Falsification

Asto wrote:... There definitely is a medical (physical) basis for mental disorders else medications wouldn't empirically prove useful.

That's a big boolean false, the attempted correlation being a compound of errors. If someone is a lost babe in the woods and sees college graduates as godsends, then just to know that one is being professionally (gag) medicated/treated for one's (picayune) anxieties could suffice to the extent that myriad patients deliver glowing feedback. But no, there's more: if society by devil-craft has a part in inflicting the original anxieties, then by same craft society can ease the patient's woes, once smug in the knowledge that the troubled subject had to come running/surrender to Big Brother. BTW, you can bet that in this highly-haunted 'spiritual' plane that humans lay claim to, there is the Devil's sorcerous interdiction/inflicting. You're catching on, yes.

jdnewell wrote:You're catching on, yes.

No, you post made no sense, sorry.

How can a correlation be "a compound of errors"?
Either you claim the correlation doesn't exist (which contradicts a lot of studies) or you acknowledge that it does exist and therefore it must have a physical explanation as in the world of science, there are no wonders and mysteries.

Either way, dafuq are you talking about?

Asto wrote:There definitely is a medical (physical) basis for mental disorders else medications wouldn't empirically prove useful.

I don't know if this really does validate mental disorders. Just because medications can change someone's behaviour or alter their states of consciousness doesn't mean that this tells us anything about what mental disorders are supposed to be. They might, after all, turn out just to be a class of useful concepts that we can use to describe people.

Asto wrote:The questions is just how mental disorders can be described on a neuronal level and that is a difficult and complex question and open subject to more research.

It's not really an empirical question about whether or not mental disorders can describe patterns of activity in the brain, it's more of a grammatical question that's settled by looking at what our psychological concepts mean and thinking about what can and can not be the bearer of a psychological attribute. In this case, I don't think a neuron or clusters of neurons can be described with a psychological concept because they don't do anything that meet's the criteria for instantiation of psychological concept (i.e. behaving in such-and-such a way).

Asto wrote:Still doesn't mean it's "wrong" to describe mental disorders on more "soft" criteria that are perfectly observable and thus falsifiable. If these definitions are always spot-on accurate is another question to be discussed and as you can see on the changes on the new DSM V there is a lot of discussion going on about such specifics.

Behavioural scientists can't really be wrong when they decide to define a concept in a particular way because it's more of a normative claim that says "we should define X by criteria P1, P2, P3, ... ". Of course, I think EDGNBD is trying to say that these noramtive claims aren't falsifiable so their not scientific if we're using Popper's falsification critieria. Also, I don't really know what you mean when you talk about definitions being "spot-on accurate". A definition is a normative rule like "memory means knowledge retained" and it can't really be true or false, in the same way that colour words and their referent can't really be true or false. The way we use language is just the way we use language.

Asto wrote:Furthermore you don't need to know HOW exactly something works (if possible to know at all) if you can prove THAT it works. Popper was concerned about theories that are not falsifiable because they aren't empirically measurable and thus can't be object of scientific research (see metaphysics, esoteric, religion).

Again, I'm not sure what you mean what you talk about something working. Yes, there is some consensus among clincians when they diagnose someone, so ascribing mental health diagnoses works, but that only tells us that clinicans are good at a particular normative practice. Carpenters get the same results when measuring things, but that doesn't mean that their measurement practice is falsifiable. Of course, the difference is that ascribing mental health diagnoses to someone has a much more greater affect on a person because you're essentially saying there's something wrong with them (normative claim) which many people object to. Also, psychiatrists and psychologists are saying that the ascription of mental health diagnoses is equatable with medical diagnoses which is contentious because the diagnoses are predicated on the basis of behaviour, which means you can be wrong because you don't understand why someone is behaving the way they are but there also isn't any way to settle disagreements about the interpretation of someone's behaviour.

As for what you said about Popper, that's true, but Popper was also concerned about verificiationism and how people could get confirmations of their theories even though the theory wasn't really falsifiable. For example, I could say that someone has a sick mind and when asked for any empirical evidence to back my claim up, I could point out that the person behaves in an unusual way. That could count as a confirmation, but it doesn't mean that the theory that people have these sick minds that cause them to behave in particular ways in falsifiable. Right?

Anyways, take care. Best wishes. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hf02SGcMPvo

Infinite_Jester wrote:I don't know if this really does validate mental disorders.

It does validate that there is some kind of interaction, no matter how this interaction takes place.
It's strictly independent which set of symptoms you sum up as a mental disorder to observe a reaction (in contrast to placebos e.g.). The discussion about the definition of mental disorders belongs more into the kind of discussion about the definition of "disorder" or "illness" in general, which, unfortunately, always has be to somewhat normative and be measured on a "normal person" in a statistical sense (being the median person in an assumed gaussian distribution). But I see no real harm in this, as nobody would reject defining having 2 legs as human being as normal when the vast majority (>99%) of all humans fulfill this criteria.

