The Capgras Delusion: An Interactionist Approach Revisited.

In this chapter the author defends a revised interactionist account of the Capgras delusion. To do so, he examines what the Capgras patient considers justifies their delusional belief, and how this fits within the overall aetiology of the Capgras delusion. The author’s aim is to demonstrate not only that the subject’s reason for believing what they do is intimately tied to their experiential content but, importantly, that it is causally relevant because of this. Moreover, the subject’s reason for coming to believe that (for example) their wife is an impostor differs from the reason they have for continuing to believe it. This is because the subject’s experience of his wife prior to embracing the delusional belief differs, markedly, from his experience of her upon accepting it. How this affects the reason for his belief is merely one piece of a complex causal puzzle; but it is an important piece, and one that has been neglected in more recent and otherwise innovative accounts of the Capgras delusion. A further aim of this chapter, then, is to integrate certain of these innovative characteristics into a revised version of the interactionist account of the Capgras delusion, thereby giving it greater explanatory worth than the original, and other revisionist models that ignore or relegate the role of personal experience.