From syndromes to symptoms: Advancing our understanding of mental disorders

<p>Traditionally, psychiatric syndromes have formed the primary target of explanation in psychopathology research. However, these syndromes have been significantly criticised for their conceptual weakness and lack of validity. Ultimately, this limits our ability to create valid explanations of these categories; if the target is invalid then our explanations will suffer as a consequence. Using depression as extended example, this doctoral thesis explores the theoretical and methodological challenges associated with classifying and explaining mental disorders, and develops an alternative explanatory approach and associated methodology for advancing our understanding of mental disorders – the Phenomena Detection Method (PDM; Clack & Ward, 2020; Ward & Clack, 2019). This theoretical thesis begins by evaluating the current approaches to defining, classifying, and explaining mental disorders like depression, and explores the methodological and theoretical challenges with building theories of them. Next, in moving forward, I argue that the explanatory target in psychopathology research should shift from arbitrary syndromes to the central symptoms and signs of mental disorders. By conceptualising the symptoms of a disorder as clinical phenomena, and by adopting epistemic model pluralism as an explanatory strategy, we can build multi-faceted explanations of the processes and factors that constitute a disorder’s core symptoms. This core theoretical and methodological work is then followed by the development of the PDM. Unique in the field of psychopathology, the PDM links different phases of the inquiry process to provide a methodology for conceptualising the symptoms of psychopathology and for constructing multi-level models of the pathological processes that comprise them. Next, I apply the PDM to the two core symptoms of depression – ¬anhedonia and depressed mood – as an illustrative example of the advantages of this approach. This includes providing a more secure relationship between the pathology of depression and its phenotypic presentation, as well as greater insight into the relationship between underlying biological and psychological processes, and behavioural dysfunction. Next, I evaluate the PDM in comparison to existing metatheoretical approaches in the field and make some suggestions for future development. Finally, I conclude with a summary of the main contributions of this thesis. Considering the issues with current diagnostic categories, simply continuing to build explanations of syndromes is not a fruitful way forward. Rather, the complexity of mental disorders suggests we need to represent their key psychopathological phenomena or symptoms at different levels or aspects using multiple models. This thesis provides the metatheoretical and methodological foundations for this to successfully occur.</p>

From syndromes to symptoms: Advancing our understanding of mental disorders

<p>Traditionally, psychiatric syndromes have formed the primary target of explanation in psychopathology research. However, these syndromes have been significantly criticised for their conceptual weakness and lack of validity. Ultimately, this limits our ability to create valid explanations of these categories; if the target is invalid then our explanations will suffer as a consequence. Using depression as extended example, this doctoral thesis explores the theoretical and methodological challenges associated with classifying and explaining mental disorders, and develops an alternative explanatory approach and associated methodology for advancing our understanding of mental disorders – the Phenomena Detection Method (PDM; Clack & Ward, 2020; Ward & Clack, 2019). This theoretical thesis begins by evaluating the current approaches to defining, classifying, and explaining mental disorders like depression, and explores the methodological and theoretical challenges with building theories of them. Next, in moving forward, I argue that the explanatory target in psychopathology research should shift from arbitrary syndromes to the central symptoms and signs of mental disorders. By conceptualising the symptoms of a disorder as clinical phenomena, and by adopting epistemic model pluralism as an explanatory strategy, we can build multi-faceted explanations of the processes and factors that constitute a disorder’s core symptoms. This core theoretical and methodological work is then followed by the development of the PDM. Unique in the field of psychopathology, the PDM links different phases of the inquiry process to provide a methodology for conceptualising the symptoms of psychopathology and for constructing multi-level models of the pathological processes that comprise them. Next, I apply the PDM to the two core symptoms of depression – ¬anhedonia and depressed mood – as an illustrative example of the advantages of this approach. This includes providing a more secure relationship between the pathology of depression and its phenotypic presentation, as well as greater insight into the relationship between underlying biological and psychological processes, and behavioural dysfunction. Next, I evaluate the PDM in comparison to existing metatheoretical approaches in the field and make some suggestions for future development. Finally, I conclude with a summary of the main contributions of this thesis. Considering the issues with current diagnostic categories, simply continuing to build explanations of syndromes is not a fruitful way forward. Rather, the complexity of mental disorders suggests we need to represent their key psychopathological phenomena or symptoms at different levels or aspects using multiple models. This thesis provides the metatheoretical and methodological foundations for this to successfully occur.</p>

Formal Principles: Some Replies to Critics

One of the main theses of principles theory is that the rational application of constitutional rights presupposes proportionality analysis and that proportionality analysis necessarily includes balancing. The objection of over-constitutionalization has been raised to this thesis. Principles theory has attempted to reply to this objection with a theory of discretion in which formal principles, in particular, the principle of democracy, play a pivotal role. The theory of formal principles, however, has led in recent decades to more questions than answers. With respect to constitutional rights, two models have been and remain in competition: the combination model and the separation model. The first model balances formal principles in combination with substantive principles, whereas the second model separates the balancing of formal principles from the balancing of substantive principles. It is argued in this chapter that both models are mistaken, and an epistemic model is proposed that finds expression in the epistemic variables of the Weight Formula.

