Kenneth S. Kendler, American Journal of Psychiatry 162(3):433–440, March 2005 — DOI-10.1176/appi.ajp.162.3.433
The brief’s citation (Kendler 2005, AJP 162(3)) is correct. Crossref gives
the month only, so published: carries the first of March.
Key takeaways
Registered from the PubMed abstract, not a reading. These are the eight propositions as the abstract states them; how each is argued is unknown here.
- Psychiatry is “irrevocably grounded in mental, first-person experiences”.
- Cartesian substance dualism is false.
- Epiphenomenalism is false.
- Both brain→mind and mind→brain causality are real.
- Psychiatric disorders are etiologically complex, and no more “spirochete-like” discoveries will explain their origins in simple terms.
- Explanatory pluralism is preferable to monistic approaches, especially biological reductionism.
- Psychiatry must move beyond a prescientific “battle of paradigms” to empirically rigorous, pluralistic explanatory models.
- Psychiatry should strive for “patchy reductionism”, with “piecemeal integration” of complex etiological pathways “bit by bit”.
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-03 at the owner’s request, for the philosophy of psychiatry. Philosophy of science comes first among its tags because the abstract is about what kind of explanation psychiatry should seek, and mental disorders are its case. No anthology topic holds it and it carries no instruction for machine-learning practice; the Anthology of the SOTA does not hold it (a grep of its literature.d, notes.d and theory.d for “Kendler” and the DOI found nothing).
It is filed as a seed because it is the paper the philosophy of psychiatry cites for explanatory pluralism, and the batch’s read works stand in its line:
- Borsboom (LIT-547) thanks Kendler in its acknowledgements and cites his 2011 and 2012 papers on the kinds and the “dappled” causes of psychiatric illness. It uses them for the claim that no common pathogenic pathways have been found for most disorders, which is proposition 5 here. Its network theory is meant to integrate the biological, psychological and sociological levels, which is one way to carry out proposition 6.
- Engel (LIT-548), also unread here, is the medical-model ancestor of the same pluralism.
- Mental causation. Proposition 4, real mind→brain causation, is the claim Pernu (LIT-147) examines for brain–computer interfaces. Pernu argues that the interventionist case for nonreductive mental causation succeeds there only by identifying the mental variable with a neural one. That bears on how proposition 4 could be defended, though whether Kendler argues it in interventionist terms is unknown until it is read.
The substitute. Kendler’s 2008 “Explanatory Models for Psychiatric Illness” (LIT-539) is filed and read in full in its place, and declares that it extends this paper. Its opening premise, that etiological models “need to be pluralistic or multilevel”, is cited to this paper. It works out two of this abstract’s propositions:
- “Patchy reductionism” and “piecemeal integration” (propositions 7–8) become the decomposition of multilevel mechanisms into locally decomposable subsystems and their reassembly. It argues against both “hard reductionism” and “hard emergentism”.
- Two-way mind–brain causation (proposition 4) becomes Marr-style implementation: “biology will implement but not replace psychology”.
It does not argue propositions 1–3 (first-person grounding, the falsity of substance dualism, the falsity of epiphenomenalism). For those this paper is still needed.
Priority for a reading: medium, now that the substitute carries the pluralism; higher if propositions 1–3 are wanted.
Access when seeded:
- PubMed 15741457 (abstract); Europe PMC (no full text).
- Crossref record (volume, issue, pages, month).
- Unpaywall: closed.
- psychiatryonline.org full text and PDF: HTTP 403 with a challenge page.