Stanghellini (for instance, I did not state that ununderstandability was a property [proprium] of delusion—I insisted, rather, that it was the hallmark of such a property, namely, the patient’s primary experience of delusion), which I am not going to straighten out here...