The Hiddenness of Psychological Symptom Amplification: Some Historical Observations

This book chapter is a short response to a paper by the psychiatrist Nicholas Kontos, on the phenomenon of psychological symptom amplification (PSA). PSA takes place when patients present symptoms to clinicians that they do not actually have, or, perhaps more commonly, they exaggerate symptoms they do have. Kontos argues that, because of modern medical training, it is very difficult for clinicians to recognize that the patient's presented symptoms are exaggerated or nonexistent. I argue that the hiddenness of PSA is a result of far-reaching instutitional changes that took place in American psychiatry in the 1970s. In short, many psychiatrists went from seeing mental disorders as (unconscious) strategies to seeing them as dysfunctions, nothing more. Recognizing PSA involves adopting a perspective that has been effectively abolished in contemporary American psychiatry

Function and Teleology

This is a short overview of the biological functions debate in philosophy. While it was fairly comprehensive when it was written, my short book ​A Critical Overview of Biological Functions has largely supplanted it as a definitive and up-to-date overview of the debate, both because the book takes into account new developments since then, and because the length of the book allowed me to go into substantially more detail about existing views

A Generalized Selected Effects Theory of Function

I present and defend the generalized selected effects theory (GSE) of function. According to GSE, the function of a trait consists in the activity that contributed to its bearer’s differential reproduction, or differential retention, within a population. Unlike the traditional selected effects (SE) theory, it does not require that the functional trait helped its bearer reproduce; differential retention is enough. Although the core theory has been presented previously, I go significantly beyond those presentations by providing a new argument for GSE and defending it from a recent objection. I also sketch its implications for teleosemantics and philosophy of medicine

Schizophrenia and the Dysfunctional Brain

Scientists, philosophers, and even the lay public commonly accept that schizophrenia stems from a biological or internal ‘dysfunction.’ However, this assessment is typically accompanied neither by well-defined criteria for determining that something is dysfunctional nor empirical evidence that schizophrenia satisfies those criteria. In the following, a concept of biological function is developed and applied to a neurobiological model of schizophrenia. It concludes that current evidence does not warrant the claim that schizophrenia stems from a biological dysfunction, and, in fact, that unusual neural structures associated with schizophrenia may have functional or adaptive significance. The fact that current evidence is ambivalent between these two possibilities (dysfunction versus adaptive function) implies that schizophrenia researchers should be much more cautious in using the ‘dysfunction’ label than they currently are. This has implications for both psychiatric treatment as well as public perception of mental disorders

Reducing Obesity: Policy Strategies From the Tobacco War

Outlines the impact of obesity on health, healthcare costs, and productivity. Reviews successful policy interventions to reduce tobacco use and considers whether excise or sales tax, labeling requirements, and advertising bans could lower obesity rates

A Suzaku X-Ray Study of the Particle Acceleration Processes in the Relativistic Jet of Blazar Mrk 421

We report on the findings of a 364 ksec observation of the BL LAC object Mrk 421 with the X-ray observatory Suzaku. The analysis in this paper uses fluxes and hardness ratios in the broad energy range from 0.5 keV to 30 keV. During the course of the observation, the 0.5 keV - 30 keV flux decreased by a factor of $\sim$2 and was accompanied by several large flares occurring on timescales of a few hours. We find that fitting a broken power model to spectra from isolated epochs during the observation describes the data well. Different flares exhibit different spectral and hardness ratio evolutions. The cumulative observational evidence indicates that the particle acceleration mechanism in the Mrk 421 jet produces electron energy distributions with a modest range of spectral indices and maximum energies. We argue that the short-timescale X-ray spectral variability in the flares can be attributed mostly to intrinsic changes in the acceleration process, dominating other influences such as fluctuations in the Doppler beaming factor, or radiative cooling in or outside the acceleration zone.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, apjgalley format, accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journa