Adrian Kind

Transformative experiences are thought to change us in different ways. Some transform us epistemically by providing genuinely new, previously unimaginable experiences, while others bring about personal transformation by altering our values. Recent debates on transformative experiences have explored the challenges these experiences pose for decision theory and medical ethics, prompting efforts to better understand their nature. An important but largely unexplored epistemic question concerns how we come to know that an experience has had a transformative impact. In this paper, I examine this issue, focusing on the epistemologically more complex case of personal transformation. I argue that while epistemic transformation is transparent—making first‐person judgments about it highly reliable—first‐person judgments regarding personal transformation are more complex, inferential, and prone to error. To explore these complexities, I introduce the phenomenon of Transformative Dazzle—situations in which the inherent error‐proneness of inferences about personal transformation leads to mistaken self‐attributions of personal transformation. I further elaborate on how such errors may be identified, both in everyday life and in empirical research on transformative experiences.

Transformative experiences are thought to change us in different ways. Some transform us epistemically by providing genuinely new, previously unimaginable experiences, while others bring about personal transformation by altering our values. Recent debates on transformative experiences have explored the challenges these experiences pose for decision theory and medical ethics, prompting efforts to better understand their nature. An important but largely unexplored epistemic question concerns how we come to know that an experience has had a transformative impact. In this paper, I examine this issue, focusing on the epistemologically more complex case of personal transformation. I argue that while epistemic transformation is transparent—making first-person judgments about it highly reliable—first-person judgments regarding personal transformation are more complex, inferential, and prone to error. To explore these complexities, I introduce the phenomenon of Transformative Dazzle—situations in which the inherent error-proneness of inferences about personal transformation leads to mistaken self-attributions of personal transformation. I further elaborate on how such errors may be identified, both in everyday life and in empirical research on transformative experiences.

How do psychiatrists arrive at their diagnostic conclusions? Though several philosophers of psychiatry have proposed how to understand psychiatric diagnostic reasoning over the last decade, this essential question of the epistemology of psychiatric practice has received little attention. This article introduces the reader to this topic, its importance, and the major theoretical positions presented in the debate, while also pointing to future relevant research in this area of philosophy of psychiatry.

The Comforting Delusion Objection is a central argument in the emerging field of Philosophy of Psychedelics. It posits that while psychedelics may benefit the mental well-being of individuals they also give rise to epistemically unreliable metaphysical beliefs that are incompatible with a naturalist worldview. Assuming naturalism is the correct stance, the result is significant epistemic harm for patients. For this reason, we should hesitate to use psychedelics as a therapeutic aid. In my counterargument, the Faithful Response, I argue that the Comforting Delusion Objection ultimately fails. This failure stems from the plausible assumption that the non-naturalistic metaphysical attitudes resulting from psychedelic experiences are often not beliefs but forms of faith. Faiths, in turn, are nondoxastic and as such, they are not suitable for epistemic evaluation. Therefore, they cannot be justifiably claimed to be epistemically harmful. If no general epistemic harm arises then the Comforting Delusion Objection loses its force.

In On Madness: Understanding the Psychotic Mind, published in 2022, Richard G.T. Gipps embarks on a philosophical exploration of psychosis. Generally speaking, Gipps’s book presents an approach he calls “apophatic psychopathology,” (Gipps 2022, 2) borrowing from negative (that is, apophatic) theology and its method of understanding God’s nature by seeing how it defeats the predication of even those most supreme qualities we are drawn to predicate of Him. Gipps’s central insight regarding psychotic phenomena is that we best come to understand them not positively, by predicating of the psychotic subject this or that rationally intelligible, intentional state, but instead negatively, through seeing how such predications are here defeated. Sitting down with a person suffering from psychosis requires that we develop the capacity to stay with them in their brokenness, rather than projecting onto them an intentional structure that their illness has abrogated. Gipps comments critically on relativistic tendencies we encounter these days, concluding that people suffering from severe psychosis are not happily thought of as just living in an “alternative reality” as good as the one populated by nonpsychotic people.

In this paper we argue that physical strength is in philosophical terms best understood as general agentive ability to exercise difficult physical effort. We develop this metaphysical claim about strength, by focusing on the historically developed most paradigmatic test of overall strength: The sport of Strong (Wo)Man. We extract the understanding of strength present in this sport, and show how the current philosophical agents' abilities, and physical effort, lend themselves to capture the essential features of strength, providing the justification for our claim. Finally we argue that strongman itself is already surprisingly well thought through to assess strength, balancing different tradeoffs that exist when quantitatively attempting to measure strength, making it a robust epistemic tool to determine strength in an interdisciplinary manner.

