Skip to content

Pablo López-silva

3 papers in the library · 8 citations · publishing 2024-2025

Papers

What are delusions? Examining the typology problem.

Wiley interdisciplinary reviews. Cognitive science January 1, 2024 Pablo López-silva, Miguel Núñez De Prado-Gordillo, Victor Fernández-castro 4 citations

Delusions are a varied phenomenon across psychiatric conditions, especially common in schizophrenia. A core philosophical debate, the typology problem, asks what kind of mental state underlies delusional reports—whether they are beliefs (doxastic) or something else (anti-doxastic). This paper critically reviews the scattered literature on this issue. It clarifies two main philosophical approaches (interpretivism and functionalism) and introduces new subcategories: revisionist and non-revisionist doxastic views, and commonsensical and non-commonsensical anti-doxastic views. The analysis concludes by highlighting fundamental unresolved challenges in the debate, which has implications for experimental psychiatry and psychotherapy development.

Making Sense of the 4E Cognition Turn in Mental Health Research

Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology June 1, 2025 Miguel Núñez De Prado-Gordillo, Pablo López-silva 2 citations

4E Cognition approaches—emphasizing embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive features—have emerged to challenge the view that mental disorders are solely brain disorders. This paper examines and classifies these approaches into two main strands: strongly situated or extended views, based on the extended mind hypothesis, and strongly embodied and enactive views, based on autopoietic enactivism. It analyzes how each strand addresses the location problem (whether disorders reside in individuals, social contexts, or their relation) and the boundary problem (distinguishing psychopathology from non-pathological diversity like social deviance). The paper also outlines practical implications of the 4E turn in mental health research.

Thinking in schizophrenia and the social phenomenology of thought insertion

Philosophical Psychology March 26, 2024 Pablo López-silva 2 citations

Delusions of thought insertion (TI) involve the distressing feeling that external agents have placed thoughts into one's mind, accompanied by loss of mental privacy and a sense of physical intrusion. The dominant cognitive-science explanation, the Standard Approach, attributes TI to a lack of sense of agency for one's own thoughts, leading to their externalization. This paper argues that the Standard Approach overlooks two more fundamental aspects: the multimodal nature of thinking in psychosis and the deeply social dimension of delusional experience in schizophrenia. A broader descriptive phenomenological characterization of TI is offered, and connections are drawn to current research in social perception and clinical practice.