D. J. Murphy

This chapter examines the implications that the theories proposed by evolutionary psychologists might have for the classification of mental disorders. It begins with a brief overview of the account of the mind advanced by evolutionary psychologists. It then explains why issues of taxonomy are important and why the dominant approach to the classification of mental disorders is radically and alarmingly unsatisfactory. It illustrates some of the virtues of the evolutionary-psychological approach to classification and highlights a fundamental distinction between those disorders that arise from the malfunction of a component of the mind and those that can be traced to the fact that our minds must now function in environments that are very different from the environments in which they evolved. Next, the chapter describes the ways in which module malfunctions might arise and sketches two strategies for incorporating this etiological information in a system for classifying mental disorders. Finally, it explains why an evolutionary approach may lead to a radical revision in the classification of certain conditions. It argues that, from an evolutionary perspective, some of the disorders recognized in standard manuals like DSM-IV (American Psychiatric Association, 1994) may turn out not to be disorders at all. The people who have these conditions do not have problems; they just cause problems.

I suggest there are three ways to see the role of folk psychology in a mature cognitive neuroscience. First, integration says that folk psychology plays a decisive role in defining the objects of scientific inquiry and guiding that inquiry. Second, autonomy is the view that folk psychology deals in personal rather than subpersonal explanations and as such has aims that are incompatible with science. Third is eliminativism, which argues that folk psychology will be replaced by a scientific theory of the mind. I argue that the integrationist perspective is an unstable position because folk psychology cannot play the role that integrationists have in mind for it. Any psychology that plays this role must be heavily revised enough to count as a successor theory, and that is a vindication of eliminativism from the point of view of scientific theory-construction.

In _ Psychiatry in the Scientific Image, _Dominic Murphy looks at psychiatry from the viewpoint of analytic philosophy of science, considering three issues: how we should conceive of, classify, and explain mental illness. If someone is said to have a mental illness, what about it is mental? What makes it an illness? How might we explain and classify it? A system of psychiatric classification settles these questions by distinguishing the mental illnesses and showing how they stand in relation to one another. This book explores the philosophical issues raised by the project of explaining and classifying mental illness. Murphy argues that the current literature on mental illness -- exemplified by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders -- is an impediment to research; it lacks a coherent concept of the mental and a satisfactory account of disorder, and yields too much authority to commonsense thought about the mind. He argues that the explanation of mental illness should meet the standards of good explanatory practice in the cognitive neurosciences, and that the classification of mental disorders should group symptoms into conditions based on the causal structure of the normal mind.

In Mind Ascribed Bruno Mölder works out a powerful and subtle view according to which the ascription in mental states in folk psychology constitutes mental phenomena. I discuss two issues raised by his account. The first is the relation of the mind, so understood, to other phenomena, and in particular the sciences of the mind. If the mind is constituted by folk psychological ascription, can that ascription be constrained by the results of empirical investigation, or is folk psychology autonomous, if not a priori? Second, I suggest that the transparency view of introspection works very well as a supplement to the ascriptivist position.

Isocrates is usually excluded from histories of philosophy. Two likely reasons are his tendency not to formulate rigorously structured arguments and his tendency not to deploy such arguments in support of universalizing positions that he takes – for example, about virtue or the good life. Nonetheless, Isocrates does come close to performing these functions, typical of what we expect from philosophers today, in Against the Sophists, written in the late 390s. In this work Isocrates criticizes, among others, educators who, he says, ‘involve themselves in disputations’. It is clear that these include followers of Socrates – at the least, Antisthenes and perhaps Plato. The disputers, Isocrates says, claim to teach a knowledge, ἐπιστήμη, that tells us what to do and thereby guarantees happiness. Against this claim, Isocrates does formulate a structured argument in service of universalizing claims, viz., his argument from Foreknowledge. He argues that the disputers’ purported knowledge requires that we foreknow outcomes of the actions about which we deliberate, if we are to attain happiness as promised. But humans do not have foreknowledge. Therefore, the disputers’ claims are false, and the cognitive attitude that we need for a happy life is not knowledge. Isocrates does not invent his rivals’ Foreknowledge premise, for Antisthenes, Plato and Xenophon present versions of it. As I ‘steelman’ and analyze Isocrates’ Foreknowledge argument, I find it sound if happiness consists in enjoying external goods, as in some Socratic dialogues, but not sound if genuine happiness is immune to fortune, as later in Plato and certain works of Antisthenes. I argue for dating those Antisthenic works later than Against the Sophists. Although certainty is elusive, it is attractive to think that Isocrates’ Foreknowledge argument played some role in pushing Plato, and perhaps Antisthenes, to seek to inoculate happiness and the good against fortune and to bring the virtuous one close to the divine.

Chapter Overview: This chapter looks at the foundations of modern psychiatry, with its stress on neurological malfunction, and asks about its strengths and limitations. We start by tracing some of the historical development of the ideas that have found their way into modern psychiatry from their roots in 19th-century medicine and neuroscience. Turning to the present day, we briefly look at competing conceptions of mental illness, before we discuss the philosophy of science that forms some of the theoretical foundations of modern psychiatry. We suggest that modern psychiatry makes a number of commitments that are quite familiar to philosophers of psychology, employing mechanistic explanations to address disorders that are seen as natural kinds. We end with an example that seems to fit this picture, specific phobia, and one that seems not to, addiction.

