What’s the linguistic meaning of delusional utterances? Speech act theory as a tool for understanding delusions
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Date
2023
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Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Taylor & Francis
Abstract
Delusions have traditionally been considered the hallmark of
mental illness, and their conception, diagnosis and treatment
raise many of the fundamental conceptual and practical
questions of psychopathology. One of these fundamental
questions is whether delusions are understandable. In this
paper, we propose to consider the question of understandability of delusions from a philosophy of language perspective. For this purpose, we frame the question of how
delusions can be understood as a question about the meaning of delusional utterances. Accordingly, we ask: “what
meaning(s) can delusional utterances possibly have?”. We
argue that in the current literature, there is a standard
approach to the meaning of delusional utterances, namely
the descriptive account which assumes that a delusional
utterance “p” means that p is the case. Drawing on Speech
Act Theory, we argue that solely relying on the descriptive
account disregards essential ways of how linguistic meaning
is constituted. Further, we show that Speech Act Theory can
prove a helpful addition to the theoretical and clinical “tool-box” used for attempting to understand delusional utterances. This, we believe, may address some of the
theoretical and clinical shortcomings of using only the currently predominant descriptive account.
Description
Keywords
Delusions; meaning; speech act theory; philosophy of language; philosophy of psychiatry; philosophy of psychopathology