Dominic 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.

Introduction: Young people are experiencing an escalating global mental health crisis, intensified by the effects of COVID-19, cultural disconnection, and the limited fit of conventional clinical models with diverse populations. While biomedical and psychological models remain essential, they often underplay the symbolic, sensory, and relational dimensions of emotional life. This review explores how young people interpret and regulate their mental health through expressive, symbolic, and sonic practices. It proposes that the Culture-as-Practice (CAP) framework can complement existing approaches by offering a more integrated understanding of how cultural participation supports wellbeing. Methods: A narrative review informed by the CAP framework, which extends the Culture-as-Interaction (CAI) model, was conducted to evaluate how participatory cultural practices function as affective technologies. Literature published between 2010 and 2025 was systematically identified from five databases and screened using PRISMA-informed protocols. Data were analyzed thematically with CAP and CAI constructs. Two case studies–Whānau Ora (New Zealand) and Giving Emotions Meaning through Arts and Health (GEMAH) (Pakistan and Australia)–were selected to illustrate how CAP explains mechanisms through which cultural participation supports emotional wellbeing. Results: Participatory arts such as music, storytelling, and ritual were found to serve as cultural technologies that foster emotional regulation, identity coherence, and social connection. Sonic and symbolic practices created co-regulatory fields of belonging, effects often absent in conventional clinical models. CAP aligned with these findings by offering a theoretical lens to explain why such practices work, reframing them as structured culture as affective technologies rather than incidental engagement. Discussion: Culture-as-Practice provides more than an alternative to biomedical models. It offers an explanatory framework for why participatory, culturally grounded practices support youth mental health and wellbeing. By positioning emotional regulation as relationally and symbolically scaffolded, CAP highlights opportunities for integrating creative and communal practices into trauma-informed, culturally resonant interventions across schools, communities, and clinical settings.

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.

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.

This dissertation examines the conceptual foundations of psychiatric taxonomy. The atheoretical approach of the current taxonomic orthodoxy is faulted, and a new foundation proposed. The basis of the proposed new approach to taxonomy is a view of the human mind which emerges from contemporary evolutionary approaches to the cognitive sciences. It is argued that a revised taxonomy should be based on a theoretical understanding of the ways in which an evolved mind can fail to function as expected. Diverse current explanations of mental disorders are canvassed with a view to showing how they might fit into such an approach. The dissertation concludes with an examination of the concept of mental disorder in the light of these new approaches. It is concluded that no coherent concept of mental disorder exists, and that therefore a now theory should make use of various successor concepts

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

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.

Kendler and Schaffner have written an exemplary case study of the rise of the dopamine hypothesis and, if not its fall, at least its stagnation and transmutation. They bring out well both the state of the science and the opportunities offered by the theory to consider some famous philosophical theories of scientific progress. So well, in fact, have they done this, that I do not have a lot to say about it. I will just mention one or two points that I found interesting, and then say a little about what looks to me like an omission from the story that the two Kens recount.One point they raise is the importance of competitor theories: now, there is supposed to be an old story about a quack who was apprehended during ..

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...

In this paper, I will argue that the NIMH’s new Research Domain of Criteria is a useful test of the philosophical hypothesis of eliminative materialism and demonstrates the superiority of a moderate eliminativism over integrationism, which is a rival philosophical framework for the cognitive sciences. I begin by going over the motivation for RDOC, which rests on the problems with the existing Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders framework in psychiatry. Then, I introduce the main tenets of RDoC before discussing eliminativism and trying to show what a moderate eliminativism looks like through the example of addiction. I then contrast that approach with intregrationism to the latter’s detriment. I end by wondering whether the broadly political consequences of eliminativism give us non-scientific reasons for resisting it, as it threatens to rob ordinary people of important means of self-description.

The paper develops a framework for discussing concepts of health and disease along two dimensions. The first is the role of values in our disease concepts, and the second is the relationship between science and folk psychology. This framework is then applied to the concept of mental disorder. I argue that existing treatments of the concept yield too much authority to common sense, which produces a tension within the program of finding a scientific basis for our ascriptions of mental disorder. The science should be given more authority, even if this leads to counterintuitive results. I conclude by identifying several smaller scale conceptual problems within the application of science to mental illness, and argue that the debate needs to shift towards dealing with such problems in an empirically informed way, rather than remaining at the level of conceptual analysis. 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

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.

The history of psychiatry does not inspire confidence, even among psychiatrists, and there has always been a cottage industry in medicine and psychology that wrestles with various conceptual problems around mental illness. It’s arguable that philosophers of science have not paid enough attention to this literature. Even if you aren’t interested in psychiatry, you might profit from the debates in psychometrics on the measurement of mental constructs, or look at the arguments over causation, reduction, and explanation that psychiatrists fight out among themselves, increasingly with some philosophical input. Kenneth Kendler is a major contributor to this literature as theorist, experimentalist, and (via his role in the DSM) institution-builder and gatekeeper. He stands out too for his willingness to engage and learn from philosophy; and also to teach, for many of us can vouch to learning a lot about psychiatry from Kendler’s willingness to collaborate with philosophers and integrate the two communities. So it is a great pleasure to have a selection of Kendler’s papers assembled in one place. The essays in this volume cover a variety of conceptual issues in psychiatry, together with some historical material looking at the recent development of biomedical psychiatry. The most notable historical piece is the chapter on the origins of the Fechner criteria for validation of diagnoses, which had an enormous impact on the development of biological psychiatry in the 1970s. This collection covers many issues, and we won’t try to discuss everything, instead opting for one or two main issues that we think philosophers of science will be especially interested in. But there is something here for almost everyone in philosophy of science, and we urge them to look at this volume even if psychiatry is not on their normal reading list.