Abstract

This article adopts the hypothesis that language impairment in schizophrenia is more a sign of an interactional deficit than of a central disorder at the semantic level. Our aim is to better understand the rationality of the patient by significantly modifying how we conceptualize the mind, and to revisit the concept of belief. Our aim is to elucidate the degree to which this health dysfunction constitutes a mental disorder. We will do this by adopting an anthropological holism of the mental such as the view Wittgenstein defended with his concept of language-games. This theory enables us to reconcile the two concepts of disordered language and ‘form of life’, with the particular form of life being schizophrenia. We center our argument on Robert Brandom’s expressivist, rationalist-pragmatist conception of mind and language.