Default Mode Network, Schizophrenia, and Narrativity. Comments on Psychopathology of Language

This paper discusses some of the ideas expressed in the paper Psychopathology of Language, DMN and Embodied Neuroscience: A Unifying Perspective (Pennisi 2022). Pennisi presents an innovative and promising framework, but some issues need a critical discussion. In particular, I argue against the idea that schizophrenia is mainly a linguistic disorder and the idea that the functions associated with the Default Mode Network (DMN) are essentially linguistic. By referring to phenomenological psychopathology (Parnas and Sass 2007) and evolutionary psychology (Corballis 2017), I show that: i) schizophrenia is better conceived as not a primarily linguistic disorder, but as a disorder that affects human experience as a whole (Stanghellini 2008); ii) the DMN functions could involve language, but it is not essentially linguistic. I examine an alternative view that individuates the main function of DMN in the narrative imagination (Carroll 2020), comparing it with the idea of narrativity developed by cognitive semiotics (Paolucci 2021).