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The Regulative Dimension of Folk Psychology

Authors:
  • Princeton University & Australian National University
... This implies that their understanding of the situation they find themselves in -including the ways in which they respond emotionally to the situation at hand --is always at the same time an understanding of the social norms of their community. Seen in this light, our understanding of ourselves, others, and the world around us is the result of being initiated into a practice enabling us to navigate and feel at home in the normatively structured social world (McGeer 2007). ...
... They can only be meaningfully uttered within the shared framework of a common language and based on having acquired the skills of navigating the normatively shaped space of social interaction. This kind of picture has recently been articulated in the so-called mindshaping view of human social cognition (e.g., Mameli 2001;McGeer 2001McGeer , 2007McGeer , 2017McGeer , 2021Zawidzki 2013). McGeer (2021) paints this picture in the following way: "The central insight of the mindshaping view is that Draft version. ...
... According to a novel alternative to these orthodox approaches, the challenges of computational tractability and reliability can be addressed if we appreciate the "regulative" (McGeer, 2007(McGeer, , 2015 or "mindshaping" (Mameli, 2001;Zawidzki, 2008Zawidzki, , 2013 roles of mental state attribution. The idea is that, rather than aiming to accurately track independently constituted mental states, mental state (self-)attribution functions to constrain human psychologies, thereby making behavioral prediction and coordination more tractable. ...
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There is evidence that mental illness is partly socially constituted: diagnoses are historically “transient” (Hacking, Rewriting the soul: Multiple personality and the sciences of memory. Princeton University Press, 1998a; Mad travelers. University of Virginia, 1998b) and culturally variable (Toh, Nature Reviews Psychology, 1(2), 72–86, 2022). However, this view risks pernicious relativism. On most social constitution views, mental illness is what (some suitably expert part of) society takes it to be. But this has morally abhorrent implications, e.g., it legitimizes many spurious and harmful diagnoses (like “drapetomania”) and makes mental illness a matter of fashion rather than an objective challenge. This paper defends a conception of mental illness according to which it is partly socially constituted, yet which avoids such pernicious relativism: mental illness consists in an objective inability - a deficit in the skilled metacognitive self-regulation required to be rationally interpretable by one’s community, including oneself. Such reasons responsiveness requires skilled regulation of cognition, conation, and behavior, such that they respect relevant interpretive norms. Because such norms vary culturally, such skills are partly socially constituted.
... Currently, the idea that our behaviour is determined by hidden states, e.g., unconscious perceptions and memories (Godfrey-Smith, 2005), seems only common sense. These ideas are not only applied to understand the behaviour of others, but they also become norms for determining our behaviour (McGeer, 2007). As a result, even if these theories are wrong, their incorporation into common knowledge makes social interactions easier to negotiate. ...
... Mental pathology, understood literally, would thus be an absurdity. As he puts it: "Mind is not matter, hence mental illness is a figure of speech" (2008, III, paragraph 8); just like morality, aesthetics, humor, and other presumably non-descriptive realms of discourse, minds could only be "sick" in metaphorical terms (Szasz, 1961a, p. x). 5 In a similar vein, contemporary regulative views of mind have recently drawn from this Rylean and Wittgensteinian perspective to argue that folk-psychological interpretation is not primarily about mindreading (i.e., describing and causally explaining one another), but about mindshaping (i.e., reciprocally regulating our actions and reactions in norm-conforming ways) (Fernández Castro, 2020;Kalis & Ghijsen, 2022;McGeer, 2007;Zawidzki, 2008). 6 This analysis of Szasz as a non-descriptivist radically stands against his usual interpretation as a dualist about the mind-body relation (e.g., Chapman, 2023b). ...
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Critical psychiatry has recently echoed Szasz’s longstanding concerns about medical understandings of mental distress. According to Szaszianism, the analogy between mental and somatic disorders is illegitimate because the former presuppose psychosocial and ethical norms, whereas the latter merely involve deviations from natural ones. So-called “having-it-both-ways” views have contested that social norms and values play a role in both mental and somatic healthcare, thus rejecting that the influence of socio-normative considerations in mental healthcare compromises the analogy between mental and somatic disorders. This paper has two goals. Firstly, I argue that having-it-both-ways views fail to provide a compelling answer to Szasz’s challenge. The reason is that what is essential to Szasz’s argument is not that mental disorder attributions involve value judgements, but that mental attributions in general do. Mental disorders are thus doubly value-laden and, qua mental, only metaphorically possible. To illustrate this, I construe Szasz’s view and Fulford’s having-it-both-ways approach as endorsing two different kinds of expressivism about mental disorders, pointing out their different implications for the analysis of delusions. Secondly, I argue, against Szaszianism, that Szasz’s rejection of the analogy is relatively irrelevant for discussions about the appropriateness of medicalizing mental distress. Specifically, I draw from socio-normative approaches to the psychopathology/social deviance distinction and mad and neurodiversity literature to argue that a) it is still possible to distinguish social deviance from psychopathology once we reject the analogy; and b) that both medicalizing and normalizing attitudes to mental distress can harmfully wrong people from relevant collectives.
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En este artículo me propongo examinar algunos casos de reconocimiento de emociones que parecieran estar constreñidos por información cognitiva de algún tipo. Usualmente, se ha explicado al reconocimiento de emociones como una habilidad directa, no-inferencial, que descansa en la detección de un conjunto de información perceptiva de carácter multimodal. No obstante, existe evidencia empírica relativa al reconocimiento de emociones que no pareciera ser explicada fácilmente por los enfoques no-inferencialistas debido a que existe algún tipo de influencia top-down entre cierto tipo estados cognitivos y perceptuales que desafía el carácter directo o no inferencial de esta habilidad. Específicamente, la integración de esa información podría involucrar mecanismos inferenciales o cognitivamente más demandantes que los propuestos por las teorías de la percepción directa de emociones. Particularmente, me refiero a la evidencia de la influencia que poseen los sesgos cognitivos, prejuicios y otras creencias en el reconocimiento de emociones. Propondré que estos casos de reconocimiento de emociones si pueden explicarse por medio de enfoques no inferencialistas si se apela a fenómenos como el de la penetrabilidad cognitiva.
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The role of experience in the process of behavioral refinement has been undertheorized by philosophers of neuroscience and neuroscientists. By examining sleep studies in behavioral neurobiology, I show that scientists frequently invoke a variety of lived experiences—what I call experientially derived notions—to refine the behavior under investigation. Of note, these behaviors must remain sufficiently fuzzy throughout experimentation to permit refinement. The aim of this article is to recognize that neuroscientists’ use of lived experience necessarily helps refine behaviors and render those behavioral terms relevant to human life.
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This is a draft chapter for the forthcoming anthology, The Phenomenology of Broken Habits, edited by Line Ingerslev Ryberg and Karl Martens, Routledge. Please cite from the published version. Abstract One of the most insidious consequences of continuous exposure to gaslighting is that agents develop an expectation of further emotional manipulation. Repeated exposure to demeaning and humiliating behavior can make agents prone to interpret any epistemic challenge as a potential instance of gaslighting. Embedded in physiological and affective habits, this expectation become an integral way of interpreting social interactions and other people's intentions. The concept of gaslighting was originally coined to alleviate a form of hermeneutic injustice, but some applications of the concept paradoxically come to perpetuate exactly this kind of injustice. When agents perceive gaslighting in epistemically ambiguous situations, they foreclose the possibility of benefiting from productive forms of epistemic frictions.
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