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So, what's your point?

Posted by bob on May 29, 2000, at 21:42:30

In reply to bob, posted by Ginny on May 29, 2000, at 13:45:58

"Science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths" according to Karl Popper. So folklore can't be all that bad a place to begin, particularly where science is failing to do the job.

The value of any scientific endeavor lies in how well it can explain what has been observed and how well those explanations predict future events of the sort subjected to previous study. I'll come back to this later.

If "mind science" is so advanced, why can't it give me a course of treatment that will relieve my distress? Certainly, if I had a big ugly kidney tumor, my doctors would know exactly what they should do to alleviate my distress. Or, perhaps the fact that mind science has failed to alleviate my distress means that "it's all in my own mind", it's some sort of epiphenomenon, and has nothing to do with a scientific cause?

Explanatory power and predictive power have little to do with discerning the Truth. Surely, if you can drop Kuhn's name into a discussion you should know how theory *always* underdetermines nature and, therefore, how any one system of disciplined inquiry will never get the whole picture correct.

At the same time, tossing out the baby with the bathwater is hardly called for. Arguing that science does not directly access the Truth about Reality is hardly a strike against it -- I'd rather say that it's an argument that most scientists would agree with. I'd also suggest that most of us think our research is pretty damn close to striking the truth, or that we'd LIKE it to be, but any scientist who claims to have ascertained the true nature of something has stopped being a scientist at that point. There are a number of times in the history of science when scientists of a particular period have predicted an "end to science" since all of the "big questions" were about to be answered, only to have the whole scheme turned upon its head.

As for having to deal with the reality of any issue--I come from an applied science background. I need to use what works. I don't have the luxury of uncontaminated laboratory conditions or of controlled experiments with manipulations of a single variable at any one time. That doesn't mean that I throw out "scientific ground rules" ... it also doesn't mean that I apply them dogmatically. That path leads to what Stephen Jay Gould calls "physics envy"...there is no *one* set of Scientific Ground Rules.

But if there was, then it would be the ground rules of physics, in all probability. It's like Rutherford said, "All science is either physics or stamp collecting."

Personally, I prefer folklore to stamp collecting.

But even within physics, if you go to either pole of our known universe and compare the subatomic to the cosmologic, you find two incommensurate systems whose ground rules negate the possiblity of the other.

Does that make cosmology or quantum chromodynamics any less powerful as explanatory devices within their own realms? But you've read Kuhn, so you know that we'll get a unified field theory as soon as someone finds the right way of breaking the rules we have now.

In the mean time, I'll use what works in my field, and I have nothing against throwing together explanations from incommensurate theories as long as they improve my overall ability to predict behaviors and control outcomes.

Now, with respect to my life and my maladies of the mind, I have found little, no, nothing to support a neurochemical explanation for my disorder nor have I found anything in medical science that can predict when my next major depressive episode will occur, nor any explanation of what will be happening in my brain at that time with enough precision so that an appropriate course of action may be taken, nor have I seen any evidence that medical science has a means of preventing me from having another major depressive episode (let alone push the melancholia in-between the episodes into remission) in the future.

It simply lacks the predictive power and the explanatory power to do those things. (I did say I would get back to it.)

What "mind science" has taught me so far, though, is that my disorder probably has something to do with norepinephrine and dopamine levels and how my brain cells don't manage those chemicals in a more normative manner. I've also learned that pharmaceutical agents that boost the levels of those two chemicals in my bloodstream tend to alleviate some of my symptomology.

But as for a cure -- well, unless you're suggesting some sort of parallel between what doctors do to big, ugly kidney tumors and me getting a frontal lobotomy, I just don't see much promise of a cure for what I've got coming anytime soon.

I also place no faith in elevated levels of certain neurotransmitters changing my behaviors. The gulf between what is understood by biochemicalneuroscience and its macroscopic consequences -- human behavior -- is just too broad at this time to convince me that there might even be a chance of bridging it in my lifetime.

But I'm still going to take my nortriptyline, my klonopin, and my methylphenidate.

I'll do that mostly because it keeps the "ground" underneath me solid enough for therapy to work. And, oddly enough, for me therapy means questioning my root-level assumptions of how I think my social world works and looking for evidence to support or refute it.

The psychological paradigm I hold most dear considers mind to extend "beyond the flesh" into our culture and its artifacts, whether material or psychological in nature. To limit the science of mind to that which can be contained within purely biological constructs simply misses the definition of what a "mind" is.

Bottom line? If you're going to stick to a single, narrow litmus test for what is a fact and what is an opinion, you're going to cut yourself out of every single field of disciplined inquiry other than that of your test. If you're living your life in a bubble or in a lab somewhere, you might have that luxury.

cheers,
bob

 

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