Abstract
Philosophy of psychiatry faces a tough choice between two competing ways of understanding mental disorders. The folk psychology (FP) view puts our everyday normative conceptual scheme in the driver’s seat – on the assumption that it, and it only, tells us what mental disorders are (1). Opposing this, the scientific image (SI) view (2, 3) holds that our understanding of mental disorders must come, wholly and solely, from the sciences of the mind, unfettered by FP. This paper argues that the FP view is problematic because it is too limited: there is more to the mind than FP allows; hence, we must look beyond FP for properly deep and illuminating explanations of mental disorders. SI promises just this. But when cast in its standard cognitivist formulations, SI is unnecessarily and unjustifiably neurocentric. After rejecting both the FP view, in its pure form, and SI view, in its popular cognitivist renderings, this paper concludes that a more liberal version of SI can accommodate what is best in both views – once SI is so formulated and the FP view properly edited and significantly revised, the two views can be reconciled and combined to provide a sound philosophical basis for a future psychiatry.
Highlights
Philosophy of psychiatry faces a tough choice between two competing ways of understanding mental disorders
This paper argues that the folk psychology (FP) view is problematic because it is too limited: there is more to the mind than FP allows; we must look beyond FP for properly deep and illuminating explanations of mental disorders
When cast in its standard cognitivist formulations, scientific image (SI) is unnecessarily and unjustifiably neurocentric. After rejecting both the FP view, in its pure form, and SI view, in its popular cognitivist renderings, this paper concludes that a more liberal version of SI can accommodate what is best in both views – once SI is so formulated and the FP view properly edited and significantly revised, the two views can be reconciled and combined to provide a sound philosophical basis for a future psychiatry
Summary
A familiar answer in philosophical circles is that any approach to mental health must always operate with reference to the normative features that define our folk psychological (FP) understanding of mind Call this the FP view of mental disorders and psychiatry. The sciences of the mind have something important to add to the story so long as they take their direction from FP when it comes to understanding and classifying mental disorders on the basis of possible causes. Advancing the idea that psychiatry needs to be grounded entirely in the cognitive sciences, Murphy (2) is the foremost defender of the scientific image (SI) view of psychiatry He and his friends see the FP view as unacceptable because it denies the sciences of the mind a free hand in revealing the essential character of mental phenomena. That seems to be the line of several prominent defenders of cognitivist variants of the SI view (2, 3)
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