Abstract
The view that psychiatry should be elucidating the mechanisms behind mental phenomena is gaining momentum. This view, coupled with an intuition that such mechanisms must, by nature, be biological, has inspired the field to look to cognitive neuroscience for classification of mental illnesses. One example of this kind of reorientation can be seen in the recent introduction of the Research Domain Criteria project (RDoC) by the U.S National Institute of Mental Health. The RDoC project is an attempt to introduce a new classification system based on brain circuits. The central idea behind the project is that mental disorders can be understood in terms of brain disorders and I argue that the project embodies a reductionist approach. The problem with this kind of reductionism is that multilevel explanations citing mental and social factors as part of the causal structures underlying mental disorders are rejected as non-scientific, or accepted only as provisional “stand-ins” for explanations to be found at the biological level. However, it is precisely such multilevel explanations that are necessary for progress in this fundamentally interdisciplinary science. This paper analyses the reductive nature of the RDoC project and investigates the potential for an interventionist account of causation and mechanism to bridge the gap between mechanistic explanations and multilevel explanations of mental disorders.
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- 1.
I thank an anonymous referee for directing me towards Papineua’s argument.
- 2.
Woodward translates questions about causal relations between events or instances of properties into questions about relations between variables.
- 3.
A large part of the contemporary discussion of this issue has focused on the compatibility of a particular conception of mechanism, namely Craver’s account (Craver 2007) and interventionism (see for example Leuridan 2012). I will not enter into this detailed discussion here. For a detailed discussion see (Menzies 2012).
- 4.
This section relies heavily work done in connection with a collaborative conference paper developed with Lena Kästner and presented at the Philosophy of Science in Practice conference in Aarhus 2015.
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Andersen, L.M. (2017). Mechanisms and Reduction in Psychiatry. In: Massimi, M., Romeijn, JW., Schurz, G. (eds) EPSA15 Selected Papers. European Studies in Philosophy of Science, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53730-6_10
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