It is widely agreed that obsessive-compulsive disorder involves irrationality. But where in the complex of states and processes that constitutes OCD should this irrationality be located? A pervasive assumption in both the psychiatric and philosophical literature is that the seat of irrationality is located in the obsessive thoughts characteristic of OCD. Building on a puzzle about insight into OCD (Taylor 2022), we challenge this pervasive assumption, and argue instead that the irrationality of OCD is located in the emotions that are (...) characteristic of OCD, such as anxiety or fear. In particular, we propose to understand the irrationality of OCD as a matter of harboring recalcitrant emotions. We argue that this account not only solves the puzzle about insight, but also makes better sense of how OCD sufferers experience and describe their condition and helps explain some otherwise puzzling features of compulsive behavior. (shrink)

This article discusses a puzzle arising from the phenomenon of insight in obsessive–compulsive disorder. “Insight” refers to an awareness or understanding of obsessive thoughts as false or irrational. I argue that a natural and plausible way of characterizing insight in OCD conflicts with several different possible explanations of the epistemic attitude underlying insight‐directed obsessive thought. After laying out the puzzle for five proposed explanations of obsessive thought and then discussing several possible ways that the puzzle might be avoided, I close (...) the article by arguing that we can avoid the puzzle by adopting a new positive view of insight‐directed obsessive thought. (shrink)

In many ways one’s quest for knowledge can go wrong. Since the publication ofAmélie Rorty’s article “Akratic Believers”, in 1983, there has been a great deal of discussion asto one particular form of flaw in reasoning to which we, as less-than-perfect rational entities,are continuously prone to in our epistemic endeavors: “epistemicakrasia”. The debate that article gave rise became, then, split between authors to whom the ideaof epistemicakrasiapromotes an interesting diagnosis of some of our intellectual imperfec-tions, and their opponents, those who (...) disclaim the very possibility of the phenomenon. Inthis paper I’ll examine, and present original objections to, four of the main arguments put for-ward by the latter, showing that none of them have consistently ruled out all the legitimatelyconceivable forms of the phenomenon. (shrink)