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356From my Lai to abu ghraib: The moral psychology of atrocityMidwest Studies in Philosophy 31 (1). 2007.While nothing justifies atrocity, many perpetrators manifest cognitive impairments that profoundly degrade their capacity for moral judgment, and such impairments, we shall argue, preclude the attribution of moral responsibility.
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269The harmful dysfunction analysis of mental disorderPhilosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 7 (4): 241-252. 2000.This paper is a critical analysis of the concept of mental disorder recently advanced by Jerome Wakefield. Wakefield suggests that mental disorders are most aptly conceived as "harmful dysfunctions" involving two distinct and separable components: the failure of the mechanism in the person to perform a natural function for which the mechanism was designed by natural selection, and a value judgment that the dysfunction is undesirable.
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252Complex mental disorders: representation, stability and explanationEuropean Journal of Analytic Philosophy 6 (1): 28-42. 2010.This paper discusses the representation and explanation of relationships between phenomena that are important in psychiatric contexts. After a general discussion of complexity in the philosophy of science, I distinguish zooming-out approaches from zooming-in approaches. Zooming-out has to do with seeing complex mental illnesses as abstract models for the purposes of both explanation and reduction. Zooming-in involves breaking complex mental illnesses into simple components and trying to explain …Read more
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249Darwin in the madhouse: evolutionary psychology and the classification of mental disordersIn Peter Carruthers & A. Chamberlain (eds.), Evolution and the Human Mind: Modularity, Language and Meta-Cognition, Cambridge University Press. pp. 62--92. 2000.
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197Explanation in psychiatryPhilosophy Compass 5 (7): 602-610. 2010.Philosophy of psychiatry has boomed in the last few years. We are now seeing a growing literature on the nature of psychiatric explanation, including work that makes contact with longstanding disputes in the philosophy of science as well as more specific work on mental disorders. This paper looks at some recent work on both representing and explaining mental illness. An emerging picture sees explanation of mental disorder as first constructing causal-statistical networks that represent disease p…Read more
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185Can evolution explain insanity?Biology and Philosophy 20 (4): 745-766. 2005.I distinguish three evolutionary explanations of mental illness: first, breakdowns in evolved computational systems; second, evolved systems performing their evolutionary function in a novel environment; third, evolved personality structures. I concentrate on the second and third explanations, as these are distinctive of an evolutionary psychopathology, with progressively less credulity in the light of the empirical evidence. General morals are drawn for evolutionary psychiatry
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162The Concept of Mental Illness--Where the Debate has Reached and Where it Needs to GoJournal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology 25 (1): 116-132. 2005.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. Th…Read more
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161Psychiatry in the Scientific ImageMIT Press. 2005.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 …Read more
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153Conceptual analysis versus scientific understanding: An assessment of Wakefield's folk psychiatryPhilosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 7 (4): 271-293. 2000.Wakefield's (2000) responses to our paper herein (Murphy and Woolfolk 2000) are not only unsuccessful, they force him into a position that leaves him unable to preserve any distinction between disorders and other problems. They also conflate distinct scientific concepts of function. Further, Wakefield fails to show that ascriptions of human dysfunction do not ineliminably involve values. We suggest Wakefield is analyzing a concept that plays a role in commonsense thought and arguing that the tas…Read more
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133The Folk Epistemology of DelusionsNeuroethics 5 (1): 19-22. 2011.Lisa Bortolotti argues convincingly that opponents of the doxastic view of delusion are committed to unnecessarily stringent standards for belief attribution. Folk psychology recognises many non-rational ways in which beliefs can be caused, and our attributions of delusions may be guided by a sense that delusions are beliefs that we cannot explain in any folk psychological terms
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118Agency in Mental Illness and Cognitive DisabilityIn Manuel Vargas & John Doris (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Moral Psychology, Oxford University Press. pp. 893-910. 2022.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 impa…Read more
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103Hacking’s Reconciliation: Putting the Biological and Sociological Together in the Explanation of Mental IllnessPhilosophy of the Social Sciences 31 (2): 139-162. 2001.In a series of recent works, Ian Hacking has produced a model of social causation in mental illness and begun to sketch in outline how this might be integrated with the medical model of psychiatry. This article elaborates and revises Hacking 's model of social forces, criticizes him for attempting a merely semantic resolution of the tension between the social and the biological, and sketches an alternative approach that builds upon his substantial insights
