Stephen Gadsby

For many who suffer from it, anorexia nervosa appears to serve adaptive functions: it emerges in the context of certain needs—for control, simplicity, or emotional relief—and seems to satisfy them. This feature of the disorder has long been recognized in the clinical literature but has so far escaped sustained philosophical attention. This paper offers a philosophical analysis of the disorder’s apparent adaptiveness. I argue that understanding why anorexia appears to serve such functions requires attending to the way many sufferers value thinness. Specifically, two features of thinness values—their strength and their exclusivity—are central to explaining why the senses of control and simplicity associated with anorexia are experienced as so rewarding, and why they generalize beyond dieting to life as a whole. The same features also reshape how sufferers perceive the disorder’s mounting costs: many are reframed as acceptable trade-offs, and some cease to register as costs at all. The account thus locates a central source of the disorder’s apparent adaptiveness in the structure of sufferers’ value systems.

We evaluate a growing trend towards anti-representationalism in cognitive science in the context of recent research into the development and maintenance of anorexia nervosa in cognitive neuropsychiatry. We argue two things: first, that this research relies on an explanatorily robust concept of representation—the concept of a long-term body schema; second, that this body representation underlies our most basic environmental interactions and affordance perception—the psychological phenomena supposed to be most hospitable to a non-representationalist treatment.