Marginality in Philosophy and Psychology

"Analysing marginality from an analytic perspective and drawing on canonical theories by Dilthey, Collingwood, Wittgenstein, Foucault, John McDowell, Susan Carey and Michael Tomasello, this book is an important contribution to ongoing debates on marginality among psychiatrists, psychologists, social scientists and philosophers. Psychology often resorts to overambitious theorising due to a perceived pressure to justify its scientific credentials. Taking the cases of preverbal children and mentally ill patients, this book shows that applying overarching and unifying explanations to marginal subjects is problematic, arguing instead that those at the margins should be given their proper explanatory autonomy. George Tudorie examines recent cognitive theories on early development in children to reveal the difficulties of conceptualising the emergence of human abilities, while also demonstrating how cognitive accounts of psychosis, built around conceptual 'belief-desire-intention' psychology, eventually falter. In doing so, he reveals that interpretation is not a route psychology can take at the margins and calls for a clearer view of explanatory options in marginal cases."--