Schwarz, Sera (2024) Problems and Prescriptions in Psychiatric Explanation. [Preprint]

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Abstract

A growing body of research suggests that different kinds of explanations of mental illness can have striking effects on their audiences’ attitudes and inferences. But it is surprisingly difficult to account for why this is. In this paper, I present a “normative model” of explanatory framing effects, which I claim does a better job of capturing the empirical data than do models that foreground changing causal or metaphysical judgments. On the normative model, different explanations will tend to differently affect their audience’s reasoning because each encodes a different picture of the kind of problem represented by the explanandum, and therefore the kinds of responses to it that are normatively apt to pursue. For example, a biological explanation of depression will convey to its audience that depression is a specifically biological problem, and therefore that appropriate responses to it should be directed at biological facts and norms. The communication of this normative information is, I argue, importantly different from communicating that depression has biological causes . For example, we can often combine different causal explanations, but it’s not clear that we can combine different characterizations of a problem. This might explain why philosophers and clinical experts sometimes seem to regard different explanations of mental illness as competing or mutually incompatible, despite their appreciation for the causal complexity of these conditions.

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Item Type:	Preprint
Creators:	Creators Email ORCID Schwarz, Sera 0009-0000-9135-7758
Keywords:	psychiatry, explanation, causation, norms
Subjects:	General Issues > Causation General Issues > Ethical Issues General Issues > Explanation Specific Sciences > Psychology > Judgment and Decision Making Specific Sciences > Medicine Specific Sciences > Medicine > Psychiatry Specific Sciences > Psychology General Issues > Values In Science
Depositing User:	Sera Schwarz
Date Deposited:	14 Jan 2025 13:51
Last Modified:	14 Jan 2025 13:51
Item ID:	24556
Subjects:	General Issues > Causation General Issues > Ethical Issues General Issues > Explanation Specific Sciences > Psychology > Judgment and Decision Making Specific Sciences > Medicine Specific Sciences > Medicine > Psychiatry Specific Sciences > Psychology General Issues > Values In Science
Date:	November 2024
URI:	https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/24556

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