I don't argue that there is a somewhat big gap between the soft description of mental disorders in the DSM and ICD and the neurological research of what is really going on in people's brains, but I think that gap will get more narrow in the future. Until then one has to live with its flaws.

Infinite_Jester wrote:It's not really an empirical question about whether or not mental disorders can describe patterns of activity in the brain, it's more of a grammatical question that's settled by looking at what our psychological concepts mean and thinking about what can and can not be the bearer of a psychological attribute.

If I understand you right then you assume that there are "psychological attributes" that can't be reduced to activity in the brain. I think that this is a metaphysical assumption that can't be validated or falsified and is therefore useless in scientific terms. It begs the question how those "psychological attributes" come into existence when there is no physical basis for them and that leads you into unscientific realms. Nothing Psychology or Psychiatry should waste their time on (although some people actually do, but that's another story).

Infinite_Jester wrote:Also, I don't really know what you mean when you talk about definitions being "spot-on accurate". A definition is a normative rule like "memory means knowledge retained" and it can't really be true or false, in the same way that colour words and their referent can't really be true or false. The way we use language is just the way we use language.

With "spon-on accurate" I mean whether they are fuzzy or not. You can define a mental disorder accurate with 558 necessary criteria leaving out every person that violates just one of them or you can define a mental disorder with fuzzy criteria or employing a (further defined) tolerance of deviation (291/558 met, or whatever)
Strict definitions in a mathematical sense are nice and fine, but are hard to use when talking about shady and fuzzy stuff like mental disorders. Even much simpler systems than human brains are hard to describe on such a level. Even if fully understood and theoretical possible, it's pointless on a pragmatical level. The same reason it's futile to use physics to describe chemical properties of molecules; you can do that, but you end up with a massive ###$. Abstractions are mandatory and with abstraction there comes fuzziness. You can't get around that.

Infinite_Jester wrote:Again, I'm not sure what you mean what you talk about something working.

Shown significance in (at least one, better thousands of thousands) double blind studies with N > 1000.
That's what I mean with "working". Proven on an empirical basis. The same way Mendel came up with rules about inheritance of properties of some stupid vegetables without even knowing how or why this stuff happens. It's two different things to find a correlation between things and to actually being able to explain why there is a correlation. In fact, latter is just a nice-to-have to build up a consistent scientific theory, but it isn't necessary to use the found correlation which is exactly what medicine is doing on a somewhat experimental level; trying to find out what "works" and what not.
Correlations are always found first before any theory is build up to explain that correlation. It's just how Science (with which I mean only empirical methods) works.
If people try to turn that principle around, it often ends up in rather absurd generalized theories that lack empirical basis and I am no fan of this.

Infinite_Jester wrote:For example, I could say that someone has a sick mind and when asked for any empirical evidence to back my claim up, I could point out that the person behaves in an unusual way. That could count as a confirmation, but it doesn't mean that the theory that people have these sick minds that cause them to behave in particular ways in falsifiable. Right?

If "sick mind" is defined only by behaving in an unusual way, then you can apply "sick mind" to everyone that meets that definition (probably including me). You are asking the ethical questions I already mentioned in the beginning of this post about when to define something as "illness". This will always be open to debate (see homosexuality) but I also think it's quite irrelevant for this topic as it doesn't change any of the observations that were made to describe the disorders. I don't know where you live, but I am from Europe and here you visit psychiatrists when you decide that you have a problem. The only exception is when you are about to harm yourself or others and I am totally fine with the assumption that people don't really want to kill or hurt themselves.
I hope we can come to the consensus that there needs to be a distinction between "mentally stable" people and people that are a threat to themselves or others, no matter if you call it "sick" or "disorder" or "whatever". In general I don't give a $#%^ about political or ethical correctness of terms.

Infinite_Jester wrote:Anyways, take care. Best wishes. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hf02SGcMPvo

Thank you. Not my music though. :p

Oh, and as usual, sorry for my bumpy english.

Asto wrote:

Infinite_Jester wrote:I don't know if this really does validate mental disorders.

It does validate that there is some kind of interaction, no matter how this interaction takes place.
It's strictly independent which set of symptoms you sum up as a mental disorder to observe a reaction (in contrast to placebos e.g.).

Saying that there is an interaction between X and Y presupposes that you know what both X and Y are. So if I ask you what a mental disorder is supposed to be: theoretical construct, undiscovered biological attribute or a criteria? And you don't know what it's supposed to be then there's no way to answer any question about X interacting with Y because you don't know what one of the two are.

