Psychology and Psychiatry

Charlie Kurth (Western Michigan University)
According to psychological constructivism, emotions result from projecting folk emotion concepts onto felt affective episodes (e.g., Barrett 2017, LeDoux 2015, Russell 2004). Moreover, while constructivists acknowledge there's a biological dimension to emotion, they deny that emotions are (or involve) affect programs. So they also deny that emotions are natural kinds. However, the essential role constructivism gives to felt experience and folk concepts leads to an account that's extensionally inadequate and functionally inaccurate. Moreover, biologically-oriented proposals that reject these commitments are not similarly encumbered. Recognizing this has two implications: biological mechanisms are more central to emotion than constructivism allows, and the conclusion that emotions aren't natural kinds is premature.

Caroline Stone (Washington University, St. Louis)
Psychologists say a measure has construct validity when it, in fact, measures the construct it is intended to measure (3). Construct validity is both an important notion in psychological research methods, and the source of much confusion and debate among psychologists (12). I argue that this confusion arises, in part, due to a failure to distinguish between construct validity, a feature of measures relative to a construct, and construct legitimacy, a feature of the construct itself. I propose a prescriptive account of construct validity based on this distinction, then provide evidence for my account through two examples from research psychology.

Matteo Colombo (Tilburg University)
An adequate explication of miscomputation should do justice to the practices involved in the computational sciences. Unfortunately, relevant practices outside computer science have so far been overlooked. In this paper, I begin to fill this gap by distinguishing different notions of miscomputation in computational psychiatry. I argue that a satisfactory explication of miscomputation in computational psychiatry should involve a semantically laden characterisation of a computational system's interaction with its environment. Because the mechanistic account of physical computation does not appeal to semantics, it cannot explicate a notion of miscomputation central to computational psychiatric practice.

Lena Kästner (Ruhr-University Bochum)
Explanations in psychiatry often integrate various factors relevant to psychopathology. Identifying genuine causes among them is theoretically and clinically important, but epistemically challenging. Woodward’s interventionism appears to provide a promising tool to achieve this. However, Woodward’s interventionism is too demanding to be applied to psychiatry. I thus introduce difference-making interventionism (DMI), which detects relevance in general rather than causation, to make interventionist reasoning viable in clinical practice. DMI mirrors the empirical reality of psychiatry even more closely than interventionism, but it needs to be supplied with additional heuristics to disambiguate between causes and other difference-makers. To achieve this, I suggest employing heuristics based on multiple experiments, temporal order and scientific domain.
 

Markus Eronen (University of Groningen)
In this paper, I will argue that interventionist causal discovery faces great obstacles in psychology, due to the special subject matter of psychology (i.e., human individuals and their minds/brains). First, psychological interventions are likely to be both fat-handed and soft, and there are currently no conceptual tools for making causal inferences based on such interventions. Second, causal control in psychology seems to be realistically possible only at the group level, but group-level findings do not allow inferences to individual-level causal relationships. Finally, I consider the implications these have for the debate on mental causation and for psychological research.