Abstract
The paper deals with the thorny problem of the validity of psychiatric diagnostic concepts which engages core-issues in the philosophy of science such as those of truth and explanation. After an initial explication of the main facets of this concept in psychiatric diagnostic classification, I develop an account of psychiatric diagnostic concepts as conceptual models with clinical-descriptive and non-clinical explanatory parts and show the differential role they play in the justification of diagnostic concept-validity in the rest of medicine. Moreover, I elaborate comparative empirical and theoretical validity-criteria of psychiatric diagnostic concepts in terms of their partial truth. My account relies on the notions of explanatory coherence and mechanistic explanation. Furthermore, I apply more extensively this account to the specific example of the diagnostic validity of acute psychotic disorders. I conclude that both descriptive and explanatory considerations are necessary for the assessment and improvement of diagnostic validity in psychiatry.
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Many thanks to Stathis Psillos and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments.
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Oulis, P. (2013). Explanatory Coherence, Partial Truth and Diagnostic Validity in Psychiatry. In: Karakostas, V., Dieks, D. (eds) EPSA11 Perspectives and Foundational Problems in Philosophy of Science. The European Philosophy of Science Association Proceedings, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01306-0_35
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01306-0_35
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