Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-q99xh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-31T17:33:31.909Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Reductionism in retreat

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 March 2019

Denny Borsboom ,
Angélique O. J. Cramer Open the ORCID record for Angélique O. J. Cramer [Opens in a new window]  and
Annemarie Kalis Open the ORCID record for Annemarie Kalis [Opens in a new window]
Denny Borsboom
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, University of Amsterdam, 1018 WT Amsterdam, The Netherlands. [email protected]://www.dennyborsboom.com
Angélique O. J. Cramer
Affiliation:
Department of Methodology and Statistics, Tilburg University, 5000 LE Tilburg, The Netherlands. [email protected]://www.aojcramer.com
Annemarie Kalis
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Utrecht University, 3512 BL Utrecht, The Netherlands. [email protected]://www.uu.nl/staff/AKalis
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

We address the commentaries on our target article in terms of four major themes. First, we note that virtually all commentators agree that mental disorders are not brain disorders in the common interpretation of these terms, and establish the consensus that explanatory reductionism is not a viable thesis. Second, we address criticisms to the effect that our article was misdirected or aimed at a straw man; we argue that this is unlikely, given the widespread communication of reductionist slogans in psychopathology research and society. Third, we tackle the question of whether intentionality, extended systems, and multiple realizability are as problematic as claimed in the target article, and we present a number of nuances and extensions with respect to our article. Fourth, we discuss the question of how the network approach should incorporate biological factors, given that wholesale reductionism is an unlikely option.

