Monist Models of Mind and Biological Psychiatry

Abstract

Theories of psychiatry do not exist an intellectual vacuum. They must mesh at many points with other bodies of knowledge. Biological psychiatry tries to prove that mental disorder and brain disorder are one and the same thing. This has no rational basis in any accepted theory of mind. This article examines two other philosophical theories that biological psychiatrists might use as their rationale: Dennett’s functionalism and Searle’s natural biologism. However, these avowedly antidualist theories fail, as they secretly rely on irreducibly dualist notions to complete their explanatory accounts of mind. Biological psychiatry is thus an ideology, not a scientific theory.