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from Section 8
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2020
Peter Zachar’s chapter is devoted to the issue of description and descriptive psychiatry. Description is one of the discursive modes, the other being argumentation, narration and exposition. In practical use, all four components frequently co-exist. The purpose of description is a linguistic attempt to make an object, a person or a state of affairs more clear, articulated and vivid. The issue of description, taken on a theoretical or philosophical level, is an immense topic with connections to linguistics, semiotics, philosophy of language, pragmatics of language use, concept formation, philosophy of mind and metaphysics. Neither the chapter nor the following commentary have an aspiration to branch into all those domains. Peter Zachar is primarily concerned with the notion of the so-called descriptive psychiatry which is usually considered as a sort of inferior kind of psychiatry, only useful in our attempt to create explanatory models.
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