This seminar delves even deeper into phenomenology than usual, with the help from Alessandro Guardascione, who on a link from Dublin will be telling us about his fascinating work on relating language and experience in the context of psychopathology with the help of Husserlian axiology (value theory), a topic about which not many of us are experts. But even more reasons to learn! Welcome to the room of the zoom link, with cameras on, a few minutes before the seminar starts at 15:15!

Understanding patients’ individual values holds immense significance in person-centered psychiatry and clinical psychology because it is supposed to increase diagnostic accuracy and support the creation of individualized treatment plans (Fulford 2004, 2014; Bae, 2015; Sadler, 2013; Stoyanov et al., 2021). Current value-based approaches in psychiatry and value research in psychology predominantly focus on eliciting individuals’ personal values (Fulford, 2004) or value orientations (Socci et al., 2021) through different forms of linguistic interactions or linguistic analysis based on value dictionaries (cf. Ponizovskiy et al., 2020). In this presentation, I take issue with some approaches that have been developed in linguistics and philosophy of language to define and individuate evaluative expressions. I show the limitations of lexical and sentence-based accounts which are based on a reductive account of meaning. I introduce a phenomenological perspective on language evaluativity based on Husserl’s phenomenology of language to integrate the experiential dimension of evaluative meanings within linguistic considerations. Instead of relying on the evidence of linguistic intuitions, as within linguistic accounts of evaluativity, phenomenology can offer an experiential perspective to evaluative language because it is interested in the very formation of evaluative expressions - understood as evaluative, categorial formations -, and in the concrete meaning-activity of language users.

Alessandro Guardascione is an IRC scholar and Ph.D. student at UCD School of Philosophy working on a project in the philosophy of psychiatry “Values and Selfhood in Psychopathology”. His research focuses on contemporary person-centered approaches to mental health that explore the place of values in psychiatric classification and clinical decision-making. Specifically, he is interested in the role of existential orientations, attitudes, and personal values as connected to psychopathological disturbances of experience. Currently, he is working on Husserl’s phenomenological axiology to understand its potential implications for phenomenological psychopathology. His research interests include phenomenological psychopathology, philosophy of emotions and value theory, 4-E cognition, and critical theory.