In psychiatry there is no sharp boundary between the normal and the pathological. Although clear cases abound, it is often indeterminate whether a particular condition does or does not qualify as a mental disorder. For example, definitions of ‘subthreshold disorders’ and of the ‘prodromal stages’ of diseases are notoriously contentious. Philosophers and linguists call concepts that lack sharp boundaries, and thus admit of borderline cases, ‘vague’. This overview chapter reviews current debates about demarcation in psychiatry against the backdrop of key issues within the philosophical discussion of vagueness: are there various kinds of vagueness? Is all vagueness representational? How does vagueness relate to epistemic uncertainty? What is the value of vagueness? Given the immense social, moral, and legal importance of demarcating the normal from the pathological in psychiatry, what are the pros and cons of gradualist approaches to mental disorders, that is, of construing boundaries as matters of degree?

This paper defends the notions of an interactive kind and a looping effect as features of social and human scientific classifications and aims to give a realist interpretation of them. I argue that interactive kinds can best be modeled as a special case of changing causal property cluster kinds. In order to do so, I develop a typology of looping effects according to the sort of entities that are affected, the main types of which are individual-looping, category-looping, and kind-looping. Based on this distinction, I identify interactive kinds as those causal property cluster kinds that are subjected to kind-looping.

The distinction between institution types and institution tokens plays an important role in Francesco Guala’s philosophy of institutions. In this commentary, I argue that this distinction faces a number of difficulties that are not sufficiently addressed in Understanding Institutions. In particular, I critically discuss Guala’s comparison between the taxonomy of organisms and the taxonomy of institutions, consider the semantics of institution terms on different levels in this taxonomy, and argue for an alternative solution to the problem of how to reconcile reformism and realism about institutions like marriage.

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Many epistemic attitudes including belief and knowledge have already been examined to determine the extent to which they can be attributed to collectives. The epistemological literature on explanatory understanding and objectual understanding, on the other hand, has focused almost exclusively on individual subjects. However, there are many situations that can be described by sentences of the form “We understand P”, “We understand why p”, “Group G understands P”, or “G understands why p”. As I shall show, these situations can be classified into five categories: distributive, common, joint, deferential, and cooperative understanding. Based on a definitional scheme, according to which the general concept of understanding has a cognitive component, a factivity component, and an epistemic-pro-attitude component, this paper aims to analyse these five types.