Karen Neander

(1954 - 2020)

Abnormal Psychobiology provides a comprehensive philosophical analysis of the anti-psychiatry discourse and the relationship between psychology and biology. Part I diagnoses a methodological problem in disputes over "mental illness" and the "medical model": arguments often conflate conceptual claims about illness and dysfunction with moral and political critiques of psychiatric practice. The text proposes bracketing the political dimension (without denying it) to clarify the explanatory commitments of the medical model. Part II develops an etiological theory of biological function and dysfunction and applies it to the distinctions between disease, illness, and organic disorder. Particular attention is given to the question of whether psychological conditions can involve biological dysfunction. Part III defends a biological theory of mind ("biological functionalism") and addresses classic objections, as well as questions about broad mental states and representation. It argues that representational status and content are grounded in biologically proper histories of acquisition and use.

Karen Neander criticizes Kitcher’s account of functions and responds to his criticisms of etiological notions. Neander argues that Kitcher’s account fails to make sense of the possibility of malfunction in token traits. Moreover his criticisms apply only to an ultra-strong etiological notion of functions. In contrast, Neander defends what she calls a middling-strong etiological account. Her account is stronger than Kitcher’s in requiring that natural selection played some role (relatively recently) in explaining the presence or maintenance of the trait over (at least some of) the available alternatives that actually existed, but unlike the ultra-strong notion it does not require that the trait would have offered an advantage over all possible alternatives.

Most theories of function ascribe biological functions to token traits on the basis of their being traits of a certain type. This raises a circularity concern, given that, traditionally, biological traits are thought to be typed by their functions. This chapter discusses this circularity problem, primarily as a problem for etiological theories of function. Drawing on a proposal made in earlier works by herself and with Alex Rosenberg, Karen Neander suggests and defends an answer to the question of how traits should be typed for the purpose of ascribing them functions. She argues that, although many trait categories are functional-homologous categories that are partly sensitive to distinctions of function (and not strictly based on distinctions in lineage), this generates no vicious circularity. By locating a trait in a lineage that is parsed at those junctures where there are relevant changes in the direction of selection, one can at once determine its function and classify it with respect to a functional-homologous classification. She shows how this proposal handles vestigial traits and exaptations, and how it helps with Robert Cummins’ worries about gradual selection and trait fixation.

This paper argues that a minimal notion of function and a notion of normal-proper function are used in explaining how bodies and brains operate. Neither is Cummins’ (1975) notion, as originally defined, and yet his is often taken to be the clearly relevant notion for such an explanatory context. This paper also explains how adverting to normal-proper functions, even if these are selected functions, can play a significant scientific role in the operational explanations of complex systems that physiologists and neurophysiologists provide, despite a lack of relevant causal efficacy on the part of such functions.

Drawing on insights from causal theories of reference, teleosemantics, and state space semantics, a theory of naturalized mental representation. In A Mark of the Mental, Karen Neander considers the representational power of mental states—described by the cognitive scientist Zenon Pylyshyn as the “second hardest puzzle” of philosophy of mind. The puzzle at the heart of the book is sometimes called “the problem of mental content,” “Brentano's problem,” or “the problem of intentionality.” Its motivating mystery is how neurobiological states can have semantic properties such as meaning or reference. Neander proposes a naturalistic account for sensory-perceptual representations. Neander draws on insights from state-space semantics, causal theories of reference, and teleosemantic theories. She proposes and defends an intuitive, theoretically well-motivated but highly controversial thesis: sensory-perceptual systems have the function to produce inner state changes that are the analogs of as well as caused by their referents. Neander shows that the three main elements—functions, causal-information relations, and relations of second-order similarity—complement rather than conflict with each other. After developing an argument for teleosemantics by examining the nature of explanation in the mind and brain sciences, she develops a theory of mental content and defends it against six main content-determinacy challenges to a naturalized semantics.