The Shadow of a Doubt: Obsessive-compulsive uncertainty and maximal grip

UNSW Philosophy and the School of Humanities and Languages invite you to attend this in-person Philosophy Seminar at the UNSW Kensington Campus. 

Abstract

People with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) engage in repetitive, ritualistic routines in order to combat or relieve fears that are generated by intrusive and troubling thoughts and imaginings. Overwhelmingly most obsessive-compulsive people claim to know both that their fears are unfounded and that their behaviours make little sense as a response to them. This apparent “insight” does not, however, prevent them from engaging in said rituals, even though doing so causes them great distress and anguish. 

In this talk, I consider an influential account of the compulsive behaviours characteristic of OCD — one that explains them by way of ascribing to the obsessive-compulsive person a lack of the affective sensation that usually accompanies knowledge acquisition. Although, I suggest, there is a lot to praise in this account (particularly in terms of its moving away from construing OCD as a certain kind of metacognitive failure), I argue that it is severely limited by requiring that certain important aspects of the phenomenology of OCD be cast, implausibly, in terms of cognitive phenomenology. I then consider alternative explanations of obsessive-compulsions that appeal to the notion of “maximal grip” and argue that these accounts do not possess such shortcomings.