Imperfect Cognitions

Muhammad Ali Khalidi is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at York University in Toronto. He specializes in general issues in the philosophy of science (especially, natural kinds and reductionism) and philosophy of cognitive science (especially, innateness, concepts, and domain specificity). His book, Natural Categories and Human Kinds, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2013, and he has recently been working on cognitive and social ontology. If a sudden interest in taxonomy is indicative of a crisis in a scientific field, then the cognitive sciences may be in a current state of crisis. Psychologists, neuroscientists, and researchers in related disciplines have recently devoted increasing attention to the ways in which their respective disciplines classify and categorize their objects of study. Many of these researchers consider themselves--rightly in my opinion--engaged in the effort to uncover our “cognitive ontology”. Ever since ...

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...

I am posting this on behalf of Nigel Sabbarton-Leary  who has research interests in philosophy of science and metaphysics and more recently philosophy of psychiatry. Nigel co-edited with Helen Beebee a volume entitled  Semantics and Metaphysics of Natural Kinds (Routledge, 2010).  Alternative Perspectives on Psychiatric Validation With Lisa Bortolotti and Matthew Broome I have recently written a paper on mental disorders and whether, or not, they should be construed as what philosophers call ‘natural kinds’. It will appear as a chapter in a volume entitled Alternative Perspectives on Psychiatric Validation , edited by Peter Zachar, Drozdstoj St. Stoyanov, Massimiliano Aragona, and Assen Jablensky for Oxford University Press (due out in November 2014). I thought I’d take this opportunity to articulate our position – in broad brush terms at least – and see what people thought. First, a bit of preamble. By a ‘natural kind’ we mean an objective, mind-independent d...

Marion Godman I’m a philosopher at the Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence in Philosophy of the Social Sciences and the University of Cambridge . I have been exploring the possibility that the human categories employed in psychology and the social sciences are not mere social constructions, but denote something real and epistemically useful to base a science on (or to use philos ophical jargon, ‘natural kinds’). As part of my work I am keen to look more closely at particular case studies that engage scientists. One case that has challenged my realist project is that of cultural syndromes (or culturally bound syndromes). At least on the face of it cultural syndromes hardly seem very scientific or very real. They represent conditions or disorders that do not occur in the human population at large, but instead seems connected to a particular time period and a particular culture. They also involve stories about the body that defy scientific fact. One well-known case in India, ...