Reading focus
Syllabus: How to Read Psychological Science
Follow the harmful-dysfunction argument and the examples used to test its boundaries. Distinguish definitions, empirical commitments, and value judgments.
Why you’re reading it. Read a conceptual argument by distinguishing its definitions, factual commitments, evaluative judgments, and possible objections.
A question to consider. Consider distress following a bereavement. What would you need to establish about harm and dysfunction to classify it using Wakefield's proposal, and which judgments could not be settled by a test score alone?
Why this reading
Wakefield's harmful-dysfunction analysis makes the boundary between disorder and other forms of adversity explicit. Harm involves evaluative standards; dysfunction concerns a mechanism's failure to perform its naturally selected function. The paper is worth reading for how the two components are joined, and for what would be required to apply that definition to an actual case.
Before you read
Be comfortable with the idea of a biological function as something a mechanism was selected to do, rather than merely something it happens to do. Wakefield's factual component depends on this evolutionary reading of function.
It helps to have seen how DSM-III-R defined mental disorder, since one of Wakefield's targets is that definition. Also keep in mind the distinction between a concept of disorder (what the word means) and criteria for particular disorders (how a clinician decides a case).
Read for
- The method: each rival account of disorder (pure value judgment, statistical deviance, biological disadvantage, unexpectable distress, the DSM-III-R definition) is tested against counterexamples. Notice what makes a counterexample decisive.
- Why dysfunction alone is not sufficient. What does the harm requirement add, and who decides what counts as harm?
- Whether the analysis makes disorder attributions empirically checkable, at least in principle, and what evidence would be needed.
- How the account handles conditions that are painful but arguably functional, such as ordinary grief or fear.
Consider afterwards
- Can we actually know what a mental mechanism was "designed" to do? If not, does the analysis become unusable, or does it still guide judgment?
- Take a contested case, such as a specific reading disability or a persistent grief reaction. Work through both components. Where does the disagreement actually lie?
Editorial context
The analysis is an influential proposal, not an agreed definition. Its application raises questions about how to establish a naturally selected function and how to judge harm across contexts. Kendler, Zachar, and Craver propose mechanistic property clusters: interacting causal processes can sustain psychiatric kinds without a single defining essence. They discuss practical kinds but do not simply endorse a practical-kinds account. The disagreement concerns what a classification should track as well as how a boundary should be drawn.