Against prevailing interpretations, this article contends that Plato's Sophist and Statesman accord the sophist a kind of ‘knowing-how’ (epistêmê). In Soph. 233c10‒d2, the Visitor and Theaetetus agree that the sophist has not truth but a δοξαστικὴ ἐπιστήμη. This phrase cannot mean ‘a seeming knowledge’, for –ικός adjectives formed from verbs express the ability to perform the action denoted by the verb—here, δοξάζω. Although not a first-order, subject-area knowledge, sophistry is a second-order knowledge of how to form and use judgements (doxai). Other acknowledgements of the sophist's epistêmê and the ascription to him of τέχνη, ‘craft/expertise’, confirm that the Visitor's conclusion is not to be dismissed as irony. To critics who argue from the Gorgias and from other works that Plato must consider the Visitor's conclusion an error, the author replies: 1) other dialogues do not control the Visitor dialogues; 2) the Visitor does not validly demonstrate that the sophist lacks all knowledge; 3) by admitting sensibles into Being, the Visitor and Theaetetus allow the objects of epistêmê to include things in the embodied world, even likenesses. Non-philosophers’ epistêmê in the Visitor dialogues is not implicated in the difficulties that critics have raised about epistemology in the so-called Two Worlds dialogues. On this new ontology, even the sophist, if guided by philosophical rulers, can benefit citizens by employing his elenctic expertise as Socrates did, aiding their growth toward virtue.

This chapter begins by sketching an account of morally responsible agency and the general conditions under which it may fail. We discuss how far individuals with psychiatric diagnoses may be exempt from morally responsible agency in the way that infants are, with examples drawn from a sample of diagnoses intended to make dierent issues salient. We further discuss a recent proposal that clinicians may hold patients responsible without blaming them for their acts. We also consider cognitively impaired subjects in the light of related issues in moral and political theory, asking whether they have been unjustly excluded from liberal conceptions of political community due to their presumed lack of agency

People with anorexia nervosa commonly exhibit social difficulties, which may be related to problems with understanding the perspectives of others, commonly known as Theory of Mind processing. However, there is a dearth of literature investigating the neural basis of these differences in ToM and at what age they emerge. This study aimed to test for differences in the neural correlates of ToM processes in young women with AN, and young women weight-restored from AN, as compared to healthy control participants. Based on previous findings in AN, we hypothesized that young women with current or prior AN, as compared to HCs, would exhibit a reduced neural response in the medial prefrontal cortex, the inferior frontal gyrus, and the temporo-parietal junction whilst completing a ToM task. We recruited 73 young women with AN, 45 WR young women, and 70 young women without a history of AN to take part in the current study. Whilst undergoing a functional magnetic resonance imaging scan, participants completed the Frith-Happé task, which is a commonly used measure of ToM with demonstrated reliability and validity in adult populations. In this task, participants viewed the movements of triangles, which depicted either action movements, simple interactions, or complex social interactions. Viewing trials with more complex social interactions in the Frith-Happé task was associated with increased brain activation in regions including the right TPJ, the bilateral mPFC, the cerebellum, and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. There were no group differences in neural activation in response to the ToM contrast. Overall, these results suggest that the neural basis of spontaneous mentalizing is preserved in most young women with AN.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:What Is Psychiatry About?Dominic Murphy, PhD (bio)There are no such things as minds, but there are animate objects who behave differently from other types of natural entity. They move around under their own power, and some of their activity seems to be very different from that of other natural objects. Furthermore, some of our predictions about these objects are disproved in interesting ways; if we make a false prediction we do not revise our best theory about how such things generally behave, but we instead conclude that there is something wrong with the object of the prediction. These intelligent unpredictable things need a special vocabulary, and mental talk has arisen to serve as that vocabulary. But since a mind is not a thing in nature we face the problem of saying what the sciences of the mind are actually about.There are, then, intelligent systems that can be judged pathological, and some of them are our conspecifics. It is fair to say that there is no agreement about how such judgments are made or should be made. The question of what a mental illness is part of this larger picture, and it raises several different issues.First, how should we think about our practices of judging deviance? It would be contrary to accepted practice to wear a swimsuit to a state funeral, but what sort of norms would it violate and what state of mind would we ascribe to somebody who did it? Second, what is the difference between a judgment of deviance and a judgment of pathology? We have many ways of distinguishing between types of deviance, and the lines between criminality, immorality and pathology, to take three examples, are not always easy to discern. Third, what makes an illness a mental illness? This is Gough's topic, and I will get to it in a moment, but it worth situating it within this broader framework which asks what we are doing when we make these judgments of norm-violation.Gough begins by quite correctly pointing out that if we look at the domain of psychiatry as currently understood, we would have a hard time seeing what it is supposed to be the science of. It is customary to see psychiatry as dealing with the mental but, as Gough notes, there are some mental processes that psychiatry does not deal with, and some processes that psychiatry deals with that are not mental. Gough's response to this problem is a very interesting one, which starts from the idea that the point of psychiatry is to help those who need it; how different do things look if we start from this position? Conley and Glackin (2021) argues that the practical and therapeutic aspirations of psychiatry should constrain our understanding of mental illness. Glackin argues that we should [End Page 41] see this 'norms-first' view, as I will call it, as part of a broader liberal-democratic conversation about the ways in which we should live togetherA view that starts with norms is typically opposed to the 'naturalist' position. A naturalist begins with positive facts as the basis for diagnostic concepts, on the grounds that our concepts of disease and health are supposed to answer to facts about the physical and mental constitution of human beings. Gough's view is neither a norms-first view or a naturalist's view. We could call it an institutionalist view, or, if we were being a bit less kind, an ostensive one—"these things here, that's mental illness."David Hull (1988) taught us that every science (indeed, every intellectual formation or tradition) needs to be understood in two ways. First, we have the theoretical commitments that are taken to define it. Second, there are the practices and institutions that separate its practitioners off from others. Contemporary evolutionary biology, for instance, is built on the twin foundations of the modern synthesis—Darwinian natural selection and Mendelian genetics. These two theoretical commitments have been transformed and adapted and supplemented in diverse ways so that their modern forms no longer resemble their originals very closely. Still, they continue as the central undertakings about the nature of the living world that modern...

