Abstract

In her wonderfully rich and insightful article, Sofia Jeppsson argues that, although a person with psychosis may seem to be strange and unintelligible to us, we nevertheless have duties of intelligibility toward them. And she draws upon her own experience to show that psychotic experiences and reasoning are more intelligible than we might have thought.In this brief commentary, I focus on why the assumption of hypothetical intelligibility is a duty of respect owed to those experiencing psychosis. In everyday human interaction we expend significant resources on interpreting other people, largely to be able to predict and explain their behavior and to adjust our own behavior and expectations accordingly in our...