Abstract

When assessing a new philosophical theory of psychopathology, a first question might be: is it descriptive or revisionary in intent? Does it aim to provide reflective understanding of what is already meant by correct uses of ‘mental disorder’? Or instead to redeploy that familiar term in articulating a new concept meeting particular desiderata? Nielsen offers us an ‘enactive conceptualization’ of mental disorder, and conceptualizations are typically understood as inventive rather than descriptive. However it was not entirely clear to me, from reading his text, that this was indeed his ambition. My first question for Nielsen, then, is clarificatory: does he intend his project as descriptive or revisionary?If the...