Why we should he realists about psychiatric disorders-reply to Peter Zachar

摘要

36.1 Epistemic modesty is not a reason to reject realism: Resistance to realism about psychiatric disorders is, I think, generated mainly by a reasonable epistemic modesty about how far we can claim to have reached definitive conclusions about the right ways to carve up the disorders. But the resistance is, I argue, a mistake. We ought to keep the epistemic modesty while insisting that a principal aim of psychiatry is to find the correct ways to carve up disorders, realistically understood.