PHILOSOPHY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES / June 2001Murphy / HACKING’S RE ONCILIATION Hacking’s Reconciliation Putting the Biological and Sociological Together in the Explanation of Mental Illness

In a series of recent works, Ian Hacking has produced a model of social causation in mental illness and begun to sketch in outline how this might be integrated with the medical model of psychiatry. This article elaborates and revises Hacking’s model of social forces, criticizes him for attempting a merely semantic resolution of the tension between the social and the biological, and sketches an alternative approach that builds upon his substantial insights. Attempts to understand mental illness employ two exemplary but mutually suspicious traditions of inquiry. Proponents of the “medical model ” believe that psychopathology is rooted in disorders of the brain; the sciences they look to for explanations of mental illness are neuroscience, biochemistry, and pharmacology. Another tradition holds mental illness to be in some sense socially constructed, a response to social pressures. Partisans of this approach may or may not see mental illnesses as genuinely pathological, but if they do, they will argue that the pathologies are caused mostly by cultural forces. To explain mental illness, they turn to the vocabulary of the human sciences. Both approaches have had their successes; in this article I ask how we can reconcile the two traditions and develop a unified theory of psychopathology