On Custom And Madness: a somewhat French essay, I suppose


Author. Doctor Terence Rajivan Edward (or 0161__Rajivan, if that helps)
Abstract. What is the relationship between custom and madness? Are there only so many departures from customary thoughts or actions before which one is mad? I suspect this is so, and the suspicion converges to some extent with our psychiatric practice, which in my experience is really about reducing any deviation from normal and unadventurous behaviour. The suspicion is of interest to philosophers because, if true, each time an individual breaks with custom, this may seem rational by all standards - supported by reason and leading to valuable outcomes; however, when one examines the whole set, a line has been crossed: it is madness to have this many breaks.
Draft version: version 3 (27th May 2026, version 2 25th November 2025, version 1 22nd November, deleted by PhilPapers)


Those who cannot cut and paste
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1. Introduction
        The ordinary person does not seem to distinguish between deductive and inductive reasoning, as philosophers and university students all over the world do. The detective who, by reason, comes to a sound conclusion from a set of premises is said to have deduced. But what is deduction and what is induction for "the educated person"? Deduction is when, if the premises are true, then the conclusion must be true. For example, consider these two premises: for every number, there must be a number above it; and the number one is a number. Granting these, we can deduce that there is a number above the number one. Inductive reasoning is different: it is reasoning by generalizing from a sample. Every December you can remember, it has been cold in this country, and so you generalize that the forthcoming December will be cold as well. Inductive reasoning does not provide one with certainty. Each of the premises could be true and the conclusion conceivably false: it was cold in the December of 1986 and it was cold in the December of 1987 and likewise 1988 and so on, but we can at least conceive that each these premises is true and yet the conclusion that the forthcoming December will be cold is false.
The great philosopher David Hume opposes inductive reasoning. "But surely we must rely on inductive reasoning. We cannot do science and much else without it. Does Hume have a misplaced craving for certainty? Not all acceptable reasoning leads to absolute certainty about its conclusion," you want to say? Hume's argument is quite complicated. Inductive reasoning, he argues, is based on an assumption: the uniformity of nature. Nature is assumed to be something not chaotic. But the assumption is open to doubt and it cannot be proved by deduction, for there is no contradiction in judging it false, nor by induction, since every piece of inductive reasoning already relies on it. Anyway, what are we to do, in the face of Hume's skepticism? Simply give up on induction? Hume argues that we are creatures of custom and so we cannot give up, even if inductive reasoning is irrational. Our minds work in customary ways, expecting A to follow B after enough cases of A following B.
        But do we not sometimes depart from custom, or break with it, and even with our natural impulses, or what seem to be natural? An example. It has long been an age of urinals, which Marcel Duchamp regarded as having artistic value, but there is a risk of making a mistake with one's aim. A way has been discovered of preventing this: a picture of a fly in a urinal causes males to aim carefully at the fly. However, in 2022, I was thinking about this ingenious innovation and I thought this: in a public toilet, can you be sure that this is a picture of a fly and not a real fly? No. But what is the rational way of dealing with a possible live fly which you wish, perhaps cruelly, to kill? It is to urinate all over, hoping to catch the insect if it should take flight. Reasoning thus, one might depart from custom and natural impulse, when faced with a urinal accompanied by a fly picture. One breaks with custom, but one's break is the result of reason, the outcome of thought, the child of contemplation. However, when one breaks with custom, one risks being called "Mad" or "Insane" or "Out of your mind." This is especially so if people do not realize why you are doing so, but some will say you are mad whether you have a reason or not, whether they know the reason or not. Custom, yes, following custom, is what makes for a sane man, or woman apparently. In this essay, I shall reflect on whether this is true or not, introducing a paradoxical proposal. The next part covers some experience of mine with psychiatry. The third part makes the proposal, one of interest to philosophers. The final part considers whether certain seemingly unmad characters are in fact mad, given the proposal.


