The multi-level model of explanation and psychiatry

Whilst attempts to explain meaning in more basic terms remains the dominant research programme in philosophy and, there is another approach to locating meaning in nature, interpretivism, which combines two claims. First there are distinct and somewhat independent levels of description of mental and physical states. Thus, following Jaspers, whilst brain events are susceptible to scientific and lawlike explanation, mental events including the speech, action and experiences of whole people, are subject to understanding.

Second, understanding essentially involves fitting mental states into rational patterns. Having a mind implies that one’s speech and action is interpretable and that to be interpretable requires that one is largely rational. One issue, especially for psychiatry, is to fathom how these very different levels connect: the interface problem.

John Campbell has a radical criticism of the very idea multi-level model of explanation in psychiatry. He argues that this results from a pre-Humean assumption about the intelligibility of relations tracked in causal explanation. He criticises Christopher Frith’s assumptions about the explanation of thought insertion. Frith claims that whether or not there are inappropriate firings of dopamine neurons, that fact cannot be used to explain thought insertion as it sheds no light on why just that kind of symptom was produced. Frith assumes we need an account pitched at a particular level: that of a sub-personal but still cognitive model of mechanisms.

Campbell suggests that the assumption that there is a right level of explanation which clarifies things in the way Frith desires is the result of a pre-Humean view of causal explanation. Resisting the idea that the right kind of cause and effect have to be intelligibly, rather than merely brutely, related undercuts the motivation for the levels of explanation picture.

Just as we find it natural to expect there to be an intelligible mechanism underpinning material causal connections – even if this assumption lacks any genuine a priori justification – so Campbell also suggests that in the case of mental causation we expect there to be a rational connection between propositional attitudes. (The desire for nourishment combined with the belief that bread nourishes rationalises and thus causes a desire for bread.) The rational link between propositional attitudes is our paradigm of a mental causal mechanism. Again, however, whilst that idea is natural, it lacks a priori justification and should be resisted.

This session examines both Campbell’s argument against the multi-level model of explanation for psychiatry and its consequences for understanding Jaspers’ twin aims of understanding and explanation.

The sides for this session are here.

Previous session.

Further reading

Bortolotti, L. (2010) Delusions and Other Irrational Beliefs, Oxford: Oxford University Press. A substantial discussion of the state of the art in the analysis of delusion.

Campbell, J. (2008) ‘Causation in psychiatry’ in Kendler, K. S. and Parnas, J. (eds) Philosophical Issues in Psychiatry. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press

Campbell, J. (2009) ‘What does rationality have to do with psychological causation? Propositional attitudes as mechanisms and as control variables’ in Bortolotti, L. and Broome, M. (eds) Psychiatry as Cognitive Neuroscience. Oxford: Oxford University Press. A challenge to an intuitive view of the role of rationality in mental causation.

Murphy, D. (2008) ‘Levels of explanation in psychiatry’ in Kendler, K. S. and Parnas, J. (eds) Philosophical Issues in Psychiatry. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. A critique of a standard reading of Marr’s view to better fit psychiatry.

Thornton, T. (2010) ‘Psychiatric explanation and understanding’ European Journal of Analytic Philosophy 6: 95-111