I disagree. Without involuntary commital and treatment, the number of suicides would greatly increase.
So, what you’re saying is that the three most popular religiously based coming of age ceremonies don’t really count as proper coming of age ceremonies.
That makes perfect sense.
He’s saying that they don’t make you confront death. Which is what mystical initiatic rites are supposed to do. That’s what makes them visceral.
I think the general idea is that if the three most popular religiously based coming of age ceremonies don’t count, then it would be inappropriate to include them when taking a count of how popular coming of age ceremonies are. With most Christians and Jews out of the picture, that adds to rather a large group for whom coming of age ceremonies are not had.
It should also be noted that becoming Bar Mitzvah has been enough for Jews for millenia now. The idea that without ‘mystic’ rituals there is “crime, lack of personal responsibility, and other forms of immature behaviour” is rather handily gainsaid by that niggling little detail.
It’d also be nice to see the actual alleged Campell quote so we can all tell what evidence he was using and, for that matter, if Smash is even relating it accurately. Then again a dozen hot wings and cold beer would also be nice… I don’t think that any shamans will magick any up for me right now, though.
Luckily, if you’d rather that society discard the progress we’ve made since the Renaissance and the Enlightenment in terms of reason and investigative methodolgy, and you’re arguing that ‘revelation’ is equal to epistemology, it’s handy to be able to pick and choose information. Of course, it’s “axiomatic” that the Bar Mitzvah just isn’t a proper ritual proven by the fact that lots of people don’t use it, but the fact that they don’t use various ‘mystic’ rituals just proves how much they need to use them.
Truly, flexible evidence is awesome.
So let’s tie this together. Assume that our presumption about Ickes is correct: he’s schizophrenic. At what point is it warranted to limit his rights?
After he’s physically harmed someone else? If he states that these reptile must be killed? If expresses an intent to harm himself?
I mean we all agree that there is a point at which a person’s risk to others warrants the limitation of their rights. The question is where that point should be vs where it currently is, I think.
There should be a single uniform legal-social mechanism for determining that someone is sufficiently incapable of managing their own affairs that decisions need to be made for them. It should be the same mechanism regardless of whether the person in question is allegedly senile from Alzheimer’s, allegedly decompensated from schizophrenia, or allegedly unresponsive due to coma. It should depend on evidence, and if the subject of the allegations is able to express anything and expresses antagonism to the idea of being found incompetent, the standard should be “beyond a reasonable doubt” even though it is not a criminal proceedings, insofar as taking from someone their right to make their own decisions is tantamount to taking away their freedom. And it should be reversible on evidence from the subject at a later time that they are now competent.
a) After he’s physically harmed someone else <—— ideally, yes. That is how we deal with misbehaving people. We charge them with crimes after they commit them. We do not lock people up because we think they might commit one if allowed to retain their freedom. And even after physically harming someone else, the subject gets a day in court to refute the charges and appear with defense counsel. And, again, the standard is reasonable doubt.
b) If he states that these reptile must be killed? <—— I would not think that is specific enough to constitute a threat. But if Icke steps over the line and makes a sufficiently specific threat, charges might be applicable.
c) expresses an intent to harm himself? <—— I think suicide should be legal and no one’s business, within limitations of creating public disorder and etc in the process of offing one’s self. As Judi Chamberlin once said, “I accept your right to commit suicide, but you don’t get to do it in my living room”. Many suicide attempts are “screams for help” and I think (depending on the subject’s degree of mobility and agility and the context in which it occurs) it’s usually reasonable to take the approach that if a person is obviously in the process of committing suicide where you can observe it, or come across it, they are not and should not be legally protected from your inclination to intervene. If they’re serious about it (and have the opportunity of course) they can take themselves somewhere private and arrange to not be found.
But if Icke, hypothetically speaking, were confined to a bed and hiking up into the mountains or out into the woods is not a realistic possibility, there should be some mechanism by which he could avail himself of the right to suicide without being interfered with. This is rambling… I don’t know what legal structure would best accomodate all this. But certainly intent to harm one’s self should not be sufficient reason to deprive a competent person of their right to self-determination, and it is not by any means prima facie evidence of incompetence.
Never read any Icke, but another, um, controversial author who has taken that drug is Terrence McKenna. It isn’t reptiles for him, oh no, the psychedelic mushrooms themselves are a kind of fungal unibrain, and you can communicate with them if you take enough drugs (ayahuasca and mushrooms), apparently. This secret fungus brain might originate in space, I can’t remember the details and anyway I couldn’t finish the book…
Bar Mitsvahs (sp?), first communion, and other such rituals are more about attaching yourself to organized religion, in my opinion. To call them “coming of age” is specious at best – “brainwashing” is the term I would use instead.