2. The psychiatrists
        We live in the age of the Internet, with the incredible transformations it has brought about in our lives. A person somewhere in the world can upload a document and it is available for reading to millions, or even billions, all over the world. In 2022, in February or March, I decided that it was a good idea to upload an essay or academic paper, if there is any distinction for me, at least once a day. I tried to write one daily, but early on I found I could not and had to turn to my store of previously written papers occasionally. But I soon got into the hang of it. I continued with the project until early September 2023, when I was found shouting in the street near my Manchester apartment, opposite a hospital, pretending to be the existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. I was primarily mocking my former employer, the University of Manchester, for their taste for fame and their desire for someone who knows both the maths in economics and the philosophical foundations and alternatives: there had been philosophical protests against the economics curriculum and such a type seems the solution. I had lived at my apartment since 2015 and had heard people shouting before without any intervention from the police and did not expect any. However, the police came. I ran away, but they chased me, grappled with me, and injected me with a tranquilizer. I was then forced into an ambulance and taken on a 5 minute journey into the neighbouring hospital. The next day I was transported in a little compartment at the back of an ambulance to North Manchester General Hospital, in the suburb of Crumpsall, about 2 hours from my apartment by buses.
        I was put on anti-psychotic medication, tablets. I initially refused but a crowd of nurses came into my room and I was told I would forcibly be injected with the medication if I did not take it in tablet form. (It must have been more than ten white nurses in the small room, despite most of the regular nurses on the ward's being black. Only white nurses will do this job?) I was in the compound, with only access to the small garden, for about 3 weeks. I was then allowed out for 30 minutes accompanied by a nurse and the next day 30 minutes by myself. They were only allowed to keep me for 4 weeks altogether, but I did not bother waiting an extra week. The first time I was allowed out by myself, I escaped back to my apartment.
        I functioned well enough back home. But a court order demanded that I return to the ward. A team of police officers broke down my apartment door, bizarrely declared me to be a known reasonable person upon entering, and I was then forced back to North Manchester General by ambulance. Reasonable but not docile, to use the language of Foucault! The consultant had applied for a 6 month extension to my confinement in hospital, with success - allowed to keep me for up to 6 months. On my first meeting with the medical team back, he loudly declared, "You cannot be trusted. From now on you will be on injections." (It was actually a month later that this proposal was implemented.)
        This consultant, it seems to me, is a counterpart to the philosophers we have who struggle with elementary logic (see Edward 2025): he even looks similar to one such philosopher, despite being Asian and his brown skin. I wonder whether they can manage a syllogism or (prompted by experience is this specific concern) fill in the minor premise in a modus ponens argument, even though philosophy is famous for logic and English philosophy especially, analytic philosophy as it is called. 
Premise 1: If trees have roots, then trees too are plants.
Premise 2: ___________________________
Therefore:
Trees too are plants
Can you fill it in? Perhaps the consultant can do this but when I first met him, I asked him if he is really a doctor and what is in the cell? He included amongst the items, the cell membrane! For all my apparent madness, I remembered my schoolbook biology. (I recall reading mathematicians saying words to the effect, "We have qualified mathematicians like these philosophers you draw attention to. They make severe mathematical blunders.") It may be speculated that the consultant was testing me in return, but can he then say for any mistake he makes, "Just testing,"  and how to trust the information he later gave: that each time this happens to me, it is harder for my brain to return to normal? (And what is normal for him?) 
        Soon after being forced back to the hospital, there was a tribunal in which a lawyer made a case on my behalf for my release. The consultant opposed it and declared schizophrenia. (Later doctors seem to have ignored the diagnosis, which is the diagnosis of the most casual observer: "Behaving as if Simone de Beauvoir, maybe he has schizophrenia.") In discussion with me, he appealed to a call I made to the police in April 2023 and consequent interactions. Around Mother's Day of that year, which is March in this country, I had gone to a nearby shop to buy a Mother's day card. The woman at the counter told me there was none. I found a card which said, "To my wife," and joked to the woman, "This might work for someone" - by the way, I had written some papers on the Oedipus myth, one of which proved very popular for some years. Pleased with my joke, I decided to purchase the card and placed it on a mattress next to my own, back in my apartment. In April, I found it gone. I telephoned the police and a police officer visited, finding my apartment cluttered with books and suggesting it might be under one of the piles of books. Amongst the questions I asked him, one was: could someone send an electronic device under the front door, a little electronic bug say, and take a card or move a card? This was reported to the consultant psychiatrist, who used it as evidence "against me": for my being psychotic.
