Overview

The Social Roots of Delusions argues that human sociality is essential for understanding what delusions are and how they form. Humans are cooperative and cultural animals, radically dependent on others for survival and for the knowledge we use to navigate our world. That world includes complex systems of norms, reputation, gossip, surveillance, and partner choice, along with high-stakes competition for prestige and power among individuals and shifting coalitions. Against this background, Williams, Wilkinson, and Miyazono offer a social account of delusions in two senses. First, they rethink what it means to be delusional by situating delusion attribution within norm-governed practices of epistemic gatekeeping. In this context, calling a belief delusional expresses bafflement and marks its adherents as ""rational lost causes"", people who seem unreachable by ordinary communication, persuasion, and argument. Second, they show how social forces help produce and sustain delusions, including both clinical delusions and collective delusions. Popular delusions arise from socially motivated cognition interacting with complex social practices that reward conformity, supply rationalisations, and shield groups from counterevidence. Clinical delusions, by contrast, are often maintained when isolation and mistrust cut people off from the shared knowledge and corrective testimony that ordinarily stabilise belief. Drawing on philosophy, cognitive science, and psychiatry, the book connects individual psychopathology with collective irrationality through a single social lens.

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9780192874177

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Daniel Williams is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sussex, UK. He works primarily in the philosophy of mind, social epistemology, and the philosophy of social science, with research interests in belief, rationality, misinformation, conspiracy theories, and moral psychology. His recent publications include The Case for Partisan Motivated Reasoning (2023), The Marketplace of Rationalizations (2023), and Signalling, Commitment, and Strategic Absurdities (2022). He also writes a widely read Substack newsletter titled 'Conspicuous Cognition'. Sam Wilkinson is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Exeter, UK. He specialises in philosophy of psychiatry, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of cognitive science. His recent publications include Philosophy of Psychiatry: A Contemporary Introduction (2023), Towards a Unified, yet Pluralistic, Account of Delusional Misidentification (2025, with Norman Poole), The Personal and the Subpersonal: Three Desiderata and a Pragmatist Proposal (2025, with Marko Jurjako), Status and Constitution in Psychiatric Classification (2025, with Tom Roberts), and Expressivism About Delusion Attribution (2020). Kengo Miyazono is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Hokkaido University, Japan. His main research areas are philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology, and philosophy of psychiatry. His recent publications include Philosophy of Psychology: An Introduction (2021, with Lisa Bortolotti), Delusions and Beliefs: A Philosophical Inquiry (2018), Social Epistemological Conception of Delusion (2021, with Alessandro Salice), The Ethics of Delusional Belief (2016, with Lisa Bortolotti), and Imagination as a Generative Source of Justification (2023, with Uku Tooming). He is an area editor of Ergo and an associate editor of Philosophical Psychology.

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