Naturalizing normativity: neopragmatist reflections on mental disorder

Abstract This paper argues that a neopragmatist approach can allow for normativity to be integrated into a thoroughly naturalist account of mental disorder. A recognition of the malleability of norm-governed social practices reveals language, rationality, and mind to be open-ended, fluid processes that resist characterization in terms of fixed mechanistic structures. This, we will argue, foregrounds the import of vocabularies in determining the structure and content of mindedness. Specifically, the broader role that our discursive practices play in generating minds means that the conditions contemporary psychiatric practice seeks to treat are themselves partly constituted by the vocabularies of treatment adopted. We then offer some positive proposals about how mindfulness based cognitive therapy (MBCT) may be enhanced once we replace representational approaches to mind with a vocabulary that explicitly articulates the inherent fluidity of self. To do this we draw on insights from mindfulness’s contextual home, namely Buddhism, and elaborate on the significance this tradition places on the doctrine of “not-self” ( anātman ) as a necessary framework for successful mindfulness practice– a framework that neatly slots into the neopragmatist understanding of mind and self as dynamic and socially constituted.