Anhedonia, roughly defined as the diminishment or absence of the capacity to experience pleasure or joy in the performance of daily activities, is a core symptom of Major Depressive Disorder, as well as other psychiatric illnesses. I argue that the two major psychological theories of anhedonia are committed to the view that anhedonia depends, in the general case, on more than just neurobiological states and processes. This is despite the overwhelming explanatory focus on neurobiological factors in the existing literature, which reflects a general commitment to biomedical materialism, the view that mental illnesses are simply neural dysfunctions (Davies 2016; Zachar 2000). Instead, I argue that anhedonia depends upon the breakdown in the function of what Colombetti and Krueger (2015) term a subject’s affective niche. Since affective niches are composed of elements of a person’s natural and social environments, including artefacts, activities, and other people, anhedonia likewise turns out to depend on a subject’s environment, in a manner that makes it generally inscrutable within the boundaries of skin and skull. I discuss and refute some objections to this view, and conclude by sketching a promising, general strategy one could adopt to refute biomedical materialism for a nontrivial class of other psychiatric symptoms.

中文翻译：

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Anhedonia和情感上脚手架的心

快感缺乏症（Anhedonia），大致定义为在日常活动中无法获得愉悦或愉悦的能力，是严重抑郁症以及其他精神疾病的核心症状。我认为，关于快感缺乏症的两种主要心理学理论都认为，通常情况下，快感缺乏症不仅取决于神经生物学状态和过程。尽管在现有文献中绝大多数关于神经生物学因素的解释集中于此，这反映了对生物医学唯物主义的普遍承诺，认为精神疾病只是神经功能障碍（Davies 2016; Zachar 2000）。相反，我认为，快感缺乏症取决于Colombetti和Krueger（2015）称其为对象的情感利基。由于情感利基是由人的自然和社会环境的要素（包括手工艺品，活动和其他人）组成的，因此，性欲低下同样取决于对象的环境，其方式通常使其在皮肤和头骨的边界内难以理解。我讨论并驳斥了对该观点的一些反对意见，并通过勾勒出一种有希望的，通用的策略来反驳生物医学唯物主义以解决其他非一般性精神病学症状的结论，得出结论。