Type
Authors' Response
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 42 , 2019 , e32
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Baker, L. R. (1995) Explaining attitudes: A practical approach to the mind. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bechtel, W. & Mundale, J. (1999) Multiple realizability revisited: Linking cognitive and neural states. Philosophy of Science 66:175–207.Google Scholar
Beck, A. T. (1970) Cognitive therapy: Nature and relation to behavior therapy. Behavior Therapy 1:184–200.Google Scholar
Bekhuis, E., Schoevers, R., de Boer, M., Peen, J., Dekker, J., Van, H. & Boschloo, L. (2018) Symptom-specific effects of psychotherapy versus combined therapy in the treatment of mild to moderate depression: A network approach. Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics 87:121–23.Google Scholar
Borsboom, D. (2017) A network theory of mental disorders. World Psychiatry 16(1):5–13. doi:10.1002/wps.20375.Google Scholar
Boschloo, L., van Borkulo, C. D., Rhemtulla, M., Keyes, K. M., Borsboom, D. & Schoevers, R. A. (2015) The network structure of symptoms of the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders. PLoS ONE 10:e0137621. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0137621.Google Scholar
Clark, A. & Chalmers, D. (1998) The extended mind. Analysis 58:7–19.Google Scholar
Clark, D. M. (1986) A cognitive approach to panic. Behavior Research and Therapy 24:461–70.Google Scholar
Costantini, G. (2014) Network analysis: A new perspective on personality psychology. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Department of Psychology, University of Milano-Bicocca.Google Scholar
Cramer, A. O. J., van Borkulo, C. D., Giltay, E. J., van der Maas, H. L. J., Kendler, K. S., Scheffer, M. & Borsboom, D. (2016) Major depression as a complex dynamic system. PLoS ONE 11:e0167490. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0167490.Google Scholar
Deserno, M. K., Borsboom, D., Begeer, S. & Geurts, H. M. (2017) Multicausal systems ask for multicausal approaches: A network perspective on subjective well-being in individuals with autism spectrum disorder. Autism 21:960–71.Google Scholar
Deserno, M. K., Borsboom, D., Begeer, S. & Geurts, H. M. (2018) Relating ASD symptoms to well-being: Moving across different construct levels. Psychological Medicine 48:1179–89.Google Scholar
Ellis, A. (1962) Reason and emotion in psychotherapy. Lyle Stuart.Google Scholar
Epskamp, S. & Fried, E. I. (2018) A tutorial on regularized partial correlation networks. Psychological Methods. doi:10.1037/met0000167. (Advance Online publication. Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/met0000167).Google Scholar
Epskamp, S., Maris, G., Waldorp, L. J. & Borsboom, D. (2018) Network psychometrics. In: Handbook of Psychometrics, ed. Irwing, P., Hughes, D. & Booth, T., pp. 953–87. Wiley.Google Scholar
Fodor, J. A. (1974) Special sciences (or: The disunity of science as a working hypothesis). Synthese 28:97–115.Google Scholar
Fried, E. I. & Cramer, A. O. J. (2017) Moving forward: Challenges and directions for psychopathological network theory and methodology. Perspectives on Psychological Science 12(6):999–1020. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/174569161770589 and at: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1745691617705892.Google Scholar
Fried, E. I., van Borkulo, C. D., Cramer, A. O. J., Boschloo, L. B., Schoevers, R. A. & Borsboom, D. (2017) Mental disorders as networks of problems: A review of recent insights. Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology 52:1–10.Google Scholar
Golino, H. F. & Demetriou, A. (2017) Estimating the dimensionality of intelligence like data using exploratory graph analysis. Intelligence 62:54–70.Google Scholar
Golino, H. F. & Epskamp, S. (2017) Exploratory graph analysis: A new approach for estimating the number of dimensions in psychological research. PLoS ONE 12(6):e0174035.Google Scholar
Hoffmann, S. G., Asnaani, A., Vonk, I. J. J., Sawyer, A. T. & Fang, A. (2012) The efficacy of cognitive behavioral therapy: A review of meta-analyses. Cognitive Therapy and Research 36:427–40.Google Scholar
Insel, T. R. & Cuthbert, B. N. (2015) Brain disorders? Precisely. Science 348:499–500.Google Scholar
Jones, P. J., Heeren, A. & McNally, R. J. (2017) Commentary: A network theory of mental disorders. Frontiers of Psychology 8: article 1305. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01305. (Online publication). Available at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01305/full.Google Scholar
Kievit, R. A., Romeijn, J. W., Waldorp, L. J., Wicherts, J. M., Scholte, H. S. & Borsboom, D. (2011) Mind the gap: A psychometric approach to the reduction problem. Psychological Inquiry 22:67–87.Google Scholar
Kim, J. (1982) Psychophysical supervenience. Philosophical Studies 41:51–70.Google Scholar
Kim, J. (1984) Concepts of supervenience. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 45:153–76.Google Scholar
Kotov, R., Krueger, R. F., Watson, D., Achenbach, T. M., Althoff, R. R., Bagby, R. M., Brown, T. A., Carpenter, W. T., Caspi, A., Clark, L. A., Eaton, N. R., Forbes, M. K., Forbush, K. T., Goldberg, D., Hasin, D., Hyman, S. E., Ivanova, M. Y., Lynam, D. R., Markon, K., Miller, J. D., Moffitt, T. E., Morey, L. C., Mullins-Sweatt, S. N., Ormel, J., Patrick, C. J., Regier, D. A., Rescorla, L., Ruggero, C. J., Samuel, D. B., Sellbom, M., Simms, L. J., Skodol, A. E., Slade, T., South, S. C., Tackett, J. L., Waldman, I. D., Waszczuk, M. A., Widiger, T. A., Wright, A. G. C. & Zimmerman, M. (2017) The hierarchical taxonomy of psychopathology (HiTOP): A dimensional alternative to traditional nosologies. Journal of Abnormal Psychology 126:454–77.Google Scholar
Marsman, M., Borsboom, D., Kruis, J., Epskamp, S., van Bork, R., Waldorp, L. J., van der Maas, H. L. J. & Maris, G. K. J. (2017) An introduction to network psychometrics: Relating Ising network models to item response theory models. Multivariate Behavioral Research 7:1–21. doi:10.1080/00273171.2017.1379379.Google Scholar
Menary, R., ed. (2010) The extended mind. MIT Press.Google Scholar
Mitte, K. (2005) A meta-analysis of the efficacy of psycho- and pharmacotherapy in panic disorder with and without agoraphobia. Journal of Affective Disorders 88:27–45.Google Scholar
Pearl, J. (2000) Causality: Models, reasoning, and inference. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Polger, T. W. (2009) Evaluating the evidence for multiple realization. Synthese 167:457–72.Google Scholar
Scheffer, M., Carpenter, S. R., Foley, J. A., Folke, C. & Walker, B. (2001) Catastrophic shifts in ecosystems. Nature 413:591–96.Google Scholar
Snippe, E., Viechtbauer, W., Geschwind, N., Klippel, A., de Jonge, P. & Wichers, M. (2017) The impact of treatments for depression on the dynamic network structure of mental states: Two randomized controlled trials. Scientific Reports 7: article 46523. (Online publication). Available at: https://www.nature.com/articles/srep46523.Google Scholar
Wray, N. R., Ripke, S., Mattheisen, M., Trzaskowski, M., Byrne, E. M., Abdellaoui, A., et al. (2018) Genome-wide association analyses identify 44 risk variants and refine the genetic architecture of major depression. Nature Genetics 50:668–81.Google Scholar
Blanken, T. F., Van Der Zweerde, T., Van Straten, A., Van Someren, E. J. W., Borsboom, D. & Lancee, J. (2019) Introducing Network Intervention Analysis to investigate sequential, symptom-specific treatment effects: A demonstration in co-occurring insomnia and depression. Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, e-pub ahead of print. doi: 10.1159/00049504.Google Scholar
Polger, T. W. (2004) Neural machinery and realization. Philosophy of Science 71(5):997–1006.Google Scholar
Van Borkulo, C. D., Borsboom, D., Epskamp, S., Blanken, T. F., Boschloo, L., Schoevers, R. A. & Waldorp, L. J. (2014) A new method for constructing networks from binary data. Scientific Reports 4: article 5918. Available at: https://www.nature.com/articles/srep05918.Google Scholar
Wichers, M., Groot, P. C., Psychosystems, ESM Group, & EWS Group. (2016) Critical slowing down as a personalized early warning signal for depression. Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics 85:114–16.Google Scholar
Woodward, J. (2003) Making things happen. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar