•  73
    Agency in Mental Illness and Cognitive Disability
    In 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
  •  25
    What 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
  • Stich (edited book)
    Wiley‐Blackwell. 2009-03-20.
  •  1
    Health and Disease
    In Sahorta Sarkar & Anya Plutynski (eds.), Companion to the Philosophy of Biology, Blackwell. 2008.
    This chapter contains section titled: Introduction Objectivism and Constructivism Problems for Constructivism Objectivism Troubles with Objectivism References.
  •  8
    Moral injury and the need to carry out ethically responsible research
    with Victoria Williamson, Carl Castro, Eric Vermetten, Rakesh Jetly, and Neil Greenberg
    Research Ethics 17 (2): 135-142. 2020.
    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, depression, and selfinjury. In this article, we discuss how the rapid expansion of research in the field …Read more
  • Introduction (review)
    In Dominic Murphy & Michael A. Bishop (eds.), Stich and His Critics, Wiley-blackwell. 2009.
  •  19
    De Haan on Sense-Making and Psychopathology
    Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 27 (1): 29-30. 2020.
    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 someth…Read more
  •  62
    Varieties of self-explanation
    Behavioral 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
  •  80
    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
  •  46
    Can 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
  •  68
    Folk psychology meets the frame problem
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 32 (3): 565-573. 2001.
  •  25
    Can 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
  • Darwinian models of psychopathology
    In Jennifer Radden (ed.), The Philosophy of Psychiatry: A Companion, Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 329--337. 2004.
  •  154
    The Concept of Mental Illness--Where the Debate has Reached and Where it Needs to Go
    Journal 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
  •  32
    Explanation 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
  •  27
    Philosophy of psychiatry
    The Philosophers' Magazine 72 85-86. 2016.
  •  18
    Relaxing into Psychiatry
    Metascience 18 (2): 335-338. 2009.
  •  54
    Dopamine and Discovery
    Philosophy, 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