Asto wrote:The discussion about the definition of mental disorders belongs more into the kind of discussion about the definition of "disorder" or "illness" in general, which, unfortunately, always has be to somewhat normative and be measured on a "normal person" in a statistical sense

The DSM and ICD don't actually make something a mental disorder because it's abnormal otherwise a whole range of abnormal traits and qualites would count as mental disorders. Also, saying that the question "what is a mental disorder?" is separable from "how is mental disorder defined" doesn't seem to make sense because to understand what a mental disorder is supposed to be presupposes that I understand the grammar of the concept "mental disorder". So the two questions really seem to be one and the same in the same way that what a "bachelor" is is the same question as "what does bachelor mean?"

Asto wrote:If I understand you right then you assume that there are "psychological attributes" that can't be reduced to activity in the brain. I think that this is a metaphysical assumption that can't be validated or falsified and is therefore useless in scientific terms.

No, I'm saying that the grammar of psychological concepts are such that they can only be meaningfully predicated to a person so that there's no sense in saying things like "cells in the prefrontal cortex are in love" or "the frontal lobe remembers that garbage day is on Tuesday".

As for causal explanations of our psychological abilities, that's entirely possible by looking at what brain areas are responsible for each ability and not something I would say is impossible. Of course, keep in mind that causal explanations of our psychological abilities doesn't change what our psychological concepts means in the same way that studying bachelors doesn't change the meaning of the concept "bachelor".

Asto wrote:

Infinite_Jester wrote:Again, I'm not sure what you mean what you talk about something working.

Shown significance in (at least one, better thousands of thousands) double blind studies with N > 1000.

Like whether or not a given treatment passes a T test? I suppose if a treatment passes a T test that really supports the claim that the treatment works well, but I don't see what that has to do with the idea that some definitions work better than others. It's really up to us, well not all of us, how we define psychological concepts and there isn't really any way to show that one definition is better than another without invoking some other normative rule like definitions should be operationally sound. This is exactly the problem in intelligence research where there are over 2000 measures of intelligence and dozens of different operational definitions. The field is really in disarray because of the proliferation of different intelligences.

Asto wrote:If "sick mind" is defined only by behaving in an unusual way, then you can apply "sick mind" to everyone that meets that definition (probably including me). You are asking the ethical questions I already mentioned in the beginning of this post about when to define something as "illness".

I think the problem is more like this: if I say that you have an unobservable non-demonstrable illness that affects your mind that can only be inferred by looking at your behaviour is that really testable in the sense that Popper meant?

Right?

Asto wrote:

Infinite_Jester wrote:Anyways, take care. Best wishes. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hf02SGcMPvo

Thank you. Not my music though. :p

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIri9YLHpOg

Take care.

Damn, I wrote a wall of text and all gone now.

Ah nvm.

Don't hang yourself up on language too much. There is a lot of postmodernist babbling going around lately and I consider language as too arbitrary as I would give too much attention to never-ending discussions about the proper use of language.

Wittgenstein is overrated btw. :p

Asto wrote:Damn, I wrote a wall of text and all gone now.

I hate when that happens

Asto wrote:Wittgenstein is overrated btw. :p

Asto wrote:

motionissue wrote:My psychologist tells me that most "mental disorders" are only classified as such to make insurance companies happy. My psychiatrist tells me that there is a medical basis. The two ideas being sent at me at once make my head hurt.

Why so? They don't contradict. There definitely is a medical (physical) basis for mental disorders else medications wouldn't empirically prove useful. The questions is just how mental disorders can be described on a neuronal level and that is a difficult and complex question and open subject to more research. Still doesn't mean it's "wrong" to describe mental disorders on more "soft" criteria that are perfectly observable and thus falsifiable. If these definitions are always spot-on accurate is another question to be discussed and as you can see on the changes on the new DSM V there is a lot of discussion going on about such specifics.

I was referring to the idea that they are like hardware problems (by medical) versus software problems (learned behaviors/responses to your enviroment). Sorry for the confusion. Maybe it is a mix of both. I do think they do exist, otherwise I wouldnt' be seeing a psychiatrist, it'd be pretty useless. I just think its a poorly understood, still young field. We just left the days of snakeoil treatments (well, metaphorically speaking) when it comes to this.

Furthermore you don't need to know HOW exactly something works (if possible to know at all) if you can prove THAT it works. Popper was concerned about theories that are not falsifiable because they aren't empirically measurable and thus can't be object of scientific research (see metaphysics, esoteric, religion).

Still Popper was and is quite irrelevant to science (as is almost all theory of science). At a certain point you have to stop trying to falsify theories and assume the validity until proven otherwise to make any progress. On a pragmatic basis (which everyone has to act on) Popper's other demands are absurd.

I agree with you on that. Though I disagree with alot of how we currently treat mental disorders though. Like using antipsychotics for reasons not approved of by the FDA, especially in areas we don't know how they'll really help much with.