The 12th biennal collective intentionality conference — july 13–25, 2020
Identifying the Explanatory Domain of the Looping Effect: Congruent and Incongruent Feedback Mechanisms of Interactive Kinds.
views 4
Tuomas Vesterinen
Discussion
4 thoughts on “Identifying the Explanatory Domain of the Looping Effect: Congruent and Incongruent Feedback Mechanisms of Interactive Kinds.”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Only ISOS members (with valid fee) can access to the discussion section. Visit ISOS website to subscribe.
sponsors
Hi Tuomas,
Thank you for your considered reply. Again, I apologise for taking you on a detour from the main thrust of your work.
When you talk of anti-psychiatry I assume you refer to Szasz and the philosophical counselling crowd. If my question is related to that, it is related weakly, since I want to poke at phenomena like ‘social contagion’ and ‘social pathology’ that are nonetheless parasitic on psychological/biological biases, weaknesses and so forth.
I take your point that there are socially influenced pathologies which are nonetheless internally psychological/neurological pathologies. So disregard my provision of OCD. If I understand correctly, if a force is entirely external, then you disregard it as a psychiatric issue. I assume then that you are working with a negative conception of disease. At the most general level I agree, however I am curious about the more alien cases where social forces are parasitic on psychological/biological levers, biases and whatnot. So let’s set aside evaluative cases, and narrow down specifically on the feedback/ looping.
As I said previously, what I am asking is perhaps orthogonal to your main talk and main use of ‘feedback’. Perhaps cases of what I refer to as recursive feedback are; ‘catostrphising , add more…’ and socially constructed psychological harms as they pertain to these process. The harm is socially constructed but it is parasitic on internal process. So perhaps these issues indeed dance on the borderline between psychiatry and anti-psychiatry. In the latter case, resolving rational confusions and problems of meaning may go some way. But really I’m just interested in the ‘looping’ aspect of it, and whether this looping is a psychological problem (over and above not being inherently a disease). It seems to me, for example, that certain psychological treatments such as cult-de programming speak to this nicely.
Returning to values, Szas et all speak of ‘social ills and disease’ but for metaphorical purposes. They otherwise regard these issues as a conflict of reason or meaning. Yet I am inclined to believe that, at least methodologically, there are cases where the looping is the issue – not necessarily the content. I’m thinking here of CBT and such like. So my question doesn’t seem to be dependent on a negative/positive conception of health.
*****
Lastly, I would like to parse out what you said about anorexia – I’m largely of novice knowledge viz. your field, so I’m not sure I totally grasp what you are providing. First, are you alluding that there was a rise in of anorexia in Hong Kong following the adoption of the label? When you talk about normative licensing are you saying that: there are socially acceptable external displays of pre-existing internal faults?
Hi Charles,
Thank you again for the comments, very interesting, I think I understand your point a bit better now. The enabling “niche” is an idea from Hacking. He argues that certain contingent sociocultural vectors (including a classification) have to coincide for transient mental disorders to thrive. The spread of eating disorders in Asia might be a good example. Self-starvation among teenagers didn’t really exist in many East-Asian countries before the idea that fasting can be a symptom for mental suffering spread there. (Although, I’m sure that the psychological and biological vulnerabilities that make people susceptible to the idea did). So, my point was that perhaps these people picked up the idea of fasting from the media and elsewhere, but once started, starvation probably becomes hard to give up for other reasons too (a bit similar to what happens with smoking). In general, I believe constitutive (what the problem is) and etiological reasons (the diachronic causes) of mental problems need to be distinguished. Whereas we have come up with patchy explanations for the latter, we do not really have an account of the former. In my talk, I tried to argue that looping can be an etiological causal explanation for interactive kinds (and mental disorders). However, in your example, I guess the role looping plays depends on what is meant by social pathology. Thanks again for sharing this interesting idea!
Hi Charles,
Thank you for the interesting question. If I understood your question correctly, I’m inclined to think that the looping effect plays a less substantial role in explaining mental disorders.
In the case of mental disorders, I think that the looping effect is an external mechanism that describes the causal interaction between the mechanisms in the mind/brain that realize mental problems and the classificatory produced social and physical circumstances they are situated in. If it were to turn out that some of the referents of our folk mental disorder concepts are in fact best explained on a higher social level, then I think that we shouldn’t call them mental disorders anymore. This is because the kind would be forced and arbitrary on psychological and neurocognitive levels, and would be something anti-psychiatry calls “problems of living”. I guess it’s plausible, maybe even likely, that some of the DSM categories are like this because of their folk-psychological ties. But all the same, labelling cannot be the only explanation for social behaviour like this either. As labelling theorist Becker has pointed out, it would be strange if robbers robbed only because someone has labelled them as robbers.
I think that the two examples you mention are very interesting and highlight nicely how labelling/looping effects can explain. Studies have shown that OCD has a strong neurocognitive and hereditary base. So I think that probably social factors and labels influence only the content of obsessive thoughts and the types of repetitive behaviours the inflicted individuals engage in. Anorexia, instead, seems to exemplify a more substantive case of the looping effect, indicated by how we have been able to follow its emergence simultaneously with the adaptation of the diagnostic category in Hong Kong, for instance, in the end of the 1980’s. Nevertheless, the looping effect of anorexia (and some other culture-bound disorders) is probably only one factor in the normative niche that licences the correct manner for displaying one’s suffering, i.e. the normal way to be abnormal. And once this “conceptual possibility” is internalized, it probably latches onto other psychological and cognitive factors, so that self-starving becomes hard to give up for more profound reasons.
I think that the two examples you mention are very interesting and highlight nicely how labelling/looping effects can explain. Studies have shown that OCD has a strong neurocognitive and hereditary base. So I think that probably social factors and labels influence only the content of obsessive thoughts and the types of repetitive behaviours the inflicted individuals engage in. Anorexia, instead, seems to exemplify a more substantive case of the looping effect, indicated by how we have been able to follow its emergence simultaneously with the adaptation of the diagnostic category in Hong Kong, for instance, in the end of the 1980’s. Nevertheless, the looping effect of anorexia (and some other culture-bound disorders) is probably only one factor in the normative niche that licences the correct manner for displaying one’s suffering, i.e. the normal way to be abnormal. And once this “conceptual possibility” is internalized, it probably latches onto other psychological and cognitive factors, so that self-starving becomes hard to give up for more profound reasons.
Hi Tuomas,
I really enjoyed your keynote. My question is quite off topic, insofar as it does not engage with your broader methodological discussion.
My curiosity piques regarding the feedback loop and psychological disorders/distress. Wondering out loud here: is it possible, at least in theory, that there are disorders/distresses out there that may, potentially, really just be extremes of the feedback process: a feedback loop in itself. That is, do you find intuitive credence to the wager that there are some disorders out there which go beyond mere social additives/social reflexivity’s, and are in themselves extreme experiences of looping. Certainly, it many compulsive disorders (OCD, anorexia etc.) are, at the very least, extremely socially driven. That is not the ground-level component I am discussing here.
Rather, it seems to me that their defining power comes from a recrusivity of sorts. Given that the DSM is grounded by symptomology not underlying mechanisms, it seems plausible to speculate that (at least in some instances) the feedback look is the issue and the social detail is the symptom?