The only real coming of age rituals we have these days is sneaking a peak at your Daddy’s Playboy stash (not so significant now with all the easily accessible pr0n on the Internet) or drinking beer while underage, and other teenage rebellion stuff. There really is no extant tradition for “coming of age” rituals, since the communal/tribal social structure which once valued these rituals no longer exists in modern, Western tradition.
What’s so different about attaching oneself to anything that means it’s not a “coming of age”? It doesn’t seem particularly odd to me that someone might choose to mark their approach into adulthood by becoming a more full member of a group. It’s saying, “I was born into this group, and others made my decisions for me as to my participation in it - now I choose it of my own free will”.
It seems to me that your definition of “coming of age” requires that choice to be a rejection. I don’t see why. Besides, the examples you give can pretty much be as much a result of “brainwashing” as anything else. The things you listed are, in and of themselves, some of the “traditional” things to do; rebellion doesn’t imply originality, and conformance doesn’t imply non-thinking.
Except the first and third sentences would contradict each other in actual practice. We have criminalized quite a few behaviors due to their potential risk to others, regardless of whether or not physical harm has been done yet.
If you drive drunk you can (and should) be arrested and charged with DWI because it is an unacceptable threat to those around you.
If you possess pipe bombs without an explosives permit you can (and should) be arrested and charged with illegal possession of explosives because it is an unacceptable threat to those around you.
If you talk to others about committing certain crimes, you can (and should) be charged with conspiracy to commit.
And so on ,and so on, and so on. We routinely criminalize behavior that has not yet risen to the level of actually harming someone else (yet).
Fine. So pass such laws. As long as they apply to everyone equally, and do not single out categories of people to be subjected to different restrictions or different consequences for the same behavior, I don’t have a relevant issue with that. (I may have a different issue with some of that. I may not think the government has any business keeping me from creating, storing, and taking LSD, or making pipe bombs under sufficiently safe conditions but that’s not relevant to this discussion).
I am aware that there are some (bad) precedents that could be used to support a law that applies differently to people who have received a psychiatric diagnosis, but that does not pass muster with me.
There are also some laws I would find intolerably invasive even if they DID apply to everyone (“all people will report for a psychiatric assessment once per week and will take any pharmaceuticals prescribed for them”).
They already don’t apply to everybody equally for engaging in the same behavior.
We already place different restrictions on different categories of people.
Driving is not a crime if you have a license.
Driving without a license is.
Driving while intoxicated is.
Having children is not a crime.
Having mental problems may be grounds to have you deemed an unfit parent.
Owning a firearm is a constitutionally protected right.
You may not be able to own one if you’re a convicted felon.
You may also not be able to own one if you’ve been diagnosed with certain mental illnesses.
Driving is seen as a legal privilege.
You will not be allowed to drive if you are legally blind.
You will not be allowed to drive if you do not have the money to maintain and insure your vehicle.
You will not be allowed to drive if you are 12 years old.
Etc, etc, etc.
You’re seem to be demanding a standard that would require the complete revision of our entire system of jurisprudence. And that’s an okay position to hold, I suppose, but I’m curious if you hold it in regard to all things equally or only when mental illness is involved.
I’d also point out that there were several points and questions from my earlier post that you still haven’t responded to. Do you intend to?
I know that. Did you read my post?:
I’ll go back and look them over and get back to you.
So Finn where do you think the line should be placed if you think it should be placed differently than AHunter does? It seems that he is accepting of the premise that someone who presents a clear and specific threat to someone else can be stripped of various rights but that the label of a specific mental illness does not in and of itself create that risk. And he feels that potential harm to oneself is not the state’s business. Do you disagree with those positions and if so in what ways?
Personally I am of mixed mind but agree with his fist position. As to his second … I do think that the state has a vested interest in protecting individuals even from themselves particularly if such risk to themselves is due to a treatable illness.
…
vBulletin took a profound dislike for some control character in my text or something. Maybe some moderator woudl be kind enough to nuke the above abortive semipost?
Take II:
FinnAgain has requested a comprehensive reply to address previously unanswered questions in his post. (I assume this is the post to which he refers. I did take cultural anthropology but I’m nevertheless no expert on coming-of-age rituals or mitzvahs).
I don’t usually do these line-by-line reply thingies but I don’t see any easy way to do this otherwise.
