Humanities Faculty

Dominic P. Murphy

Assistant Professor of Philosophy

Research interests

Philosophy of mind, history of modern philosophy, philosophy of science.

Research Statement

My previous work has concentrated on issues of explanation and classification in psychiatry, culminating in my forthcoming book.

My current research applies recent work in the cognitive and social sciences to empirical and theoretical problems about introspection. The negative project uses data from developmental and abnormal psychology to argue that introspection and self-knowledge involve a set of loosely related capacities that do not form a psychological natural kind underwritten by a specialized cognitive mechanism.

The positive project investigates the widely fashionable conception of introspection as a narrative capacity. There is good reason to believe that the narrative, self-representational sense of introspection is a form of confabulation, since much of our mental life is unconscious, many of the sources of our conscious mental life are opaque, and many of our stories about why we act as we do are wrong. But why have such an unreliable capacity for accurate inner scrutiny? I aim to consider the possibility, first raised by Adam Smith, that the function of self-examination is social.

I hope that this project offers a way to reconcile two different bodies of research at the intersection of cognitive and social science: first, that behavior is largely the product of situations, not a stable underlying self: second, that the function of a number of mental states, especially affective ones, is to transmit social signals. I will explore the idea that developing a representation of the self as stable and predictable enables us to manipulate others, including our own future selves.

Publications

"On Fodor's Analogy: Why Psychology is like Philosophy of Science after all" Forthcoming in Mind & Language.

"Explanation in Psychiatry." Forthcoming in J. Prinz (ed), The Philosophy of Psychology: A Handbook (Oxford).

Psychiatry in the Scientific Image, forthcoming 2005. MIT Press.

Can Evolution Explain Insanity? Forthcoming in Biology and Philosophy.

Health and Disease. Forthcoming in A. Plutynski & S. Sarkar (eds) A Companion to the Philosophy of Biology(Blackwell)

Axiological Foundations of Psychotherapy. Journal of Psychotherapy Integration, 14 (2004): 168-191 (with R.L. Woolfolk).

Adaptationism and Psychological Explanation. In F. Rauscher & F. Scher (eds) Evolutionary Psychology: Alternative Approaches. (Kluwer, 2003): 161-184

Hacking's Reconciliation: Putting the Biologial and Sociological together in the Explanation of Mental Illness. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 31 (2001):139-162.

Darwin in the Madhouse: Evolutionary Psychology and the Classification of Mental Disorders. In P. Carruthers & A. Chamberlain (eds) Evolution and the Human Mind. (Cambridge University Press, 2000): 62-92 (with S.P.Stich).