Adrian Downey

Anti-psychiatrists contend that psychiatric practice is fundamentally misguided: it inappropriately medicalises difference by equating it with illness, resultantly forcing unwarranted “treatment” on the “mentally ill.” I explain why the most popular realist accounts of mental illness—naturalism, constructivism, and hybridism—are typically considered vulnerable to this moral problem. Then, I introduce “the phenomenological account” that promises to avoid it. The phenomenological account equates mental health with the being-body experiential mode, which is conducive to the flow experiences empirically demonstrated as constitutively necessary for subjective well-being. Mental illness, meanwhile, is equated with entrapment in the having-a-body mode. This precludes flow and, as such, subjective well-being. I explain why the phenomenological account is better placed to resolve the moral problem than its peers, thus providing a proof of principle demonstration of its potential to rebut the anti-psychiatry argument across the board. Finally, I defend the phenomenological account from three common objections.

The proponents of ecological and enactive approaches (e-approaches) to cognitive science find common cause in rejecting representation as a core explanatory posit. In its stead, they suggest that cognitive scientists work with non-representational explanations that emphasise embodied interaction. The ‘scaling up’ objection to e-approaches says that, whilst their non-representational explanatory toolkit might well account for ‘basic’ cognitive capacities, it will founder when confronted with the ‘representation hunger’ of ‘higher’ cognition. Proponents of e-approaches tend to focus their attention upon the scaling up problem posed by truth-conditional language, with it being thought that non-perceptual experiences readily submit to a non-representational analysis. In this paper I argue that non-perceptual experiences possess an oft overlooked, non-linguistic kind of ‘representation hunger’— they hunger for a private mental space within which the representational function of standing-in for is performed. I contend that such theatre hunger poses serious difficulties for e-approaches which they are presently ill-placed to satiate. Hence, I conclude that the theatre hunger of non-perceptual experiences presents a much more serious problem for e-approaches than is often acknowledged.

The ‘scaling up’ objection says non-representational ecological-enactive accounts will be unable to explain ‘representation hungry’ cognition. Obsessive-compulsive disorder presents a paradigmatic instance of this objection, marked as it is by ‘representation hungry’ obsessive thoughts and compulsive behavior organized around them. In this paper I provide an ecological-enactive account of OCD, thereby demonstrating non-representational frameworks can ‘scale up’ to explain ‘representation hungry’ cognition. First, I outline a non-representational account of mind— a predictive processing operationalization of Sean Kelly’s theory of perception. This account explains the ‘tensions’ and ‘pulls’ which guide and constrain our action-oriented and affect-laden perceptual ‘grip’ upon the world to be underwritten by an imperative to minimize prediction error. I then argue that OCD is best understood as ‘grip gone awry’— malformed predictive models signal inappropriately high error, and this results in extremely strong ‘tensions’ and ‘pulls’ which prescribe actions. Thus, I arrive at the idea that OCD is primarily constituted by ‘not just right’ feelings caused by high error signaling. Finally, I explain that this account provides a causal explanation of the non-representational existential feeling fundamental to OCD. Compulsions are considered manifestations of non-representational grip responsive to this feeling, whilst obsessions are explained to play a meta-role in the condition, being formulated by subjects in a bid to make their ‘not just right’ feeling intelligible. I explain that the meta-role obsessions play makes their representational status largely irrelevant to OCD, and so leave this an open question. Consequently, I provide a non-representational account of OCD, thereby demonstrating that ecological-enactive approaches can respond to the ‘scaling up’ objection.

In this paper I argue that, by combining eliminativist and fictionalist approaches toward the sub-personal representational posits of predictive processing, we arrive at an empirically robust and yet metaphysically innocuous cognitive scientific framework. I begin the paper by providing a non-representational account of the five key posits of predictive processing. Then, I motivate a fictionalist approach toward the remaining indispensable representational posits of predictive processing, and explain how representation can play an epistemologically indispensable role within predictive processing explanations without thereby requiring that representation metaphysically exists. Finally, I outline four consequences of accepting this approach and explain why they are beneficial: we arrive at a victory for metaphysical eliminativism in the ‘representation wars’; my account fits with extant empirical practice; my account provides guidance for future research; and, my account provides the beginnings of a response to Mark Sprevak’s IBE problem for fictionalist approaches toward sub-personal representation.

In this paper I argue that split-brain syndrome is best understood within an extended mind framework and, therefore, that its very existence provides support for an externalist account of conscious perception. I begin by outlining the experimental aberration model of split-brain syndrome and explain both: why this model provides the best account of split-brain syndrome; and, why it is commonly rejected. Then, I summarise Susan Hurley’s argument that split-brain subjects could unify their conscious perceptual field by using external factors to stand-in for the missing corpus callosum. I next provide an argument that split-brain subjects do unify their perceptual fields via external factors. Finally, I explain why my account provides one with an experimental aberration model which avoids the problems typically levelled at such views, and highlight some empirical predictions made by the account. The nature of split-brain syndrome has long been considered mysterious by proponents of internalist accounts of consciousness. However, in this paper I argue that externalist theories can provide a straightforward explanation of the condition. I therefore conclude that the ability of externalist accounts to explain split-brain syndrome gives us strong reason to prefer them over internalist rivals.