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      Understanding as explaining: how motives can become causes

      Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
      Springer Science and Business Media LLC

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          Abstract

          The distinction of „understanding“ and „explaining“, formulated by Karl Jaspers in his „General Psychopathology“, has had a lasting effect on psychiatry. As a result, phenomenological, hermeneutic, or psychodynamic approaches have often been accorded only descriptive or epiphenomenal status, while the actual causes of mental illness have been sought in neurobiologically or genetically based explanations. In contrast, this paper defends the explanatory role of understanding and phenomenological approaches. To this end, two levels of explanation are distinguished and shown to be equally justified in principle, namely, motivational explanation at the macro-level and physical explanation at the micro-level. The actual causal role of motivational, i.e., understandable connections is then demonstrated by means of a conception of circular causality, which includes downward causality. Finally, the explanatory role of phenomenological analyses is also shown in psychotic disorders that refuse motivational understanding, using the example of schizophrenic delusion.

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          Most cited references45

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          The human amygdala and the induction and experience of fear.

          Although clinical observations suggest that humans with amygdala damage have abnormal fear reactions and a reduced experience of fear, these impressions have not been systematically investigated. To address this gap, we conducted a new study in a rare human patient, SM, who has focal bilateral amygdala lesions. To provoke fear in SM, we exposed her to live snakes and spiders, took her on a tour of a haunted house, and showed her emotionally evocative films. On no occasion did SM exhibit fear, and she never endorsed feeling more than minimal levels of fear. Likewise, across a large battery of self-report questionnaires, 3 months of real-life experience sampling, and a life history replete with traumatic events, SM repeatedly demonstrated an absence of overt fear manifestations and an overall impoverished experience of fear. Despite her lack of fear, SM is able to exhibit other basic emotions and experience the respective feelings. The findings support the conclusion that the human amygdala plays a pivotal role in triggering a state of fear and that the absence of such a state precludes the experience of fear itself. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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            Enactive intersubjectivity: Participatory sense-making and mutual incorporation

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              A theory of biological relativity: no privileged level of causation.

              Must higher level biological processes always be derivable from lower level data and mechanisms, as assumed by the idea that an organism is completely defined by its genome? Or are higher level properties necessarily also causes of lower level behaviour, involving actions and interactions both ways? This article uses modelling of the heart, and its experimental basis, to show that downward causation is necessary and that this form of causation can be represented as the influences of initial and boundary conditions on the solutions of the differential equations used to represent the lower level processes. These insights are then generalized. A priori, there is no privileged level of causation. The relations between this form of 'biological relativity' and forms of relativity in physics are discussed. Biological relativity can be seen as an extension of the relativity principle by avoiding the assumption that there is a privileged scale at which biological functions are determined.
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Journal
                Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
                Phenom Cogn Sci
                Springer Science and Business Media LLC
                1568-7759
                1572-8676
                June 30 2022
                Article
                10.1007/s11097-022-09839-1
                3ce13f31-5db6-46d0-8473-c18734385044
                © 2022

                https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

                https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

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