Chapter 4 INTELLIGENCE, REGRESSES, AND EMPIRICISM discusses the prospects for a view that reduces intelligence to skillfulness—the Skill View of Intelligence. Though the view comes with many perks, I argue that it does not fit well with an independently motivated empiricism and that, on these bases, we ought to reject it. Nonetheless, many of its perks can be retained on a weaker understanding of the relation between skill and intelligence, one on which intelligence is a bundle of capacities—to acquire, to maintain, to exercise a cluster of skills in a variety of domains (general intelligence) or in specific domains (domain-specific intelligence).

Chapter 5 assesses harms that people with mental illness experience that are related to how their self is constituted. These include harms of de-individuation and mis-identification, but also, as this chapter focuses on, harms of social exclusion and dehumanization that result from status loss and moral distancing. Dehumanization occurs through both being reduced to a stereotyped trait and being viewed as lesser compared to others. Having a sense of belonging and being accepted as an equal member of a moral/epistemic/social community are important parts of being viewed as and viewing oneself as a full human being; these are also critical for developing and exercising autonomous agency as well as for well-being and flourishing. People with mental illness are often excluded from these communities as a result of public stigma, diminishing their autonomy and well-being. This chapter shows how dehumanization, social exclusion, and belonging uncertainty threaten belongingness and autonomy.

Two main lines of argument have shaped the overall structure of the book.

According to the first, skills’ distinctive learnability, control, and flexibility accord them a central status in theory of intentional action, of intelligence, and of talents; such central status is evidence that skill is a natural kind. For social beings like us, skills’ distinctive flexibility makes for the possibility of cumulative culture, thereby accounting also for the collective dimension of our intelligence. All in all, skills afford us a unique perspective on both intelligence and intentional agency.

Chapter 1 examines what mental illness stigma is and analyzes the components of mental illness stigma to show how people with mental illness experience stigma in their daily lives. These components include labeling, stereotyping, prejudice, moral distancing, social exclusion, status loss, dehumanization, microaggressions, discrimination, and epistemic injustice. In each case, I use empirical evidence from the social psychology literature on stigma to show ways in which people with mental illness experience these forms of stigma. Next, I look at factors that affect the kind, degree, and scope of stigma associated with mental illness, including beliefs, political values, cultural values, socioeconomic status, education, and gender. Finally, I examine how many people experience compounding stigmas that come from multiple sources.

Chapter 6 examines what makes discrimination and microaggressions (as a form of discrimination) wrongful. Discrimination involves differential treatment where some people are treated in different, unequal, and worse ways compared to others, and where that differential treatment is based on possessing a socially undesirable trait that marks a person as bad and inferior. Discrimination is wrongful because it harms people in a variety of ways, impacting their circumstances, resources and opportunities, options, agency, autonomy, and well-being. It causes material disadvantage and distributive injustice that denies people access to resources and opportunities and prevents them from having the basic goods necessary to participation in society. It also demeans people and leads to unfair subordination, loss of deliberative freedom, and decreased autonomy. This chapter reviews the philosophical literature on discrimination to provide a pluralistic account of the many harms discrimination and microaggressions cause to people with mental illness, which altogether make discrimination wrongful.

Chapter 1 SKILLS proposes a regimentation of skill. It differentiates skills from habits, instincts, talents, virtues, and other sorts of capacities; it argues for the legitimacy of this regimentation by locating skills in the broader explanatory contexts, from action theory and history of philosophy, to biology, evolutionary psychology, as well as anthropology; and it argues that this way of demarcating skills captures the core subject of Ryle’s Chapter 2 “Knowing How and Knowing That” of The Concept of Mind. That of skills, it is suggested, is a natural kind of interest for the study of intelligence and action, and with a long pedigree, starting from Aristotle’s conception of technē.

Chapter 7 ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM ABOUT SKILLED ACTION AND ITS DISCONTENT raises two problems for anti-intellectualism about skilled action—the problem of creditability and the problem of innovation—and it defends intellectualism from some outstanding objections.

Chapter 8 THREE KINDS OF CONTROL AND THE MINDEDNESS OF SKILLED ACTION distinguishes between three kinds of behavioral control: strategic control, automatic control, and procedural control. The former corresponds to expert behavior; the second to habitual control; and the third is necessary for strategic control and agentive automatic control but can dissociate from them. I develop two positive arguments in favor of the intellectualist conception of strategic control.

Chapter 2 assesses what stereotypes are and explains what makes them both wrongful and harmful. The chapter begins by defining stereotypes, explaining their relationship to prejudice and implicit bias, and showing how they are maintained due to cognitive biases. I examine factors that go into making the judgments involved with stereotyping. Then I analyze what makes stereotypes wrongful, including their rigidity, their falsity, and the way they overgeneralize about a person’s experience so as to erase its nuance and complexity. I look at descriptive and normative components of stereotypes and show that negative stereotypes always make a normative judgment about the badness and inferiority of a person who fits the stereotype.

Chapter 4 shows how internalized stigma often results in adaptive preferences that harm a person. When people incorporate aspects of negative stereotypes into their identity, they sometimes develop adaptive preferences by internalizing harmful social norms and beliefs embedded within these stereotypes. I show how people with mental illness often develop goals and desires that are shaped by these beliefs and social norms, which limits what they believe they are capable of, thus reducing their options for action and truncating their agency and autonomy. While adapting desires to one’s circumstances can be positive, as in positive adaptation, it is negative when it is harmful to a person. The adaptive preferences that result from this can be seen as rationality deficits that are oppressive and nonautonomous and that damage well-being and flourishing.

The introduction motivates the book’s arguments by showing how mental illness stigma remains pervasive despite greater awareness of mental health issues and more resources directed at mental health treatment and destigmatization. The forms of mental illness stigma most commonly expressed are stigma against people with severe mental illness who are perceived as homeless, and internalized stigma that people with mental illness project onto themselves. Mental illness stigma arises as a reaction to the violation of social norms of what a human being should be in the Western world in the twenty-first century. I give an account of stigma as the devaluing and discrediting of a person based on possessing a social trait that is seen as violating social norms, constituting a relationship of power. Components of stigma include labeling, stereotyping, prejudice, moral distancing, social exclusion, status loss, dehumanization, microaggressions, discrimination, and epistemic injustice. The chapter ends with a description of the book’s scope, methodology, and chapter outline.

Chapter 9 PRACTICAL REPRESENTATION AND PROCEDURAL CONTROL goes on to outline a theory of practical representation that falls out from a more general taxonomy of mental representations. I outline a hierarchy of practical representations, from nonconceptual practical representation to schematic practical representation and to practical concepts; I discuss its psychological reality and put it to use in a theory of procedural control.