And again, Freud's influence can muffle the shivers: if a ghost is a mere psychological delusion, the gleam of the supernatural is dulled.
The trial, he wrote, had been based on mere fantasies and delusions.
Does the mere presence of delusions indicate lack of autonomy or responsibility?
The Japanese learned painfully to dismiss the military's rhetoric along with their own delusions as mere "victory disease".
In the famous "Refutation of Idealism," Kant says the following: "Whether this or that putative experience is not mere imagination [or dream or delusion, etc.] must be ascertained according to its particular determinations and through its coherence with the criteria of all actual experience" (B279).
Gallagher 2009 argues that an explanation of the delusion as a mere cognitive error would be inadequate, and introduces the terminology of delusional realities, modes of experience which involve shifts in familiarity and sense of reality and encompass cognition, bodily changes, affect, social and environmental factors.
Some authors emphasize the experiential and phenomenological character of delusions over the doxastic one (e.g., Sass 1994; Gold and Hohwy 2000), and others conceive of delusions not as mere representations of a person's experienced reality, but as attitudes towards representations (e.g., Currie 2000; Currie and Jureidini 2001; Stephens and Graham 2006).
Treating the downturn as a mere interlude is the last gasp of bubble delusion.
The mere fact that the testator laboured under some insane delusion will not affect the validity of his will unless it is proved that this governed the disposition made by him.
Others are mere passive enablers, willing to believe by default that the delusion is probably true, or at least that it's not worth seeking an alternative explanation.
