In this short comment on Dustin Stokes's Thinking and Perceiving, I attempt to clarify what is at stake in the debate between Fodorian modularists and Stokean anti-modularists.

The data-driven approach to psychiatric science leverages large volumes of patient data to construct machine learning models with the goal of optimizing clinical decision making. Advocates claim that this methodology is well-placed to deliver transformative improvements to psychiatric science. I argue that talk of a data-driven revolution in psychiatry is premature. Transformative improvements, cashed out in terms of better patient outcomes, cannot be achieved without addressing patient understanding. That is, how patients understand their own mental illnesses. I conceptualize understanding as (...) the possession of adaptive mental constructs through which experience is mediated. I suggest that this notion of understanding serves as a bottleneck which any prospective approach to psychiatry must address to be efficacious. Subsequently I argue that, though the data-driven approach is undoubtedly powerful, it does not have a straightforward means of unblocking the bottleneck of understanding. I suggest that the data-driven approach must be supplemented with significant theoretical progress if it is to transform psychiatry. (shrink)

What is it to have a mental disorder? The paper proposes an ability-based view of mental disorder. It argues that such a view is preferable to biological dysfunction views such as Wakefield’s Harmful Dysfunction Analysis and Boorse’s Biostatistical Theory. According to the proposed view, having a mental disorder is basically a matter of having a certain type of inability (or: an ability that is not sufficiently high): the inability to respond adequately to some of one’s available reasons in some of (...) one’s reasons-sensitive attitudes or actions, where the threshold of inability is determined by one’s being harmed. The relevant concepts of inability, reasons, and harm are sketched. The paper argues that the proposed view evades some problems of biological dysfunction views by remaining neutral on questions of causation and the evolution of the mind. Furthermore, it can capture better what is distinctively “mental” about mental disorder. On the proposed view, it is the rational relations among an individual’s attitudes and actions that are “disordered” and the relevant norms in mental disorder are the norms of reasons. As further merits, the view can account for degrees of disorder, incorporate biological as well as social aspects, and elucidate the relations among disorders, symptoms, and their causes. (shrink)

In Thinking and Perceiving, Stokes challenges “the pernicious cognitive effects assumption”: the assumption that it would be epistemically problematic if our thoughts were to directly influence our perceptual experience. In doing so, Stokes takes himself to be supplementing the epistemological claims of philosophers like Siegel and Lyons with descriptive claims about human psychology. I argue that his conclusions are more radical than they first appear, to the extent that Stokes’s project is at odds with the standard epistemological discussions of cognitive (...) penetration. (shrink)

Whether animals fare well or not is of ethical significance. For this reason, their capacity for wellbeing, i.e., how good or bad the lives of animals can go, is of ethical significance as well. I assume that the wellbeing of most animals is mainly determined by their phenomenally conscious experiences. If consciousness differences between species determine wellbeing differences, then the kinds of conscious experience species are capable of may entail that some species systematically (can) have higher or lower wellbeing than (...) others. Then, I argue that not all phenomenally conscious states contribute to wellbeing equally. I discuss which features of consciousness are constituents of wellbeing and which can, for ethical purposes, be ignored. In addition, I scrutinize how much different features of experience contribute to wellbeing and how their presence can be detected empirically. This way, this paper exemplifies a novel consciousness-centered approach for the empirical investigation of animal wellbeing. The strengths and weaknesses of this approach are analyzed. While subsequent research is needed to refine the framework, I already note some preliminary implications for animal ethics. (shrink)

This symposium focuses on Thinking and Perceiving by Dustin Stokes (2021), published by Routledge. In his précis, Stokes (2023a) provides an overview of the key arguments of his book, which lead to a new descriptive and normative account of the relationship between cognition and perception. Four commentaries examine the scope and implications of this account. Zoe Drayson (2023) and Christopher Mole (2023) examine the epistemological force of Stokes’s claims about the organisation of the human mind. Furthermore, the implications of philosophical (...) and empirical research on object recognition are discussed by Aleksandra Mroczko-Wasowicz (2023) and on perceptual learning by Zed Adams (2023). The symposium concludes with a reply by Stokes to these commentaries (Stokes, 2023b). (shrink)

Some philosophers search for the mark of the cognitive: a set of individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions identifying all instances of cognition. They claim that the mark of the cognitive is needed to steer the development of cognitive science on the right path. Here, I argue that, at least at present, it cannot be provided. First (§2), I identify some of the factors motivating the search for a mark of the cognitive, each yielding a desideratum the mark is supposed (...) to satisfy (§2.1). I then (§2.2) highlight a number of tensions in the literature on the mark of the cognitive, suggesting they’re best resolved by distinguishing two distinct programs. The first program (§3) is that of identifying a mark of the cognitive capturing our everyday notion of cognition. I argue that such a program is bound to fail for a number of reasons: it is not clear whether such an everyday notion exists; and even if it existed, it would not be able to spell out individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for cognition; and even if it were able to spell them out, these conditions won’t satisfy the desiderata a mark of the cognitive should satisfy. The second program is that of identifying a mark of the cognitive spelling out a genuine scientific kind. But the current state of fragmentation of cognitive science, and the fact that it is splintered in a myriad of different research traditions, prevent us from identifying such a kind. And we have no reason to think that these various research traditions will converge, allowing us to identify a single mark. Or so, at least, I will argue in (§4). I then conclude the paper (§5) deflecting an intuitive objection, and exploring some of the consequences of the thesis I have defended. (shrink)