        In the early years of the last decade, around 2013, I had read up on delusions. The orthodox view of delusions is that they are beliefs, that they conflict severely with the evidence available to us, and yet the deluded persist with them; but a clever argument has been made against this orthodoxy, extending the philosophy of Donald Davidson: a belief is not held in isolation, rather as part of a whole of set of rationally related beliefs - one believes that the moon is full, for example, along with the belief that it can be full, that the moon is an astronomical body, that it is positioned closer to the Earth than various planets, and more - but there is no surrounding whole of beliefs for a delusion, such as that one is dead (see Davidson 1977; Bortolotti 2005). Anyway, I worked with the orthodoxy when interacting with the consultant psychiatrist and said, "I did not believe that an electronic bug was sent under my door. It was a hypothesis I entertained and when the police did not confirm it, I set it aside." Delusions, recall, are beliefs, in severe conflict with the evidence, and are held robustly in the face of counterevidence - that is the orthodoxy. I was shocked: here was a doctor taking a mere hypothesis as evidence of madness. The consultant doctor said, "Most people do not have that hypothesis." We have arrived at the essay's theme: the relationship between custom and madness. A thought which is not customary is taken by this psychiatrist as evidence of madness, even if it is a mere hypothesis, not a belief. It reminds me of those people for whom everything slightly unusual is mad really, e.g. "Various academics put a quotation at the head of a chapter, such as lines from an apt poem. But you put your own poem. Madness!" (By the way, my sister passed on an alternative expert opinion: the problem was not that I entertained an uncustomary hypothesis, rather the problem was that I actually acted on it, by calling the police and asking them about the matter. But the missing card, and another unusual card I found, were never found, even after the apartment was decluttered, as recommended!)


3. A paradoxical proposal
        There are, of course, some people who are so conservative that any departure from custom, in thought or action, ought to be suppressed, if possible, and is evidence of madness, regardless of whether one has reason for this departure. They are far more conservative than the average Briton, but are probably of use to department heads and the like: loyal servants I suspect they are. They should not be involved in professional psychiatric diagnosis, should they?  Diagnosis on the basis of mere non-customary thought, not even believed, strikes me as a risk to any talented scientist - "An unusual hypothesis: the lunatic asylum for you" - let alone we artists! Also what is "outside-the-box" may be different for different social groups. Is my electronic bug hypothesis so strange for a politician, for example? The whole process of relativizing acceptably-within-range thought to a social group seems problematic to me. One may well associate with others different from one's schooldays, no? ("Most people are born within a social class and stay within that social class, avoiding substantial interaction with anyone else"???) The approach seems to confirm the perspective of Foucault and less dazzlingly the British structural-functionalist anthropologists before him, who thought of social institutions as functioning to maintain a social structure. And leaving aside the relativization issues, is the hypothesis so outlandish for anyone in this country today? I found these sentences in a fiction, by a Monya Baker, published on June 2nd of this year:
"A hoax. A prank. Maybe inside the vase there was a flea-sized speaker-bug-camera spy gadget installed by an asshole at Trader Joe's. Or by the creepy landlord. Or, please no, by Zoe." (Monya Baker 2025)
Presumably, the reader is not meant to regard this as science fiction. 
    But in hospital, I began to wonder whether there is some relationship between the non-customary and the mad, which is closer than merely "The mad have mad thoughts, don't they?" Some departures from custom are valuable: a clever pass, an ingenious dress design, a clever comedy sketch concept, and so forth. But are there only so many of these departures before one is surely mad? I suspect that is the case. But it is a paradox really. Each departure is supported by reasoned argument and is indeed valuable, but there is a number of these beyond which one is mad nevertheless. No delusion, no significant failure of social functionality even, but this many departures entails madness? I suspect this is true, but it should not be incorporated into psychiatry. Psychiatry is not a metaphysical project of finding out whether a person who functions well is actually mad nevertheless, as some intuitively assess the person to be.