We’re on the same page except for relevance, so let’s dive into relevance. The original question was whether or not it is fair to characterize schizophrenia as always to some degree an impairment. But if what schizophrenia is is a suseptibility to cognitive changes under certain circumstances, it is less obviously an impairment. The point becomes arguable. Perhaps the more impaired person is the person who can witness the Nazis dragging one’s brother out of the house to kill him and one’s mother hang herself the next and not react with a massive emotional & cognitive change. A change whose actual nature, keep in mind, is something I have not ceded as necessarily without functional value and/or without viable content.
We have a phenomenon, previous – and often – misdescribed as consisting of a neurotransmitter deficit, now reconceptualized as perhaps a reaction to stressors, a reaction that some people may have more of a propensity for than others, which in turn appears to have a neurobiological correlate.
Now we’ve moved on to establish that we don’t even know if a neurochemical condition exists even as a correlate, let alone an indirect (reactive) cause, and certainly let alone direct cause, of the observed behavior. Hearing voices that who considers to be “not there”? To invert the old saw about trees falling in forests, if you hear a voice, the voice itself is kind of “there”, isn’t it? It may not be the voice of a person, it may not manifest as measurable sonic vibrations that your tape recorder could pick up, but that doesn’t make it an objective disconnect with reality. If it should happen to be true that some human beings under some circumstances experience elements and aspects of their subconscious thoughts as if they were external to themselves and speaking to them, but those individuals are aware that there is no person standing around the corner saying those things and they know full well that a tape recorder would not pick up the voices that they are hearing, where’s the “disconnect with reality”?
What we have, when you unravel the ball of wax here, is that some people react to stressors differently than others. That their minds go into certain modes which are quite often at least superficially and temporarily not conducive to them continuing to function effectively in their everyday tasks. That there may or may not be neurochemical changes that accompany that — they have been posited but in any given real-life case we don’t know if they are occurring at all, and we do not know that they are anything more than the neurochemical manifestation of the mental processes rather than the mental processes being manifestions of the neurochemical condition.
It is not unreasonable to say this is no more an unmitiged negative than a strong sense of smell, which could render a person incapable of much rational thought and utterly devoid of calm demeanor when the olfactory bombardment is sufficiently severe. You may reject the analogy as appropriate but that’s my assertion: there are tradeoffs to our susceptibility to stressors. For every x schizophrenic people who simply cease to be able to function and go nuts under such triggers, there are y people who have insights and comprehensions of unusual scope and depth that arise and are fueled by the same sensitivities and the same “looseness” of conceptual connectivities and associations. We make a lot of spurious conceptual connections (and have a harder time weeding out the chaff and hence are nutty fairly often) but we make a lot of brilliant nonobvious nonspurious connections due to the same difference.
Stop right there. I don’t accept that you objectively know a goddamn thing about schizophrenia. I do not think an objective understanding is even theoretically possible. There are too many value judgments intrinsically embedded in the definition, the implementation in actual diagnosis, and in behavior and thought and personality as they can be observed.
I don’t need evidence to support a counter claim that is anchored in alternative interpretations of the same data points. I’ve provided my interpretations. I’m not suggesting different data points, at least not to any significant extent, relevant to this discussion.
No. In any individual case there is never any evidence that a given behavior is attributable to schizophrenia as opposed to being attributable to unforgettable Nazi horrors or a bad stomach ache or anything else. Similarly, there is no evidence that my brilliance is due to schizophrenia as opposed to my natively high intelligence, charm, wit, and good looks.
There are very few studies of us except as confined and drugged, and very few studies studying any aspect of our behavior except our tendency to report or display certain characteristic symptoms. We don’t get studied “in the wild”. As soon as we have open communities and lives lived with a relative lack of coercive interference in our right to our cognitions, I’d be interested in finding out more about who we are and what-all we have in common.
You are assuming that what we would feel proud of consists only of negatives, which would indicate that you’re either rejecting or missing the point.
But as I’ve been saying, we think there are tradeoffs. And we categorically deny that ALL of what are conventionally described as delusional ideas are in fact delusional. See previous paragraphs about loosened associations. A board-certified psychiatrist would most likely agree that a characteristic of how our minds work differently is that our minds are more likely to see connections and associations between things where other people would not. They see this as reflected or caused by sparks jumping gaps in too loose a fashion.
Describing our difference as “hearing voices that aren’t there or has paranoid delusions” is as connotatively biased and inflammatory as describing gay guys’s difference as “wants to fuck other men up the ass”.
I do take note of that, and I do acknowledge that in the most important and most central of our political objectives you’re on our side! 
