Draft abstract for Amsterdam workshop this month
Title: Anti-reductionist normativism: a price worth paying.
Key words: Causal explanation, intelligibility, normativity
and reductionism
Abstract: There is momentum in the philosophy of psychiatry
away from a picture of reductionism based on a well ordered hierarchy of levels
of explanation and towards either cross level interaction or scepticism about
the very idea of levels of explanation. This is a move towards explanatory
pluralism and pragmatism and away from a metaphysical picture that can seem to
be the unjustified imposition a priori claims about how the world must be. In
this presentation, however, I will argue that the resultant austere picture
carries two significant costs. First, it undermines our right to characterise
states as mental states. That is, it shed no light on the intelligibility of
states as mental. Second, it undermines our grasp of the pathological status of
the conditions that form of the subject matter of psychiatry. Normativism
offers a distinct, full blooded contrast to a reductionism of levels. Whilst it
faces significant challenges, it promises to address these potential gaps in
the intelligibility of the subjects of psychiatry and is thus a price worth
paying.
