Some Contributions of Philosophical Psychopathology

An interesting review of how important notions in qualitative analyses from the philosophical subdiscipline of phenomenological psychopathology can account for quantitative data from reasoning tasks with schizophrenia-patients over the years.

I saw it in another thread just yesterday: schizophrenics are impaired in their capacity to reason logically - this is obvious. As a rule of thumb, when things are obviously said to be such and such, so obviously even, that citing evidence would be superfluous, one might suspect to be dealing with matters of paradigm.

A long tradition of research on schizophrenia has considered defects in logical reasoning one of the core features of this mental disorder. According to this view, reasoning in schizophrenia is severely impaired. Nevertheless, an increasing amount of data coming from the cognitive perspective is making this conclusion more controversial, and seems to be heading in the same direction as a very different kind of tradition, that of psychiatric phenomenology. This approach considers the typical features of schizophrenia in terms of an enhancement of logic, rather than a defect of it (cf. minkowski 1927, Binswanger 1956, Blankenburg 1971). In this paper, we will bring together these two different perspectives in order to explain why the “lack of logic” paradigm seems to fail to understand schizophrenics’ reasoning abilities.

I’d recommend reading the full article at: http://www.clinicalneuropsychiatry.org/pdf/ahead-pub/CardellaEpub.pdf

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That was fascinating. Definitely some of my delusions are formed when I substitute with rationality where the recipe calls for common sense - ie: the structure of the syllogism is more important than its contents. I’d always explained it as a defective Occam’s Razor.

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under certain circumstances, schizophrenic subjects seem to
reason even better than healthy ones (except for their
greater sensitivity to emotional content).

and

Many authors that embrace this perspective claim that the
problem in schizophrenic reasoning is not the lack of
logic, but the excess of it, a sort of intellectual attitude
toward the world.

Cool.