Mostly, see prior comments on how there should be a single mechanism for determining that a person is incompetent. It should not be relevant that a person has been diagnosed (or is a self-described) schizophrenic; it should only be relevant that specific behavior has been observed and that right there in the courtroom it can be demonstrated that the subject is not able to make decisions and understand issues to the degree legally set as the threshold for requiring a guardianship.
I’d like to clarify that I raised this as my own concern and that I do not pretend to have easy answers. I don’t feel divinely qualified to speak for (or OVER, to be precise) other folks diagnosed schizophrenic WHO DO EXPERIENCE IT AS AN IMPAIRMENT. I do acknowledge the problem of trying to advance a pride movement. I threw those questions out there as problematic concerns I myself am mulling over as an activist.
MOST of the activists in the movement received the forms of psych diagnosis called “major psychosis” in the textbooks: paranoid schiz or other schiz, bipolar or manic-dep, clinical dep. The second largest contingent is a huge block of folks dx’ed as ADD or ADHD or OCD mostly as minors. Together these are the contingents most likely to have been subjected to forced treatment and that does fuel the desire for justice in a big big way. But we have had people with “personality disorder” diagnoses as well, and even one veteran of classical Freudian psychoanalysis (he once had an organization titled the National Association for the Prevention of Psychotherapy Abuse, here in New York, where else?), as active participants. In the modern insurance era, practitioners need to write down a DSM code in order that the client can be insurance-reimbursable. Then it can follow you, forever defining you as a bit of a fruitbat if not an out-and-out nutter like us psychotics. And if one is urged to conceptualize the problem one has sought help for as internal and as a known clinical disorder known to modern medical science, and one wastes years and a large chunk of money, only to gradually realize there is very little actual support for this medical model, then it can generate a lot of anger and can yield a rejection of the self-blame that these labels can bring with them.
“Should they” feel pride? I think they, like everyone else, need to move towards a state of being where they can and do feel pride in who they are. For most human beings, with or without a psych dx in their personal history, getting there is going to involve some changes to self, but on occasion for some of us it also involves sticking out our virtual elbows and telling the surrounding culture “We’re here and we aren’t letting you shut us away and YOU, not us, are the locus of the balance of the problems that we are having and that is just gonna have to change”.
For the people with neurological problems that are not conventionally classified as psychiatric: I’m inclined to think of them the same way I think of the deaf. Now, that may be due to MY not having listened to THEIR activists. (I’ve said twice in this thread that I’m willing to at least consider the deaf activists’ pride-claims). I’ve written elsewhere of the long history of psychiatry and how through most of the last 200 years whenever science got its actual biomedical tongs on a genuine etiology and mechanism, lo and behold, that ailment would be whisked away to the appropriate REAL branch of medicine, leaving psychiatry as the dull dingy grab-bag of “stuff we never figured out” where it simultaneously pretends to be a medical practice like any other but does double-duty as the window dressing for the police function of removing disturbing people from society for the benefit of others, not for their own benefit, no matter the profession’s protestations to the contrary. I won’t reiterate the history lesson here. (I will link if necessary). I dont tend to think of neurology the same way. They are quite a bit tighter in their self-policing of their categorical systems and I’m far less likely to question the validity and real meaning of the diseases and conditions they purport to treat.
Even so, if multiple sclerosis patients rise up tomorrow and say they’re being victimized and defined as a disease when that’s not how they see themselves, I will at least listen, with as much of an open mind as I can manage.
I don’t know.
I do know for instance, that I’m 100% fine with keeping both convicted fellons and anybody who’s been institutionalized from owning a firearm, for example.
That isn’t what I got, at all, since he said that only could be done if they’d physically harmed someone. I strongly disagree with that, and although I do not know where the line lies (I would prefer to leave it up to trained professionals backed by rigorous statistical data), I would argue that certain ‘full blown’ cases of mental illness absolutely mandate forced intervention.
Nope, I responded to it without having to read it at all. Then I levitated out of my chair and opened the refrigerator via telekinesis.
My point, actually, was that we routinely decide that behavior/impairments are not going to be tolerated in society even before they’ve caused actual physical harm to anybody. Denying firearms to convicted felons and someone who’s been committed seems eminently sensible, and doesn’t seem to be bad precedent at all. You may argue that a much smaller subset of people should be committed, and we could discuss that, but my point would still stand. My argument was that, quite aside from it being bad precedent, it was precedent totally in line with similar laws that we have all over the place.
And thank you for responding to my other post. I’ll get to that in a bit.
I’ll go back and look them over and get back to you.
