Historical and Philosophical Considerations in Studying Psychopathology

Abstract In this chapter, the authors trace a tug of war between adopting more descriptive versus more conjectural approaches to the study of psychopathology from the seventeenth century onward. The contrast between descriptive versus conjectural is somewhat relative. Statements which rely on shared background assumptions tend to be viewed as descriptions, while those that do not are viewed as conjectural. Throughout the history of psychopathology attempts to offer causal explanations have relied on conjecture hoping to extend our knowledge, but when conjecture was seen as going too far, there were calls to return to descriptions, on which there is more consensus. Recently, the descriptive psychopathology paradigm that was introduced in the DSM-III has been challenged by renewed calls for explaining disorders with respect to etiology and pathogenesis. Turning to causal explanations, the authors contrast production versus regularity accounts of causality. Production accounts tend to favor reducing mind to brain, whereas regularity accounts do not place a priori restrictions on which levels of analysis have genuine casual power. The authors also look at a recently proposed nonreductive perspective in the philosophy of mind, the 4E framework, in which the mind is seen as embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended. The chapter closes by examining the contrast between scientific realism and scientific anti-realism in the study of psychopathology, emphasizing the common ground between scientific realism and factor analytic models and describing some alternative anti-realist views.