Glades of Meaning: Towards a Cognitive Semiotics of Schizophrenic Delusions

Delusion is one of the phenomena that most distinctly characterizes schizophrenia in psychiatric practice. After more than a century of research, we still lack a clear explanation of how schizophrenic delusions originate and consolidate within the patient’s psyche. The only apparent certainty is that they arise from an «abnormal meaning»(Jaspers 1946) that bursts into psychic life and disrupts the relationships between experience, cognition, and narration. Yet, the precise dimension in which this meaning takes shape remains an unresolved mystery. Drawing on a semiotic-cognitive approach (Eco 1997; Paolucci 2021) and comparing it with phenomenological psychopathology, philosophy of language, and neurocognitive models of predictive coding, the paper aims to show how delusion can be understood as a response to the multiplication of perceptual saliences that undermines the very possibility of making sense of lived experience. Within this framework, delusion emerges as a semiotic strategy with a narrative formwhose function is to stabilize one’s perception of the world, to carve out a foothold of comprehensibility. Delusion is a glade of meaning, a fragile opening where orientation can be regained, and from which uncanny narratives rise like castles defending the self from the forest of meanings in which it has lost its way.