Social Ontology, Transient Mental Illness and Justified False Belief

Officially dismissed between 1987 and 1993, hysteria has been the cornerstone for the birth of neurology, psychoanalysis and dynamic psychology along the 19th and 20th centuries. The nosological category is here endorsed as the result of the social construction of scientific facts. Starting from Ian Hacking's reflections on Transient Mental Illnesses, we intend to bring his conclusions towards contextualist epistemology, questioning knowledge as Justified True Belief and further reconsidering the status of DSM categories as scientific kinds. The idea that justificationism may guarantee reliability of knowledge attributions is rejected on a historical base, and knowing is rather considered in the terms of an understanding whose logical and psychological features significantly overlap with the act of believing. Following the work of the later Kuhn, we separate the ideas of scientific revolution and mere taxonomic reformulation. Unlike Hacking, we do not consider DSM rewritings as scientific revolutions. We finally argue that the ontological and methodological premises adopted by DSM and ICD do not yet guarantee on their scientific reliability. Novel revisions are not suitable for better understanding dysfunctional behaviours, as they still fail to account for the phenomenological reality of diagnostic constructsbeyond mere social ontology.