Jonathan Y. Tsou examines and defends positions on central issues in philosophy of psychiatry. The positions defended assume a naturalistic and realist perspective and are framed against skeptical perspectives on biological psychiatry. Issues addressed include the reality of mental disorders; mechanistic and disease explanations of abnormal behavior;
definitions of mental disorder; natural and artificial kinds in psychiatry; biological essentialism and the projectability of psychiatric categories; looping effects and the stability of mental disorders; psychiatric
classification; and the validity of the DSM's diagnostic categories. The main argument defended by Tsou is that genuine mental disorders are biological kinds with harmful effects. This argument opposes the dogma that mental disorders are necessarily diseases (or pathological
conditions) that result from biological dysfunction. Tsou contends that the broader ideal of biological kinds offers a more promising and empirically ascertainable naturalistic standard for assessing the reality of mental disorders and the validity of psychiatric categories.

Ontological Relativity and Other Essays

Philosophy of Psychiatry

Since 1980, property cycles have emerged emphatically as a phenomenon of urban development in both developed and developing countries. Among the many things which need to be explained is the continuing high levels of financial investment in property sectors, even well past the time when supply exceeds demand and vacancy rates continue to grow. Various intellectuals have put forward new theories and some situational explanations of the periodic over‐capitalisation in property. The economic adversities are not confined to the property and finance sectors. They extend into the socio‐economic performance of national economies, and in some cases they have international linkages and impacts. Gives exposition and evaluation relating to cyclicity in the USA, the UK, Japan, and some developing countries in Asia. The aim is mainly centred on explanation and theory, extending earlier published work in the authors’ research programmes in property cycles, urban development, and experience in both developing and developed countries. The economic, social, and political significance of property cycles is enormous.

Theory and explanation in international property cycles since 1980

This position paper advocates combining formal epistemology and the new paradigm psychology of reasoning in the studies of conditionals and reasoning with uncertainty. The new paradigm psychology of reasoning is characterized by the use of probability theory as a rationality framework instead of classical logic, used by more traditional approaches to the psychology of reasoning. This paper presents a new interdisciplinary research program which involves both formal and experimental work. To illustrate the program, the paper discusses recent work on the paradoxes of the material conditional, nonmonotonic reasoning, and Adams’ Thesis. It also identifies the issue of updating on conditionals as an area which seems to call for a combined formal and empirical approach.

Formal Epistemology and the New Paradigm Psychology of Reasoning

Abstract This multifaceted essay emerges from a host of sources within diverse academic settings. Its central thesis is guided by physicist John A. Wheeler's thoughts on the quantum enigma. Wheeler concludes, following Niels Bohr, that we are co-participants within the universal self-organizing process. This notion merges with concepts from Peirce's process philosophy, Eastern thought, issues of topology, and border theory in cultural studies and social science, while surrounding itself with such key terms as complementarity, interdependence, interrelatedness, vagueness, generality, incompleteness, inconsistency, and mestizaje. Ultimately, a sense of semiosic process pervades in light of combined homogenous and hetergenous tendencies.

Cultures, timespace, and the border of borders: Posing as a theory of semiosic processes

by James Brian Pitts This dissertation updates the debate over the nontriviality of general covariance for Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity (GTR) and considers particle physics in the debate over underdetermination and empirical equivalence. Both tasks are tied to the unexplored issue of artificial gauge freedom, a valuable form of descriptive redundancy. Whereas Einstein took general covariance to characterize GTR, Kretschmann thought it merely a formal feature that any theory could have. Anderson and Friedman analyzed substantive general covariance as the lack of absolute objects, fields the same in all models. Some extant counterexamples and a new one involving the electron spinor field are resolved. However, Geroch and Giulini diagnose an absolute object in GTR itself in the metric’s volume element. One might instead analyze substantive general covariance as formal general covariance achieved without hiding preferred coordinates as scalar “clock fields,” recalling Einstein’s early views. Theories with no metric or multiple metrics make the age of the universe meaningless or ambiguous, respectively, so the ancient and medieval debate over the eternity of the world should be recast. Particle physics provides case studies for empirical equivalence. Proca’s electromagnetism with some nonzero photon mass constitutes a family of rivals to James Brian Pitts Maxwell’s theory. Whereas any Proca theory can be distinguished empirically from Maxwell’s, the Proca family approaches Maxwell’s for small masses, yielding permanent underdetermination with only approximate empirical equivalence. The weak nuclear force also displays a smooth massless limit classically, but not after quantization, recalling the instability of empirical equivalence under change of auxiliary hypotheses. The standard electroweak theory apparently permits a photon mass term and hence underdetermination, but possible further unification might not. The question of underdetermination regarding massive gravity is unresolved. Physicists often reformulate a theory to install additional fields and new gauge symmetries preserving empirical content. Post-positivist philosophers might judge the result a distinct and inferior theory, but physicists consider it a perhaps superior formulation of the same theory. Evidently a step back from näıve realism towards mathematical-empirical equivalence is appropriate for physical ontology and theory individuation. Artificial gauge freedom licenses a generalized Kretschmann objection, but the clock field case suggests a resolution. For Dilkushi, more precious than jewels.

Ontological Relativity and Other Essays

Citations

Philosophy of Psychiatry

Theory and explanation in international property cycles since 1980

Formal Epistemology and the New Paradigm Psychology of Reasoning

Cultures, timespace, and the border of borders: Posing as a theory of semiosic processes

General Covariance, Artificial Gauge Freedom and Empirical Equivalence

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