The need for research to advance scientific understanding must be balanced with ensuring the rights and wellbeing of participants are safeguarded, with some research topics posing more ethical quandaries for researchers than others. Moral injury is one such topic. Exposure to potentially morally injurious experiences can lead to significant distress, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, and selfinjury. In this article, we discuss how the rapid expansion of research in the field of moral injury could threaten the wellbeing, dignity and integrity of participants. We also examine key guidance for carrying out ethically responsible research with participants’ rights to self-determination, confidentiality, non-maleficence and beneficence discussed in relation to the study of moral injury. We describe how investigations of moral injury are likely to pose several challenges for researchers including managing disclosures of potentially illegal acts, the risk of harm that repeated questioning about guilt and shame may pose to participant wellbeing in longitudinal studies, as well as the possible negative impact of exposure to vicarious trauma on researchers themselves. Finally, we offer several practical recommendations that researchers, research ethics committees and other regulatory bodies can take to protect participant rights, maximise the potential benefits of research outputs and ensure the field continues to expand in an ethically responsible way.

A Scientific Integrity Consortium developed a set of recommended principles and best practices that can be used broadly across scientific disciplines as a mechanism for consensus on scientific integrity standards and to better equip scientists to operate in a rapidly changing research environment. The two principles that represent the umbrella under which scientific processes should operate are as follows: Foster a culture of integrity in the scientific process. Evidence-based policy interests may have legitimate roles to play in influencing aspects of the research process, but those roles should not interfere with scientific integrity. The nine best practices for instilling scientific integrity in the implementation of these two overarching principles are Require universal training in robust scientific methods, in the use of appropriate experimental design and statistics, and in responsible research practices for scientists at all levels, with the training content regularly updated and presented by qualified scientists. Strengthen scientific integrity oversight and processes throughout the research continuum with a focus on training in ethics and conduct. Encourage reproducibility of research through transparency. Strive to establish open science as the standard operating procedure throughout the scientific enterprise. Develop and implement educational tools to teach communication skills that uphold scientific integrity. Strive to identify ways to further strengthen the peer review process. Encourage scientific journals to publish unanticipated findings that meet standards of quality and scientific integrity. Seek harmonization and implementation among journals of rapid, consistent, and transparent processes for correction and/or retraction of published papers. Design rigorous and comprehensive evaluation criteria that recognize and reward the highest standards of integrity in scientific research.

De Haan has provided a novel and distinctly enactivist solution to the problem of integrating the physiological, experiential, social and existential. We admire her articulation of her fourth "existential" dimension. Not only does it represent a real attempt to bridge, as she says, enactivism's explanatory gap, it is also a potentially useful construct for conceptualizing the way that self-reflexivity seems to go astray in much psychopathology. We think that pinpointing this phenomenon is something that phenomenological accounts excel at. We have, however, two key reservations about her account, which we outline.To begin with, we are unsure that there is any particular scientific research program that derives from...

This chapter sketches an account of psychiatric explanation with roots in contemporary philosophy of science and suggests that it is a natural fit with what it will call the strong interpretation of the medical model in psychiatry. The chapter starts by distinguishing between strong and minimal ways to understand the medical model before it moves on to talk about explanation. The basic idea of the chapter is that the logic of the medical model, together with recent developments in the sciences of the brain, suggests that psychiatry should be seen as a kind of cognitive neuroscience. The second part of the chapter discusses some issues in applying mechanistic explanatory models to mental disorders. Recent philosophical work on explanation in the cognitive neurosciences has seen it as mechanistic explanation. A mechanistic explanation shows how components of a system interact to give rise to the phenomenon to be explained.