Abstract

Debates surrounding the nature of mental disorder have tended to divide into an objectivist camp that takes psychiatric classification to be a value-free scientific matter, and a normativist camp that takes it to be irreducibly values-based. Here we present an overlooked distinction between status and constitution. Questions of the form “What is x?” are ambiguous between status questions (“What gives something the status of an x?”), and constitution questions (“Given that something has the status of an x, what is it made of?”). We elucidate this distinction in detail, and argue that normativism is uniquely well-placed to answer status questions while objectivism provides answers, where they are available, to constitution questions.