Psychosis, agnosia, and confabulation: an alternative two-factor account

Theories of delusions which rely on a combination of abnormal experience and defective belief evaluation and/ or cognitive bias are the subject of an emerging consensus. This paper challenges the validity of these theories and constructs a two factor alternative.

The paper starts by identifying the difficulty the current theories have explaining the complex delusions of schizophrenia and then, by considering, first, the aetiology of somatopsychotic symptoms, and second, the literature on the relationship between confabulation and allopsychotic symptoms, demonstrates that the natural solution is to retain the experiential factor whilst replacing the second factor with confabulation.

The paper is then able to demonstrate that the resultant two-factory theory can clarify recent work on the aetiological role of autonoetic agnosia and on the relationships between confabulation, delusion, and thought disorder.

The theory supersedes currently available theories in terms of its simplicity, fruitfulness, scope and conservatism and represents an advance in the search for unified theory of psychosis.