What is a mental disorder? My project aims to answer this basic question of the philosophy of psychiatry. Crucial to answering it is observing that there are actually two related questions. On the one hand, there is the conceptual question of when a person is mentally disordered. On the other hand, there is the classification question of what constitutes types of mental disorders. This distinction allows me to reject naturalistic answers to the conceptual question without denying their relevance to the classification question.
This research is carried out as part of the project “Complex Biological Dispositions: A Case Study in the Metaphysics of Biological Practice” (2020-2023) and is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). It is a subproject in the research group “Inductive Metaphysics” (FOR 2495).
Perceptual representations are either correct or incorrect. Their correctness depends on their content and on the way the world is. Teleosemantics delivers compelling explanations of why our perceptual representations have contents, whereby it assigns the notion of "function" a central explanatory role.
In my thesis, I searched for a theory of function suited for this purpose. After a detailed evaluation of the selected effects theory and dispositional theories, I argue that synthesis is best suited to be used by teleosemantics.
This research was carried out as part of the DFG-project "Advancing Teleosemantics".
14. September 2022 Multi-track pluralism at the GAP.11 - Philosophie und Öffentlichkeit, Berlin
8. September 2022 Dysfunctions, Dispositions, Defects and Disorders at the ThUMB 2022 Meeting on Functions in Biology and the Biomedical Sciences, Rijeka (Croatia)
3. June 2022 Causal bases in the life sciences together with Javier Suárez at Dispositions in the Life-Sciences: Contemporary and Historical Perspectives, Trier
13. September 2021 What are causal bases of dispositions? together with María Ferreira Ruiz at the Microworkshop Dispositions and the life-sciences, Bielefeld
"The Future of Teleosemantics", Universität Bielefeld, 6.-8. September 2018
"Teleosemantics and the Nature of Functions ", Universität Bielefeld, 7.-8. September 2017
"Teleosemantic Perspectives on Perception", Universität Bielefeld, 7.-8. Oktober 2016
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