Precision medicine impacts virtually all medical specializations, including psychiatry. Though precision psychiatry, in general, is a flourishing area of research and debate, psychotherapy as one pillar of psychiatry has received little attention. Theoretical discussions about precision psychotherapy are rare; research on precision in psychotherapy is just evolving. In this paper we provide a conceptualization of precision psychotherapy providing a common idea of what should be understood as precision in the context of psychotherapy and what kind of psychotherapy research can be considered to contribute to the aims of precision psychotherapy.

Chiara Caporuscio and Adrian Kind argue that psychedelic-assisted therapy is different from traditional therapy in an ethically fraught way and, as a result, arguably require ethical guidelines beyond those constitutive of traditional therapy. The way in question pertains to the therapist’s role as participatory sense-maker of the patient’s experiences and, with it, the balance of power between the therapist and the patient. In both traditional and psychedelic-assisted therapy, the therapist role as sense-maker can give rise to an imbalance of power between the therapist and the patient, such as when the therapist’s attempt at sense-making totally disregards the patient’s attempt at doing so. But in psychedelic-assisted therapy, the possibility of such a power imbalance is exacerbated. For, given her use of a psychedelic drug, the patient’s conscious experience is altered in such a way as to render her much more vulnerable than she otherwise would be. To give just one example, since the therapist is perceived by the patient to be an authoritative sense-making guide, the former’s attempts at making sense of the latter’s experiences can have much more influence on a psychedelically intoxicated patient’s interpretation of her experiences than they otherwise would have. Hence, Caporuscio and Kind’s conclusion that the ethical guidelines constitutive of traditional therapy are probably not sufficient for psychedelic-assisted therapy.

How do clinical psychiatrists arrive at their diagnostic conclusions? Little attention has been directed to this question by philosophers of psychiatry. Adrian Kind presents a systematic, in-depth philosophical investigation into this question and argues that psychiatric diagnostic reasoning can be understood as a model-based reasoning procedure analogous to scientific model-based reasoning. To support this, he draws on ideas from the philosophy of science, psychiatry, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. This study is an invaluable resource for practicing psychiatrists, philosophers interested in psychiatry, and researchers in artificial intelligence or cognitive science interested in medical cognition.

We challenge the standard interpretation of pain asymbolia (PA), a neuropsychiatric condition that causes unusual reactions to pain stimuli. The standard interpretation asserts that PA subjects experience pain but lack important features of the experience. However, we argue that the clinical evidence for PA does not support this interpretation and that the arguments put forward by the defenders of the standard interpretation end up making self-contradicting claims. Finally, we suggest that the best interpretation of the available evidence is to take a deflationist stance toward PA, at least until further evidence becomes available.

In attempting to explain the properties and behavior of an evolved artefact with the breathtaking complexity of the human brain, dissociating conventional causes and effects is like pulling apart an autosarcophagic snake. To paint a representative picture, we need a palette of explanatory languages capable of portraying the multifarious interactions within a complex system at suitable levels of abstraction. In particular, in addition to conventional causal explanations, the philosophy of science offers a framework of so-called constitutive explanations. Here, we motivate, describe, differentiate and discuss the use of causal and constitutive explanations in the field of computational psychiatry.

Since its beginnings, modern bodybuilding has been accompanied by the background issue of whether it should be considered a sport. The problem, culminating in its provisional acceptance as a sport by the International Olympic Committee, was later retracted. The uncertainty of whether bodybuilding is a sport or not seems to linger. Addressing this issue, Aranyosi (2018) provided an account to determine the status of bodybuilding as a sport that arrives at the negative answer: bodybuilding is not a sport but rather a form of artistic presentation. In this paper, we disagree with Aranyosi. We argue that by the standards he presents in his first argument, bodybuilding should be considered a sport. Further, we argue that his alternative approach on how to evaluate a discipline as more sport- or art-like on a spectrum, is not a valid basis to make such a judgment regarding bodybuilding. Further, even if his spectrum was modified to enable such a judgment, again it would result in bodybuilding being evaluated as a sport. Therefore, we conclude that everyone who accepts Aranyosi´s (or any less restrictive) requirements to decide whether bodybuilding is a sport, has to consider bodybuilding as a sport or refrain from making claims about its status.

An important question in the philosophy of psychiatry is: what is the proper method of psychiatric diagnostic reasoning? Let us call this the Methodological Question. In this paper, I criticize the answer that proponents of phenomenological psychiatry have given to this question and present an alternative. I argue that their answer fails to meet several adequacy conditions for a theory of psychiatric diagnostic reasoning. I then show how my own answer to the Methodological Question – the Model-Based Account of diagnostic reasoning – meets these adequacy conditions. I conclude that the Model-Based Account of diagnostic reasoning is preferable to the Phenomenological Account.