The background for this special issue is the multidisciplinary workshop "Minds, Models and Mechanisms: Current Trends in Philosophy of Psychiatry" which was held at Saarland University in April 2021. Though we had to switch to an online format due to the pandemic, the discussions at the event have been extremely inspiring. It brought together experts from diverse disciplines, like clinical psychiatry, neuroscience, computational modelling, philosophy of mind and cognition, and philosophy of science. Joining forces, researchers from these disciplines presented their (...) ideas on the subject. In the aftermath of the workshop, the organizers issued an open call for contributions. After a rigorous review process five papers made it into the final issue, each making an original contribution to the field. (shrink)

An important question in the philosophy of psychiatry is: what is the proper method of psychiatric diagnostic reasoning? Let us call this the Methodological Question. In this paper, I criticize the answer that proponents of phenomenological psychiatry have given to this question and present an alternative. I argue that their answer fails to meet several adequacy conditions for a theory of psychiatric diagnostic reasoning. I then show how my own answer to the Methodological Question – the Model-Based Account of diagnostic (...) reasoning – meets these adequacy conditions. I conclude that the Model-Based Account of diagnostic reasoning is preferable to the Phenomenological Account. (shrink)

This paper presents a naturalist skill-based alternative to traditional function-based naturalist theories of mental health and disorder. According to the novel skill view outlined here, mental health is a skilled action of individuals, rather than a question of the functioning of mental mechanisms. Mental disorder is the failure or breakdown of this skill. This skill view of mental health is motivated by focusing on the process of mental healing. This paper argues that, when we start with a focus on how (...) and why individuals heal from mental disorders, we gain a better understanding of what mental health is: the exercise of self-regulatory metacognitive skill. (shrink)

The structural representation (S-representation) account provides an increasingly popular way of understanding the role and value of representation in cognitive science. Yet critics remain unconvinced that the account has the resources to rescue representationalism. This paper reviews problems faced by the S-representation account. In doing so, it offers a novel taxonomy that divides objections into two broad camps that ought to be disambiguated: ‘conceptual’ and ‘empirical’. It further shows how these objections can be met, bolstering existing responses in the literature (...) with novel solutions, thus strengthening the S-representation account. Finally, this paper suggests that the types of objections identified provide a generalisable taxonomy for a better understanding of any version of anti-representationalism. Thus, this review is of value to the representation debate more broadly. (shrink)

Concept eliminativists argue that we should eliminate the term ‘concept’ from our vocabulary in psychology because there is no single natural kind that is picked out by it. I argue that the most developed version of concept eliminativism by Edouard Machery depends on the assumption that concepts are defined as stable and context-independent bodies of information. It is this assumption that leads Machery to eliminativism and it is an assumption we have reason to reject. Another assumption that leads to the (...) eliminativist conclusion and that we have reason to reject is that the type of content represented in long-term memory is the relevant property based on which we should individuate certain natural kinds in cognitive psychology. Finally, I argue that certain pieces of information are functionally integrated enough to meet the conditions for being a natural kind. (shrink)

The position that Stokes’s Thinking and Perceiving aims to overthrow is committed to the idea that the facts about one’s propositional attitudes and the facts about one’s perceptual experiences are alike grounded in facts about representations (in various formats) that are being held in a short or long term memory store, so that computations can be performed upon them. Claims about modularity are claims about the distinctness of these memory stores, and of these representations. One way in which to reject (...) these claims is to deny only that distinctness. A more radical way would be to reject the underlying idea that facts about perception and facts about propositional attitudes are alike grounded in facts about stored representations. Although the more radical approach might seem to face a problem concerning causal efficacy, I suggest that the way is open for Stokes to take it. (shrink)

Dustin Stokes’s book contributes to one of the continuing debates in empirically informed philosophy of mind and cognitive sciences which concerns the relation between thought and perception. The book sheds new light on such questions as: whether vision is modular, informationally encapsulated, and thus cognitively impenetrable or rather the opposite – whether it is malleable and sensitive to further improvements by cognitive states. Stokes supports the latter by referring to empirical evidence on perceptual expertise. Proponents of the modular and malleable (...) architectures of the mind offer different explanations of the phenomena involved in perceptual expertise, viz. object identification and categorization. Interestingly, both views assume some kind of automaticity of the recognitional capacities for identifying and categorizing objects. In this article, I examine the influence of perceptual expertise on object recognition and how the seeming automaticity of object recognition may be approached from the modularist and antimodularist (malleabilist) perspectives. (shrink)

