For the last 150 years, schizophrenia has been considered a brain disease leading to a cognitive impairment. A widespread representation of schizophrenia considers it a form of mental deficit. This chapter evaluates to what extent schizophrenia corresponds to a standard folk-psychological notion of disease (onset, pathological process, insight into illness, etc.). Parnas and Zandersen present examples of phenomenological characteristics of schizophrenia that question its status as a typical disease. Specifically, they portray the affliction of the subject (self-disorder), an affliction that prevents a full insight into illness. Self-disorders typically begin during childhood and adolescence, and dating the onset of schizophrenia becomes a conceptual rather than an empirical issue. Next, the authors discuss a characteristic configuration of psychosis, namely the phenomenon of “double bookkeeping” that implies a persistent parallel double orientation to both a social reality and a private psychotic world. Finally, they look at some characteristics of course and outcome that do not conform to a standard notion of disease. The authors conclude that to progress in our scientific research, psychiatry needs to refocus its interest on the issues of subjectivity and psychological processes involved in schizophrenia.

Part III concerns the quarrel between Curll and Pope, which went on for almost thirty years, and raises significant issues, not just as it affected their careers, but also as it inflects the history of the book. These matters include the situation of both authors and publishers after the Copyright Act; the nature of piracy; the habit of (in effect) self-publishing that Pope acquired; the implications of anonymity, on both sides of the fence; the relations between elite and popular culture; and the literary portrayal of booksellers. Chapter 8 focusses on anonymity in the presentation of Pope’s poems and Curll’s publications. A brief introductory segment describes the historical valency of anonymous writing. The subsequent discussion traces a development that James McLaverty has characterised as ‘the blurring of authorship’, and shows how this is played out in The Dunciad and Curll’s responses to the work. Attention is given to other items by Pope that appeared anonymously or pseudonymously, together with attacks by Curll that constitute a reply in kind.

This chapter discusses some widely used strategies (not just in psychiatry but elsewhere) for inferring causal relations, including randomized controlled trials and instrumental variables. The author emphasizes the advantages of these design-based strategies over more traditional strategies based on identifying and conditioning on possible confounders. However, these design-based strategies can come with costs, including failures of generalizability and interpretability, as well as inattention to patient heterogeneity. The role of such considerations as stability and specificity in controlling for possible confounders, as well as the benefits of triangulation strategies, is also emphasized.

Work on causation in psychopathology often emphasizes variation in the causes, but variation in what is to be explained further complicates matters. Focusing on the protean nature of psychopathology, this chapter explores different ways classificatory variation is generated. For example, choices about what features of disorders to foreground and background can produce variation. The chapter also examines, from the perspective of scientific conventionalism, how classificatory decisions made at choice points partly constitute what is classified, but not in the sense of making it up. In contrast to the view that conventions are neither true nor false and thus isolated from the domain of facts, the chapter argues that scientific conventions are implemented to promote the discovery of facts. Scientific conventions must also answer to conceptual and factual constraints. The chapter concludes by looking at how classificatory choices can produce different versions of a psychiatric, which may also result in variations in causal models across those versions. In agreement with the ideas articulated by Putnam, the chapter argues that we cannot divide the language of psychopathology into a part that describes disorders as they are in themselves and a part that contains our conceptual contributions to what we know about disorders.

Shaun Gallagher in his chapter argues that those who study psychopathology can adopt a level-free vocabulary without having to give up the explanatory virtues of levels of analysis thinking. In doing so, they can potentially make new contributions to our knowledge of psychopathology.

The topic under consideration is Curll’s deployment of imprints, among the most important tools of his trade. He found it acceptable on many occasions to follow the conventional forms, along the lines of ‘London: printed for E. Curll, at the Dial and Bible against St. Dunstan’s Church in Fleet-street.’ However, there are many exceptions. This chapter discusses variant forms described by David Foxon. It itemises some cases where the imprint is incomplete or unreliable. They include, for example, works which have the same text but different names on the title-page; those in which Curll’s name appears and disappears in succeeding editions); and instances where a trade publisher such as James Roberts is found in the imprint on certain occasions, but is absent in others. Ways are described to identify Curll’s hand when his name is omitted. Along with comparatively innocent subterfuges, we find elsewhere what can be described as ‘false and misleading imprints’, a subject pioneered by Michael Treadwell.

