The Function Debate and the Concept of Mental Disorder

Abstract

In this paper I compare the functional approaches of two authors, Christopher Boorse and Jerome Wakefield, and I focus specifically on the solutions that they offer to resolve conceptual difficulties in psychiatry. I demonstrate that their respective positions are ambiguous: the solutions they propose waver between two opposite points of view. The one is a denunciation of the psychiatric discourse from the perspective of what it should be; the other is a legitimization of what this discourse is in respect to the limited state of psychiatric knowledge. I argue that this vacillation stems from the fact that both authors, each in their own way, remain too indeterminate about the role of the concept of “biological function” in their definition of mental disorder. I seek to show that this frailty undermines the practical value of both Wakefield’s and Boorse’s analyses.