Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-hc48f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T17:00:55.348Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

44 - Entity Focus: Applied Genetic Science at Different Levels

from Section 15

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2020

By
Eric Turkheimer
Edited by
Kenneth S. Kendler ,
Josef Parnas  and
Peter Zachar
Kenneth S. Kendler
Affiliation:
Virginia Commonwealth University
Josef Parnas
Affiliation:
University of Copenhagen
Peter Zachar
Affiliation:
Auburn University, Montgomery
Get access

Summary

Psychopathologists have been arguing forever about whether psychiatric syndromes are some variety of “biological,” “genetic,” or “brain disorders.”This argument has been hobbled by the lack of a coherent theory of what it means for a complex behavioral entity to be biological, or what the alternative to being biological might be. In the absence of a well-articulated theory, there has been a tendency to assume that the question at issue is whether or not behavioral entities are correlated with chemical, neurological, or genetic variables; and since the answer to this question is always affirmative, the consensus has generally been to move psychiatric syndromes farther and farther down the hierarchy of the sciences. I make the case that questions of whether complex behavioral categories correlate with physical ones is misplaced. Instead, I suggest that questions about the proper location of entities involve determining the level at which the entity is most clearly defined; at other levels the entity is out of focus: detectible but blurry. Blurry entities are poor candidates for successful scientific analysis.

Keywords

Levels of AnalysisDiagnostic CategoriesReductionismHuntington's Disease
Type
Chapter
Information
Levels of Analysis in Psychopathology
Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives
 , pp. 521 - 544
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Boyle, E. A., Li, Y. I., & Pritchard, J. K. (2017) ‘An expanded view of complex traits: From polygenic to omnigenic.’ Cell, 169(7), 1177–1186.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Carnaby, G. A., & Wood, E. J. (1989) ‘The physics of carpets.’ Journal of the Textile Institute, 80(1), 71–90.Google Scholar
Chabris, C. F., Lee, J. J., Cesarini, D., Benjamin, D. J., & Laibson, D. I. (2015) ‘The fourth law of behavior genetics.’ Current Directions in Psychological Science, 24(4), 304–312.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Coan, J. A., Schaefer, H. S., & Davidson, R. J. (2006) ‘Lending a hand: Social regulation of the neural response to threat.’ Psychological Science, 17(12), 1032–1039.Google Scholar
Craver, C. F., & Bechtel, W. (2007) ‘Top-down causation without top-down causes.’ Biology & Philosophy, 22(4), 547–563.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Edwards, A. C., Bacanu, S. A., Bigdeli, T. B., Moscati, A., & Kendler, K. S. (2016) ‘Evaluating the dopamine hypothesis of schizophrenia in a large-scale genome-wide association study.’ Schizophrenia Research, 176(2–3), 136–140.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fraser, A. D. (1998). Use and abuse of the benzodiazepines. Therapeutic Drug Monitoring, 20(5), 481–489.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Goldstein, D. M., & Hall, K. (2015) ‘Mass hysteria in Le Roy, New York: How brain experts materialized truth and outscienced environmental inquiry.’ American Ethnologist, 42(4), 640–657.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Greenberg, A. S., & Bailey, J. M. (1994) ‘The irrelevance of the medical model of mental illness to law and ethics.’ International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, 17, 153–173.Google Scholar
Guze, S. B. (1989). Biological psychiatry: is there any other kind? Psychological medicine, 19(2), 315-323Google Scholar
Harré, R., Clarke, D., & De Carlo, N. (1975) Motives and mechanisms: An introduction to the psychology of action. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Huntington, G. (1872) ‘On chorea.’ The Medical and Surgical Reporter, 26(15), 317–321.Google Scholar
Insel, T., Cuthbert, B., Garvey, M., Heinssen, R., Pine, D. S., Quinn, K., … Wang, P. (2010) ‘Research domain criteria (RDoC): Toward a new classification framework for research on mental disorders.’ The American Journal of Psychiatry, 167(7), 748–751.Google Scholar
Insel, T. R., & Landis, S. C. (2013) ‘Twenty-five years of progress: The view from NIMH and NINDS.’ Neuron, 80(3), 561–567.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Insel, T. R. (2017) Star Neuroscientist Tom Insel Leaves the Google-Spawned Verily for … a Startup? Retrieved from https://goo.gl/JX2Qyf, March 28, 2019.Google Scholar
Jocklin, V., McGue, M., & Lykken, D. T. (1996) ‘Personality and divorce: A genetic analysis.’ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71(2), 288.Google Scholar
Meehl, P. E. (1995) ‘Bootstraps taxometrics: Solving the classification problem in psychopathology.’ American Psychologist, 50(4), 266.Google Scholar
Leshner, A. I. (1997) ‘Addiction is a brain disease, and it matters.’ Science, 278(5335), 45–47.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lipowski, Z. J. (1989) ‘Psychiatry: Mindless or brainless, both or neither?’ The Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, 34(3), 249–254.Google Scholar
Parnas, J. (2014) ‘The RDoC program: Psychiatry without psyche?’ World Psychiatry, 13(1), 46–47.Google Scholar
Plomin, R., & Kovas, Y. (2005) ‘Generalist genes and learning disabilities.’ Psychological Bulletin, 131(4), 592–617.Google Scholar
Rogers, A. (2017) ‘Star Neuroscientist Tom Insel Leaves the Google-Spawned Verily for … a Startup?.’ Wired. Retrieved from https://goo.gl/JX2Qyf, March 28, 2019.Google Scholar
Satel, S., & Lilienfeld, S. O. (2014) ‘Addiction and the brain-disease fallacy.’ Frontiers in Psychiatry, 4, 141.Google Scholar
Turkheimer, E. (1998) ‘Heritability and biological explanation.’ Psychological Review, 105(4), 782.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Turkheimer, E. (2017) ‘The hard question in psychiatric nosology.’ In Kendler, K. S. and Parnas, J. (Eds.), Philosophical issues in psychiatry IV: Classification of psychiatric illness (pp. 27–44). Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Turkheimer, E., Pettersson, E., & Horn, E. E. (2014) ‘A phenotypic null hypothesis for the genetics of personality.’ Annual Review of Psychology, 65, 515–540.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
van Haren, N. E. M., Cahn, W., Pol, H. H., & Kahn, R. S. (2008) ‘Schizophrenia as a progressive brain disease.’ European Psychiatry, 23(4), 245–254.Google Scholar
Visscher, P. M., Wray, N. R., Zhang, Q., Sklar, P., McCarthy, M. I., Brown, M. A., & Yang, J. (2017) ‘10 years of GWAS discovery: Biology, function, and translation.’ The American Journal of Human Genetics, 101(1), 5–22.Google Scholar
Walum, H., Westberg, L., Henningsson, S., Neiderhiser, J. M., Reiss, D., Igl, W., … Lichtenstein, P. (2008) ‘Genetic variation in the vasopressin receptor 1a gene (AVPR1A) associates with pair-bonding behavior in humans.’ Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(37), 14153–14156.Google Scholar
Weiss, V. (1992) ‘Major genes of general intelligence.’ Personality and Individual Differences, 13(10), 1115–1134.Google Scholar
Wimsatt, W. C. (2007) Re-engineering philosophy for limited beings: Piecewise approximations to reality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×