4. An inference?
        In 1914, Dora Marsden opened the new periodical she edited, namely The Egoist ("What a name? Surely mad!" "Was it more customary at that time?" "It was an age of feminism and it was previously called The New Freewoman."), by commenting on the preoccupation of her time with football scores:
"The concepts with which one age will preoccupy  itself, and in which it will invest its surplus emotional heat have shown themselves to be so essentially casual as to be now a matter for mirth rather than wonder with its successors. The subject  of an age's Master Passion round which its interest rages will be anything accidental and contingent which will serve: stand the heat, that is, and last out until enthusiasm tires. The amount of genuine enthusiasm which Athanasius, Arius and their followers were able to cull from the numerical problems in the concept of the Trinity was—incredible  though it may seem—equal to that which this age culls from the figures of the football scores." (Marsden 1914: 1)
I stopped following football closely around 2014, which is when I believe Marsden predicted a demise for the popular sport, but I did watch the Euro 2024 tournament. Towards when I stopped watching, Spanish football was dominant, iconically featuring small players who made neat cunning passes of the ball. But could it be that at least one of these quiet well-behaved passers of the ball, who pleasingly leaves a match unsoiled, suffers from madness. That is one perceptive-directing-of-the-ball too many?! They do not fit our image of a madman, but if you are going to say that there are only so many departures from custom, then should that last pass not have been a simple textbook pass to a nearby player? Any emphasis on being bound by custom as a requirement of sanity, even my much milder emphasis than that of the consultant psychiatrist I met, requires us to open our minds to the hypothesis, yes? And surely with the world's population numbering over 8 billion, there are some peculiar cases like this.


References
Baker, Mona. 2025. Lucy Bamboo. Flash Fiction Magazine June 2nd 2025. Available at:
https://flashfictionmagazine.com/blog/2025/06/02/lucky-bamboo/
Bortolotti, Lisa. 2005. Delusions and the background of rationality. Mind and Language 20(2): 189-208. Available at:
https://www.overcominghateportal.org/uploads/5/4/1/5/5415260/delusions_and_the_background_of_rationality.pdf
Davidson, Donald. 1977. The method of truth in metaphysics. Midwest Studies in Philosophy 2 (1):244-254.
Edward, Terence Rajivan 2020 (version 21). How did Oedipus solve the riddle of the Sphinx? Available on PhilPapers at: https://philpapers.org/rec/EDWHDO
Edward, Terence Rajivan. 2025. Hypotheses as evidence for madness, Humeans. Available on PhilPapers at: https://philpapers.org/rec/EDWHAE
Edward, Terence Rajivan. 2025. On the nonsense of psychiatrists (Nietzsche imitation - don't try this). Available on PhilPapers at:
https://philpapers.org/rec/EDWOTN-2
Edward, Terence Rajivan. 2025. A booklet of some of analytic philosophy's faulty reconstructions. Available at:
https://www.academia.edu/145299070/A_booklet_of_some_of_analytic_philosophy_s_faulty_rational_reconstructions
Foucault, Michel. 1988 (originally 1965, in English, translated by RIchard Howard). Madness and civilization. A history of insanity in the age of reason. New York: Vintage Books. (Originally Random House, in English.) Available at:
https://monoskop.org/images/1/14/Foucault_Michel_Madness_and_Civilization_A_History_of_Insanity_in_the_Age_of_Reason.pdf
Hume, David. 1748. An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. Available at:
https://davidhume.org/texts/e/
Marsden, Dora. 1914. Liberty, Law, and Democracy. The Egoist: An Individualist Review volume 1, number 1. Available at:
https://modjourn.org/issue/bdr519946/
Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred Reginald. 1940. On Social Structure. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 70(1): 1-12. Available at:
https://www.bebr.ufl.edu/sites/default/files/Radcliffe-Brown%20-%201940%20-%20On%20Social%20Structure.pdf