Imperfect Cognitions

This post is by Şerife Tekin , Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Daemen College. Here she summarises her paper ‘ Are Mental Disorders Natural Kinds? A Plea for a New Approach to Intervention in Psychiatry ’, forthcoming in Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology. Thanks to Ema for inviting me to share my work with the Imperfect Cognitions blog readers. What follows is a snapshot of my arguments in the paper mentioned above. In the article I engage a debate with a long history in philosophy of science: the metaphysical status of mental disorders and empirical investigatibility . I offer an evaluation of what I call a Looping Debate (Tekin 2014 ), and recommend its replacement with a Trilateral Strategy. Among philosophers interested in metaphysical and epistemological issues of psychiatric classification, the application of the theory of natural kinds to mental disorder is a particularly contentious topic (e.g. Hacking 1995 ; Cooper 2004 , Zachar 2000 ; Graham 2...

In this post, Harold Kincaid and Jackie Sullivan present their edited volume titled Classifying Psychopathology: Mental Kinds and Natural Kinds (MIT Press, 2014) Harold Kincaid We are Harold Kincaid and Jackie Sullivan . Harold is Professor in the School of Economics and Director of the Research Unit in Behavioural Economics and Neuroeconomics at the University of Cape Town . He works primarily in the philosophy of the social sciences and has published numerous books and articles on topics in this research area. Jackie is Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy and a member of the Rotman Institute of Philosophy at the University of Western Ontario . She works primarily in the philosophy of neuroscience and is the author of multiple recent journal articles on topics in this research area. Together, we edited a volume entitled Classifying Psychopathology: Mental Kinds and Natural Kinds , which was published by MIT Press in April 2014. The volume asks whether psych...