The increasing integration of Machine Learning (ML) techniques into clinical care, driven in particular by Deep Learning (DL) using Artificial Neural Nets (ANNs), promises to reshape medical practice on various levels and across multiple medical fields. Much recent literature examines the ethical consequences of employing ML within medical and psychiatric practice but the potential impact on psychiatric diagnostic systems has so far not been well-developed. In this article, we aim to explore the challenges that arise from the recent use of (...) ANNs for the old problems of psychiatric nosology. To enable an empirically supported critical reflection on the topic, we conducted semi-structured qualitative interviews with Swiss and German experts in computational psychiatry. Here, we report our findings structured around two themes, namely (1) the possibility of using ML for defining or refining of psychiatric classification, and (2) the desirability of employing ML for psychiatric nosology. We discuss these themes by relating them to recent debates about network theory for psychiatric nosology and show why empirical research in the field should critically reflect on its contribution to psychopathology research. In sum, we argue that beyond technical, regulatory, and ethical challenges, philosophical reflection is crucial to harness the potential of ML in psychiatry. (shrink)

The unifying theme across all four commentaries is the question: just how radical are the ideas contained in, and implied by, Thinking and Perceiving? Does the abandonment of the modularity of mind, and an embrace of the malleability of mind, have wide reaching consequences for empirical studies of sensory perception, for cognitive architecture, for the metaphysics of mind and the epistemology of perception? And which of those consequences are welcomed, and which of those are problematic? These general questions anchor in (...) (at least) the following topics: learning and the role of cognition, object recognition, perceptual expertise, early versus late vision, perception and truth, virtue epistemology, and computational architectures of mind. This reply attempts to address the overarching question from this variety of angles taken in the four commentaries. (shrink)

In popular imagination creativity requires us to surrender control. Yet, attention is at the heart of control, and many studies show attention to play a key role in the creative process. This is partly due to the selective nature of attention—creative cognition consists of two phases, idea generation and idea evaluation, and selective processes are essential for both phases. Here, we investigate attentional (i.e., selective) mechanisms underlying each phase, using the framework of two major attention taxonomies: top-down/bottom-up and internal/external attention. (...) We argue that creative cognition is supported by a dynamic interplay between the typically opposing sides of each taxonomy. Further, we argue that this dynamic relationship is reflected in interactions across three large-scale brain networks: the default mode (DMN), frontoparietal control (FPN), and salience (SN) networks. Our review of the evidence suggests that creative cognition is best achieved through the flexible use of multiple forms of attention, rather than through reduced attention. We thus propose a two-dimensional space, including one dimension for top-down/bottom-up and another for internal/external attention, which can sufficiently capture the flexibility and diversity of attentional mechanisms underlying different stages and components of creative cognition. (shrink)

In recent decades, affective scientists have begun using concepts and tools from dynamical systems theory (DST) to characterise emotional processes. This article considers how the concept of emergence might be used to develop this approach. Emotions are explicated as ‘emergent products’ that diachronically constrain the operations of their parts in virtue of feedback loops (a classical feature of nonlinear dynamical systems). The explication is shown to be broadly consistent with what is sometimes called ‘pattern’ emergence. Casting emotions as emergent patterns (...) is shown to shed light on a major conceptual and empirical challenge emotion theorists have faced over the past century: identifying and measuring the presence of emotional episodes (Lindquist et al., 2012; Hollenstein & Lanteigne, 2014), dubbed here the ‘boundary problem’ (following Colombetti, 2014). In particular, the explication suggests seeing the emotional ‘signatures’ thought to accompany emotional episodes as fragile and context-bound: likely to hold under a relevant class of interventions (Woodward, 2005), but not without exception beyond that class. This in turn may suggest a need to significantly revise the statistical methods currently used to measure the presence of emotional ‘signatures’. The casting of emotions as emergent patterns also functions as a further case study supporting the value of ‘pattern emergence’ (Winning & Bechtel, 2019) as a powerful vehicle for characterising the objects of investigation — compound and context-sensitive — ubiquitous in the biological sciences. (shrink)

Thinking and Perceiving defends the claim that thought not only affects perceiving, thought improves perceiving. It thus defends a malleable architecture of the mind, opposite strong modularist views that claim that perception is informationally encapsulated and thus cognitively impenetrable. The argument for this view centers around cases of perceptual expertise. Experts in a wide variety of domains—radiology, birdwatching, elite athletics, fingerprint examination—have been empirically studied using behavioral, neural-physiological, and computational methods. This convergence of evidence is best explained in terms of (...) cognitively sensitive perceptual improvements. And these improvements amount to epistemic virtue, where the virtue is partly resident in perception and credited to the perceiving agent. The view has far-reaching implications for a wide range of issues, including the epistemology of perception, the contents of perception, theory-ladenness in science and social perception, understanding and self-understanding, and aesthetic taste. (shrink)