Anorexia Nervosa as Irreducibly Normative: A Dilemma Posed for Dominic Murphy’s Two- Stage Picture of Psychiatry
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Psychiatry in the Scientific Image, philosopher Dominic Murphy proposes a two-stage picture of psychiatry with mental disorders conceptualized as an underlying malfunction of a cognitive mechanism, followed by a judgement of the harmful effects this malfunction can have. Murphy himself raises a dilemma to this mechanistic reductionism, in that there are several mental disorders which seem to be irreducibly normative, and that the disorders must make normative assumptions of rationality in order to be fully understood. In this paper, I take up this obstacle to the two-stage picture by arguing that the three key aspects of anorexia nervosa — its triggers, aims, and the sustaining behaviors — render it irreducibly normative under Murphy’s model. I contend that the first two components of triggers and aims cannot be reduced down to a psychological malfunction of rationality in light of evidence that their causal phenomenology is largely culturally-based and deemed rationally oriented towards human flourishing. I then analyze potential underlying biological and physiological factors of the disorder’s self-starvation behaviors to assess whether this is enough to reduce anorexia down to a mechanistic explanation. I conclude that normativity needs to be assessed for a complete conception of the disorder, such that it cannot be reduced down to a non-normative malfunctioning mechanism of rationality.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.045 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".