This chapter examines what is considered a fact in individual communications processed by the Human Rights Committee (HRC), recognized as the UN’s most authoritative human rights monitoring body. Despite its significance, little is known about the HRC’s handling of individual complaints against states that have signed the optional protocol. Through the case studies of Sanila-Aikio v. Finland (2018) and Näkkäläjärvi et al. v. Finland (2018), which address the inclusion of new voters on the Sámi Parliament’s electoral roll, the chapter scrutinizes the Committee’s evidentiary practices. Notably, the Finnish Supreme Administrative Court added ninety-three persons to the Sámi Parliament’s electoral roll, while an unreferenced study suggested over half a million could be eligible. The Committee included this study without verifying its reliability. The chapter explores how evidence is translated and distanced from Committee members, questioning how material veracity is determined. It concludes by reflecting on how the HRC’s evidentiary regime shapes and supports certain narratives while marginalizing others.

Psychopathology is the scientific exploration of abnormal mental states and behavior. The phenomena under consideration are first-person (i.e., lived) experiences and third-person clinical descriptions, which can be studied and explained in two different ways. On the one hand, descriptive psychopathology aims to capture these phenomena without any preconceived notions of cause or mechanism (Häfner, 2015). On the other hand, theoretical psychopathology explores the etiology of abnormal mental states, applying methods ranging from the social sciences to neurobiology and genetics (Schultze-Lutter et al., 2018). Here I will focus on the descriptive and theoretical psychopathology of panic disorder given that Russo and van Eck use it as the paradigmatic psychiatric illness in their chapter, “Charting the Explanatory Potential of Network Models in Psychopathology.”

This chapter describes ways in which Curll interacted with the book trade at large, and illustrates his methods as they relate to the common publishing practices then in operation. It is easier to spot the manner in which he differed from his colleagues than areas in which he resembled them. Under one crucial aspect, he never joined the mainstream: he was not a member of the Stationers’ Company, a fact whose implications underlie some of his publishing choices and his possible apprentices. In other respects, he went along with normal practices in the trade. Among other topics, attention is given to the scale of his output over time, pricing policies, his limited use of trade sales, his retail operations, some of his marketing strategies, and his legal problems, as compared with other booksellers. One section discusses his activities in co-publishing and his partnerships (longer or shorter) with figures such as Egbert Sanger, John Pemberton, and William Mears.

Psychiatry has a core goal of understanding the mechanisms that produce, underlie, and maintain psychiatric disorders. But what is a mechanism? And how should the answer to that question be justified? In this chapter Craver defends a practice-first direction of fit, which involves building a notion of “mechanism” for psychiatry by charitably reconstructing what the term appears to mean from the functions it serves for psychiatrists and researchers. Taking this approach, many philosophical objections to mechanism (i.e., that it is at odds with a process metaphysics and that it is committed to reductionist obsession with detail) turn out to be predicated on misunderstandings. Some directions for a future mechanistic philosophy of psychiatry are sketched out.

Can we use neuroimaging to study the causes of psychiatric disorders? If so, how does neuroimaging compare to other methods in psychiatric research that allow for strong causal inferences? Neuroimaging study designs have evolved from cross-sectional, providing only correlational evidence, to longitudinal and interventional, which have strengthened the inferences we can draw from brain images. In this chapter, Heckers shows that researchers are using neuroimaging tools to pursue three very different goals. The techniques are similar, but they aim for different – at times conflicting – inferences. The three types of psychiatric neuroimaging studies pursue distinct aspects of causality, with different levels of explanation and applications for clinical practice. Much of current psychiatric neuroimaging does not study the causes of psychiatric disorders. However, the inclusion of neuroimaging methods in intervention trials has the promise to reveal causal relationships in psychiatric disorders.