Wake up and smile, or how I learned to stop worrying and love epistemological pluralism: commentary on "a postmortem and future look at the personality disorders in DSM-5".

Comments on the original article by Widiger (see record 2013-45025-016). Widiger provides a thoughtful overview of some reasons the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders-Fifth Edition (DSM-5) personality disorder (PD) proposal came to its current position in Section III of the manual, as well as insightful advice about how to move forward. Markon comments that psychiatry seems to suffer an inordinate fear of what would transpire if authoritative nosologies were unavailable as guides to scientific discourse. Widiger's admonishments to be thorough, rigorous, and fair in developing arguments for a given model are good advice for anyone in science, not only those involved in constructing an authoritative nosology. However, Markon remarks, as we move forward, it is also important to ask why do we have such nosologies, and are they really needed to fulfill those purposes?