Psychiatry in the Scientific Image by Dominic Murphy

Psychiatry in the Scientific Image by Dominic Murphy

An analysis of the understanding, classification, and explanation of mental disorders that proposes that psychiatry adopt the best practices of the cognitive sciences.In Psychiatry in the Scientific Image, Dominic Murphy looks at psychiatry from the viewpoint of analytic philosophy of science, considering three issues: how we should conceive of, classify, and explain mental illness. If someone is said to have a mental illness, what about it is mental? What makes it an illness? How might we explain and classify it? A system of psychiatric classification settles these questions by distinguishing the mental illnesses and showing how they stand in relation to one another. This book explores the philosophical issues raised by the project of explaining and classifying mental illness.Murphy argues that the current literature on mental illness--exemplified by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders--is an impediment to research; it lacks a coherent concept of the mental and a satisfactory account of disorder, and yields too much authority to commonsense thought about the mind. He argues that the explanation of mental illness should meet the standards of good explanatory practice in the cognitive neurosciences, and that the classification of mental disorders should group symptoms into conditions based on the causal structure of the normal mind.

Murphy, Dominic: - Dominic Murphy is Senior Lecturer in the Unit for History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780262517447
ISBN 10	0262517442
Title	Psychiatry in the Scientific Image
Author	Dominic Murphy
Series	Psychiatry In The Scientific Image
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	MIT Press Ltd
Year published	2012-01-13
Number of pages	422
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.