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100Delusions, Modernist Epistemology and Irrational BeliefMind and Language 28 (1): 113-124. 2013.Jennifer Radden argues that delusions play an important role in modernist epistemology, which is preoccupied with the justification and evaluation of beliefs. Another theme running through the book is the importance of culture for attribution of delusion. Beliefs that look delusional will not be treated as pathological if they are expressions of religious views or other culturally acceptable forms of life. It is hard to see why cultural acceptability should play a role in the modernist project o…Read more
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84Stich and His Critics (edited book)Wiley-Blackwell. 2009.Through a collection of original essays from leading philosophical scholars, _Stich and His Critics_ provides a thorough assessment of the key themes in the career of philosopher Stephen Stich. Provides a collection of original essays from some of the world's most distinguished philosophers Explores some of philosophy's most hotly-debated contemporary topics, including mental representation, theory of mind, nativism, moral philosophy, and naturalized epistemology
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84On Fodor's analogy: Why psychology is like philosophy of science after allMind and Language 21 (5): 553-564. 2006.Jerry Fodor has argued that a modular mind must include central systems responsible for updating beliefs, and has defended this position by appealing to shared properties of belief fixation and scientific confirmation. Peter Carruthers and Stephen Pinker have attacked this analogy between science and ordinary inference. I examine their arguments and show that they fail. This does not show that Fodor's more general position is correct
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78Folk psychology meets the frame problemStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 32 (3): 565-573. 2001.
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73Levels of explanation in psychiatryIn Kenneth S. Kendler & Josef Parnas (eds.), Philosophical Issues in Psychiatry: Explanation, Phenomenology, and Nosology, Johns Hopkins University Press. pp. 99--125. 2008.
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68Varieties of self-explanationBehavioral and Brain Sciences 32 (2): 155-156. 2009.Carruthers is right to reject the idea of a dedicated piece of cognitive architecture with the exclusive job of reading our own minds. But his mistake is in trying to explain introspection in terms of any one mindreading system. We understand ourselves in many different ways via many systems
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60Conceptual Foundations of Biological PsychiatryIn Fred Gifford (ed.), Philosophy of Medicine, Elsevier. pp. 16--425. 2011.
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58Can psychiatry refurnish the mind?Philosophical Explorations 20 (2): 160-174. 2017.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 mai…Read more
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58Dopamine and DiscoveryPhilosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 18 (1): 69-71. 2011.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…Read more
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53Review of George Graham, The Disordered Mind - An Introduction to Philosophy of Mind and Mental Illness (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2010 (6). 2010.
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45Function, dysfunction, and adaptation?In Pieter R. Adriaens & Andreas de Block (eds.), Maladapting Minds: Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Evolutionary Theory, Oxford University Press. pp. 216--237. 2011.
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43Review of man Cheung Chung, K.w.M. Fulford, George Graham (eds.), Reconceiving Schizophrenia (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2007 (6). 2007.
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37What Is Psychiatry About?Philosophy Psychiatry and Psychology 30 (1): 41-43. 2023.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 r…Read more
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35Can Psychiatry Refurnish the Mind?Philosophical Explorations 20 (2): 160-174. 2017.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 mai…Read more
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34Explanation in Psychiatry (review)Philosophy Compass 5 (7): 602-610. 2010.Philosophy of psychiatry has boomed in the last few years. We are now seeing a growing literature on the nature of psychiatric explanation, including work that makes contact with longstanding disputes in the philosophy of science as well as more specific work on mental disorders. This paper looks at some recent work on both representing and explaining mental illness. An emerging picture sees explanation of mental disorder as first constructing causal‐statistical networks that represent disease p…Read more
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University of SydneyRegular Faculty
Areas of Specialization
Science, Logic, and Mathematics |
Metaphysics and Epistemology |
Areas of Interest
Science, Logic, and Mathematics |
Metaphysics and Epistemology |