Jonathan Hill

I am Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and Professorial Research Fellow in Philosophy, at the University of Reading, UK. I am also a practising psychiatrist in the UK NHS. As a clinician, and a researcher into developmental processes in psychopathology, it has seemed to me that there are important and still unresolved questions regarding causal processes in the behavioural sciences and mental disorder. In ‘Mind, Meaning and Mental Disorder’, written with Derek Bolton, I sought to show how these questions can be addressed by starting with an examination of causal processes throughout biology, which have the illuminating and intrinsically linked properties of directedness and mistake-proneness. In this project, I will work with philosophical colleagues to further develop and scrutinise these, and allied ideas, in light of current philosophical controversies. Then working with colleagues in relevant empirical disciplines, we will use these ideas to generate and test novel scientific hypotheses.