Delusion as Narrative Regulation of Perception: Integrating Phenomenology, Predictive Coding, and Cognitive Semiotics

Delusion is traditionally framed, since Jaspers, as an incomprehensible mutation of experiential meaning. This lack of meaning can be filled up by integrating phenomenological psychopathology with cognitive semiotics and current predictive-coding accounts. Aberrant- salience models capture the threshold between Wahnstimmung and delusional perception, but they do not explain how anomalous significance is structured into a stable theme. Drawing on Gerrans’s DMN-based account while rejecting reductionism, the Default Mode Network is reconceived not as an inner storyteller that manufactures propositional content, but as a sense-making integrator: a system that schematises experience across intrinsic/extrinsic and social inputs. Using Paolucci’s semiotic theory of perception, it is shown how imaginative simulation organizes perceptual fields and affords the passage from pre-delusional atmosphere to thematic delusion without collapsing belief and perception through the semiotic concept of narrativity. On this view, delusions are non-doxastic, narratively regimented schemes of action that stabilize a crisis of perception. The account preserves the strengths of predictive processing (hierarchical error dynamics) within an enactivist and semiotic framework in which meaning emerges from organism–world coupling. Finally, clinical implications are sketched: DMN alterations (e.g., hyperactivity in schizophrenia; hypoactivity in autism) can be read as disruptions of semiotic narrativization rather than mere neural glitches, reframing delusional experience as a maladaptive mode of sense-making at the interface of perception, imagination, and action.