Projekt badawczy "Doznania urojone a świadectwa" współfinansowany przez Komisję Europejską i Narodowe Centrum Nauki w ramach grantu Marie Skłodowska-Curie COFUND w ramach konkursu POLONEZ BIS 2.

Podstawowe informacje

Tytuł projektu: Doznania urojone a świadectwa
Czas trwania: 1 maja 2023 - 30 kwietnia 2025
Kierownik projektu: dr Chenwei Nie (chenwei.nie@uj.edu.pl)
Opiekun naukowy: dr hab. Tomasz Żuradzki, prof. UJ

Opis popularyzatorski

This project proposes to develop a novel epistemological framework for understanding the interaction between
delusional experiences and evidence in the aetiology of delusional beliefs. Delusional beliefs are notorious for their
being incorrigible in light of conflicting evidence. In the literature, it is widely accepted that one of the key explanatory
factors may be patients’ delusional experiences. According to cognitive theories of delusions, patients’ delusional
experiences offer some flimsy evidence in support of their delusional beliefs. However, there is a growing recognition
that this creates a conundrum for cognitive theories: that is, how could it be that on the one hand patients are too
willing to form delusional beliefs on the basis of the flimsy evidence provided by their delusional experiences (overresponsive to evidence), but on the other hand they fail to reject their delusional beliefs in the light of considerable counterevidence (under-responsive to evidence) (Furl et al., 2022)? One promising way to solve the conundrum, which this project will explore, is to argue that patients’ delusional experiences play a more significant role than offering some flimsy evidence. Indeed, according to phenomenological theories of delusions, patients have a distinctive kind of delusional experiences with the character of hyper-reality which might do more than offer flimsy evidence (Feyaerts et al., 2021). However, phenomenological theories have been focusing on “understanding the variety of ways in which one might experience delusions and the delusional world” (Sass & Pienkos, 2013, p. 632) and an epistemological account of the interaction between delusional experiences and evidence is underdeveloped in the literature.

The primary aim of the project is to fill in this gap by developing an epistemological framework that will help us get a
better understanding of the interaction between delusional experiences and evidence. The framework will be built on
three working hypotheses. (1) Based on the phenomenal reading of Descartes (Paul, 2020), the first hypothesis this
project plans to pursue is that in many cases patients’ delusional experiences may be a pathological form of what
Descartes calls clear experiences that causally compel assent. (2) Based on phenomenal conservatism (Siegel & Silins, 2015), the second hypothesis this project plans to pursue is that patients’ delusional experiences may offer some prima facie justification, but the justification would be undermined in the presence of counterevidence. (3) Inspired by the recent work on mental causation (Campbell, 2020), the third hypothesis this project plans to pursue is that the causal relationship between delusional experiences and delusional beliefs is primitive in the sense that it is not dependent on the justificatory relationship between them. With these three hypotheses, delusions will become understandable in the following sense: in many cases, even though the justificatory force of a patient’s delusional experience would be undermined in the presence of counterevidence, the primitive causal force of the patient’s delusional experience may persist and causally compel the patient’s assent.

Not only will the framework be valuable for researchers interested in delusions, but it will also make important
contributions to overcoming epistemic injustices in clinical practice. It has been argued that apart from negative
stereotypes, another main contributory factor of epistemic injustice is the lack of theoretical resources for patients to
express their experiences and for clinical professionals to value patients’ descriptions of their experiences (Crichton et al., 2017; Ritunnano, 2022). The secondary aim of the project is to investigate ways the framework may help eliminate epistemic injustices. The hypothesis is that in many cases, the framework may be a promising candidate for the missing theoretical resource for eliminating testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice.

The project has four main objectives: (1) to offer a way to solve the conundrum faced by cognitive theories; (2) to
develop phenomenologists’ insight that patients’ delusional experiences are a distinctive kind; (3) to offer a new way to integrate cognitive theories and phenomenological theories into a unified framework; (4) to overcome epistemic
injustices in clinical practice.

Źródło finansowania

Projekt jest realizowany w Interdyscyplinarnym Centrum Etyki Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego. Chociaż Centrum jest częścią Wydziału Filozoficznego i ściśle współpracuje z Instytutem Filozofii, jest to przedsięwzięcie interdyscyplinarne: w skład Zespołu INCET wchodzą przedstawiciele kilku wydziałów uniwersyteckich.  Stosujemy interdyscyplinarne podejście, które wypełnia lukę między etyką filozoficzną a innymi dyscyplinami, takimi jak psychologia, medycyna, nauki prawne i ekonomia; wykorzystujemy metody "fotelowe" typowe dla nauk humanistycznych, a także nauki społeczne (analiza pojęciowa, studia przypadków) i metody empiryczne (eksperymenty behawioralne, analiza korpusów, modelowanie tematów). Zobacz więcej informacji o INCET

 

Badania realizowane w ramach projektu nr 2021/43/P/HS1/02247 współfinansowanego ze środków Narodowego Centrum Nauki oraz programu
ramowego Unii Europejskiej w zakresie badań naukowych i innowacji Horyzont 2020 na podstawie umowy nr 945339 w ramach działań „Marie Skłodowska-Curie”.
Akronim: DoznaniaUrojone