Engels, humanism and revolutionary praxis: The centrality of the dynamic analysis of historical materialism and its inherent relation to overcoming capitalist alienation

At the end of the 19th century, a debate emerged among academics of historical materialism on the apparent divergence between Engels’ and Marx’s theoretical developments. During the 20th century, those who wanted to argue that there was a dichotomy between the two authors identified Engels as responsible for historical materialism’s crises. This paper aims to demonstrate that Engels, far from distancing himself from Marx’s central positions, contributed to the formation of historical materialism as a revolutionary praxis that seeks a more rational regulation of the human metabolism with nature through overcoming the alienating conditions of the capitalist system. For this reason, the paper analyses Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, one of Engels’ most controversial texts, and exposes the correlation with the historical development of the revolutionary praxis in the Engels’ and Marx’s work. The article will be drawing on Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez’s Philosophy of Praxis, understood as a ‘revolutionary’ activity, and his analysis of Marx’s and Engels’ work. It is argued that one of Engels’ primary purposes, in Ludwig Feuerbach, was to show the demystification process of the Hegelian dialectical method, resulting in the formation of historical materialism as a dynamic epistemic model, that seeks to transform social reality through revolutionary praxis. The Feuerbachian ontological categories and Feuerbach’s perception of nature were the objects of the same process of demystification and critique, resulting in the characterisation of the human being in Marxism as a generic, social and historical being. Finally, it is shown that Engels demonstrates the possibilities for transformation of the human subject; for that reason, Engels’ argument is associated with the revolutionary praxis.

Positivism, Post-positivism, and Social Science

This chapter highlights positivism and post-positivism in the social sciences. ‘Post-positivism’, much like ‘positivism’, is a notoriously imprecise term that nonetheless does significantly effective work in shaping academic controversies. Post-positivist approaches are loosely organized around a common rejection of the notion that the social sciences should take the natural sciences as their epistemic model. This rejection, which is a dissent from the naturalist position that all the sciences belong together and produce the same kind of knowledge in similar ways, often also includes a rejection of what are taken to be the central components of a natural-scientific approach: a dualist separation of knowing subjects from their objects of study, and a limitation of knowledge to the tangible and measurable. To get a handle on ‘post-positivism’, the chapter discusses these three rejections (naturalism, dualism, and empiricism) in turn.

Equilibrium in Generalized Stackelberg Game with Arbitrary Memory and Planning Horizon of Players

The paper investigates game-theoretical properties of a model of production dynamics on markets with wrong expectations of most producers about the existence of a market. It might be a market of electrocars, green energy space flights, paper books, theaters, oil energy, etc. The foundation of a game-theoretical model is a special method for the generating of an epistemic model from observations. The method is based on a generalization of a classic model from the theory of mind and an idea of an observation model is very similar to the model of moving average.We focused on periodic solutions and introduced a control model for them. The control problem in the model is an optimization problem for parameters of induced parametric equilibrium in the game. The influence of the initial conditions on the overall dynamics was modeled for some examples.

Mistrust and misinformation: A two-component, socio-epistemic model of belief in conspiracy theories

Although conspiracy theories are endorsed by about half the population and occasionally turn out to be true, they are more typically false beliefs that, by definition, have a paranoid theme. Consequently, psychological research to date has focused on determining whether there are traits that account for belief in conspiracy theories (BCT) within a deficit model. Alternatively, a two-component, socio-epistemic model of BCT is proposed that seeks to account for the ubiquity of conspiracy theories, their variance along a continuum, and the inconsistency of research findings likening them to psychopathology. Within this model, epistemic mistrust is the core component underlying conspiracist ideation that manifests as the rejection of authoritative information, focuses the specificity of conspiracy theory beliefs, and can sometimes be understood as a sociocultural response to breaches of trust, inequities of power, and existing racial prejudices. Once voices of authority are negated due to mistrust, the resulting epistemic vacuum can send individuals “down the rabbit hole” looking for answers where they are vulnerable to the biased processing of information and misinformation within an increasingly “post-truth” world. The two-component, socio-epistemic model of BCT argues for mitigation strategies that address both mistrust and misinformation processing, with interventions for individuals, institutions of authority, and society as a whole.