Imperfect Cognitions

In this post, Harriet Fagerberg and Justin Garson discuss their new paper, “Proper Functions are Proximal Functions,” forthcoming in The British Journal for Philosophy of Science (preprint  here ). Harriet Fagerberg What makes something a mental disorder? Why are schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and depression mental disorders, but not jealousy, grief, or racism? This is philosophy of medicine’s famous “demarcation problem.” We think that what makes something a mental disorder, rather than an ordinary response to the problems of life, or run-of-the-mill social deviance, is that there’s a dysfunction. Something in the person’s brain isn’t working as designed. The same is true of the rest of medicine. What makes diabetes or leukemia diseases, rather than just unpleasant things to have (like being short), is that they involve dysfunctions. Justin Garson But what are functions? By ‘function’ we just mean effects that were favored by natural selection. The function of the heart is...

Today's post is by Anne-Marie Gagné-Julien. Anne-Marie is a postdoctoral fellow at the Biomedical Ethics Unit at McGill University and also affiliated with the École normale supérieure (ENS). She works on philosophy of psychiatry and medicine, social epistemology and epistemic injustice. Here, she discusses her recent paper on dysfunction and the definition of mental disorder.  Anne-Marie Gagné-Julien One big question in North-American psychiatry (at least) is the meaning of “mental disorder”. This is an issue that goes back to the 1960s-1970s when the discipline was the subject of heated debate. At that time psychiatry was under attack from all sides, but one of the most important criticisms was to show problems with one of its central concepts, “mental disorder”. One of the arguments was that the concept of mental disorder was not based on anything scientific or empirical and was therefore only a tool of social control to regulate social deviance (e.g., depression would not be a...

Today's post is by Justin Garson . Justin is professor of philosophy at Hunter College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York. He writes on the philosophy of madness, the evolution of mind, and purpose in nature. He also contributes to PsychologyToday.com . Today he writes about his new book, " Madness: A Philosophical Exploration ". Since the 1970s, Western psychiatry has been locked into a disease paradigm of madness. This paradigm has such an ironclad grip on our thinking that it’s sometimes hard to see outside of it. I call this paradigm madness-as-dysfunction. In essence, it sees the forms of madness – delusions, dissociative episodes, depression – as so many different ways that the mind can break down, or fail to function as it should. We all know the slogans. “Depression is like diabetes.” “Schizophrenia is like cancer.” These give voice to madness-as-dysfunction while investing it with the force of an ethical imperative. Justin Garson But what if mad...

In today's post, Anneli Jefferson discusses her new book , Are Mental Disorders Brain Disorders? (Routledge 2022) .  She is a lecturer at Cardiff University who works in the philosophy of psychology, moral philosophy, and at the intersection of the two.  In the last 20 years or so, neuroscience and psychiatry have increasingly been researching what brain differences can be found in people suffering from mental distress, and how these might help to explain and treat mental disorders. There is a long-standing belief that mental disorders must be brain disorders, because whatever psychological dysfunction we find must have some basis in the brain. However, many psychiatrists, clinical psychologists and philosophers strongly resist this idea, and debates about this issue can get quite heated. In my book  I set out to get to the bottom of what makes this debate so intractable and provide a way forward in the debate. I argue that resistance to calling mental disorders brain di...

Today's post is by Harriet Fagerberg at King’s College London & Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin on her recent paper “ Why mental disorders are not like software bugs ” (forthcoming, Philosophy of Science ). What, if anything, is the difference between mental disorders and brain disorders? Are mental disorders brain disorders? If not, are they disorders at all? According to one prominent view in the philosophy of psychiatry, mental dysfunction does not entail brain dysfunction just as software dysfunction does not entail hardware dysfunction in a classical computer. Wakefield writes:  It is true that every software malfunction has some hardware description; that is not at issue. Rather, the point is that a software malfunction need not be a physical hardware malfunction. Analogously, even if all mental states are physical states, it does not follow that a mental dysfunction is a physical dysfunction. (p. 129, Wakefield, 2006 ; see also Papineau, 1994 ) Nevertheless, because dysf...

This post is by Awais Aftab (Department of Psychiatry, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, USA). In this blog post he introduces and summarizes the article “ Mental Disorder and Social Deviance ”, co-written with Mohammed Abouelleil Rashed (Philosophy, Birkbeck College), and published in International Review of Psychiatry . Aftab also leads the interview series ‘ Conversations in Critical Psychiatry ’ for Psychiatric Times which is likely to be of great interest to the readers of this blog. Awais Aftab   I have been fascinated by the problem of distinguishing between “mental disorder” and “social deviance” since the early days of my psychiatric training. My exposure to the antipsychiatry philosophical literature had left me with a lingering, nagging doubt that unless there was some valid way of making this distinction, the legitimacy of psychiatry as a profession would stand on precarious and perilous ground.   Social deviance refers to actions or behaviors that ...

This post is by  Eisuke Sakakibara , psychiatrist working at  The University of Tokyo Hospital . In this post he writes about his paper “ Intensity of experience: Maher’s schizophrenic delusion revisited ” recently published in Neuroethics. Delusion is one of the most frequently discussed themes in philosophy of psychiatry, and this is my second publication regarding delusions. In my first paper, entitled “ Irrationality and pathology of beliefs ,” I proposed that not all delusions are pathological, and some delusions are formed without any physical or mental dysfunction. In my second paper , I focused on delusions accompanied by schizophrenia. As for schizophrenic delusions, it is beyond question that they are the result of dysfunction of some kind. The problem, then, is what kind of dysfunction is relevant for the development of schizophrenic delusions. The theory of schizophrenic delusion has developed by the consecutive works made by Brendan Maher. He proposed ...

In this post, Anneli Jefferson , Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Birmingham summarizes her paper on the nature of brain disorder, recently published in Synthese. A long-standing project pursued by some psychiatrists is to show that mental disorders are brain disorders and that mental dysfunction can best be explained as brain dysfunction. But what exactly is the relationship between mental disorders and brain disorders and when is a mental disorder a brain disorder? This is the question I address in my paper. Some psychiatrists believe that it follows from the acceptance of physicalism that all mental disorders are brain disorders. If all mental states are brain states, shouldn’t all disordered mental states be disordered brain states? Many philosophers have resisted this conclusion, appealing to the hardware/software distinction to argue that even if dysfunctional mental processes are realised in the brain, this does not mean that the underlying brai...

Five years ago I started this blog with a post by Kengo Miyazono...  Happy birthday Imperfect Cognitions!  I am very grateful to all the people who have worked hard during this time to keep the blog active and engaging: Ema Sullivan-Bissett, Kathy Puddifoot, Andrea Polonioli, Sophie Stammers, Magdalena Antrobus, Valeria Motta, and Anneli Jefferson.  And special thanks to our regular contributors and assiduous readers. To the next five years! Lisa 💛 -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-  On the 5th birthday of the Imperfect Cognitions blog  Michael Larkin (Aston University)  considers some conceptual propositions of the Power Threat Meaning framework, arguing that the framework is both a step towards a more humanising concept of mental health problems, and a missed opportunity to be more inclusive. Enjoy this very rich and thought-provoking celebratory post! Often we are disappointed because we want the thing presented to us to be the thin...