Psychiatric diagnoses, ‘thought styles’, and ex post facto fact fallacies

Living in two-way, dialogical relations with our surroundings, rather than in monological, one-way causal relations with them, means that we can no longer treat ourselves as inquiring simply into a world of objective ‘things’ already existing in the world around us. We need to see ourselves instead as always acting ‘from within’ a still-in-process world of flowing streams of intermingling activities affecting us as much, if not more, than we can affect them. In such a world as this, instead of discovering pre-existing things in our inquiries, we continually bring such ‘things’ into existence. So, although we may talk of having discovering certain nameable ‘things’ in our inquiries, the fact is, we can only see such ‘things’ as having been at work in people’s activities after they have performed them. This, I want to argue, is also the case with all our diagnostic categories of mental distress – thus to see the ‘things’ they name as the causes of a person’s distress is to commit an ex post facto fact falla...