How does the psychiatrist know?
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Keywords

diagnostic reasoning
phenomenological psychiatry
model-based reasoning
epistemology of psychiatry

How to Cite

How does the psychiatrist know?. (2023). Philosophy and the Mind Sciences, 4. https://doi.org/10.33735/phimisci.2023.9391

Abstract

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.

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Copyright (c) 2023 Adrian Kind