In defense of the one-factor doxastic account: A phenomenal account of delusions

According to the doxastic model, delusions are beliefs. In the metacognitive model, delusions are imaginings mistaken for beliefs. I argue that endorsement of false second-order beliefs could also create unpleasant dissonance, that mentally healthy people often endorse irrational or conflicting beliefs, and that the lack of delusion-motivated action can be explained by the influence of nonbelief factors on action. The two-factor doxastic model posits irrationality as necessary, and one metric of rationality many scholars employ is whether a response is easily understood by folk psychology. A precedent for folk-psychological acceptance of contextually bizarre beliefs as a result of personal experience can already be found in the lack of imaginative resistance encountered not in response to the impossibilities portrayed in speculative fiction, but in response to the characters' ability to incorporate these occurrences into their mental frameworks, despite them often being at odds with these characters' bedrock understanding of the world.