engleski

RDoC, reductionism and the pragmatics of psychiatric classification

Conceptualisations of mental disorders assign different roles to biological genetic or neural factors in the categorisation of these conditions. Syndrome based accounts, that inform many diagnoses in classificatory systems such as the DSM (American Psychiatric Association 2013) or the ICD (World Health Organization 1993), categorise mental disorders in terms of symptomatic behaviours and mental states and personality traits. In these accounts, thus, the identity of a certain mental disorder does not depend on its neural or other biological aetiology or correlates. Proposals for biological and neurocognitive (for short biocognitive) based classification of mental disorders aim, instead, at grounding the categorization of mental disorders on genetic, neurological, or neurocomputational mechanisms. The Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) is a notable example of this proposal (Insel et al. 2010 ; Insel and Cuthbert 2015 ; Lilienfeld 2014) However, there has been some opposition to biology-based classifications of psychiatric disorders. A significant instance of this resistance is in a recent BBS target paper (2018) by Denny Borsboom, Angélique Kramer and Annemarie Kalis, who argue that the RDoC type approaches are overly reductionist, empirically unsuccessful for advancing psychiatric practice, and theoretically unsound. In this paper, we want to highlight and criticise some of the misgivings that motivate such a resistance to biocognitive based classifications. We argue that most of these doubts derive from a misunderstanding of the commitments that guide the RDoC type approaches. The principal of these misunderstanding is that these approaches involve a reductionist programme. We argue, instead, that they do not invovle any kind of crude version of reductionism.

RDoC ; Reductionsm ; Classification of Mental Disorders

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