[/QUOTE]
Okay:
First, having now read that monster post (and starting on one of my own) I will retract my claim that Hunter was only arguing that having committed physical harm already could be criminal. However, I’d still argue that even his revised standard violates the system of jurisprudence that we already have in place. Arguing that everybody needs to be treated exactly the same if they perform the same exact action is falsified by our system of laws and by common sense. A blind person going hunting with a high powered rifle would quite rightly be treated differently than a sighted person (with a hunting license) doing the same exact thing. Yes, even if the blind person happened to claim that being blind wasn’t an impairment. I have, as of yet, seen no cogent, compelling argument for why people with severe mental disorders (again, to be determined by sound methodology and expert analysis) should be treated as if that wasn’t the case.
Now:
-You argue that maybe the cognitive/perceptual disabilities of Nazi-induced paranoid schizophrenia are not a disability because maybe they’re a totally normal reaction and those who wouldn’t get that reaction are not normal. This sidesteps the issue. Hurting your back by trying to lift too large a weight and lifting from the small of your back instead of your legs will hurt you, too. That doesn’t mean that a hurt back is any less of an impairment than paranoid schizophrenia or that someone who could lift like that without hurting their back was really the person who was impaired Your argument that someone who is not impaired is more impaired because they really should be impaired (and that the actual impaired person is therefore less impaired) is weird. Being able to function, even with bizarre coping mechanisms that avoid trauma, is not an impairment.
-Again, it doesn’t matter what the precise neurological basis is (and I’d point out that neurological functioning in response to a stimulus is still a neurological basis), we’re quite able to look at the effects and impairments without needing to know the exact neurological/neurochemical/etc… cause. Although, of course, that too would be nice. Again, you’re asking for a different standard than routinely applies to everybody else in our system of jurisprudence. If, for instance, we found someone who was attempting to buy kiddie porn, we’d throw the book at him even if we didn’t understand the precise neurological basis for his actions. Likewise, if we find someone who we’re reasonably certain is going to harm someone because he’s convinced that his neighbor is a lizard person who are putting mind control drugs into his morning coffee via teleoportation, and he’s mad as hell at this lizard person and wants to ‘take action’, we should act to limit that danger even if we don’t know what exactly the neurological basis is.
-It is rather odd that you have to ask, ‘hearing voices that who considered not to be there?’ The answer is that they’re objectively not real voices and are hallucinations. And yes, voices are those things that vibrate air molecules and which you hear with your ears. You’re trying to conflate ideas with voices, when in fact confusing them is an instance of someone’s degree of divorce from reality. You can claim that it’s elements of someones subconscious or what have you, but that doesn’t change it to anything less of a disconnect from reality because, by objective definition, voices are external. Hearing your own brain talk to/yell at/whatever itself is an instance of a brain not functioning properly.
You are, essentially, arguing that who’s to say that the visual hallucinations that someone on LSD has aren’t real things that they’re seeing. After all, it could be their subconscious directing what images they see.
But of course, in both cases, here are no real images and there are no real voices, and hearing voices that are produced by mental illness (and/or the subconscious) and seeing images that are produced by LSD (and/or the subconscious) are both examples of a lack of authentic perception.
-Now, the definition that there are certain minds that “quite often at least superficially and temporarily not conducive to them continuing to function effectively in their everyday tasks” is the very definition of an impairment. It might be nice to argue that, if society was totally different it wouldn’t be an impairment (if you were an ancient pharoh and you could simply chill out while slave girls brought you roast pheasant), but we do live in the society we live in. And pointing out that something is a disability in the world we live in is not an argument against it being a disability. It’s a bit like arguing that being blind really isn’t a disability if everybody lived in great unlit caves far beneath the Earth’s surface. Or being paralyzed isn’t a disability if everybody was set in concrete from their neck down.
And yes, someone who could not function due to a ‘super nose’ would, likewise, have a disability.
-You have again made the claim that somehow schizophrenia might leave Y Percent of people with “insights and comprehensions of unusual scope and depth”. Can you cite any actual research which shows any form of understanding of that sort that’s been demonstrated under methodologically sound conditions, and which was shown to somehow be a result of schizophrenia rather than despite it?
-Along the same lines, you may object to the fact (and yes, it is a fact) that we objectively know certain things about schizophrenia, but your objection has the same sort of rationalizations that you use to cast hearing voices that don’t exist as ‘not objectively’ divorced from correct perception. You can complain about ‘conceptual packaging’ or whatever you’d like, but that simply attempts to win the argument by definition when we already have perfectly serviceable objective definitions. We could play such silly games with anything.
It’s like arguing:
“Being shot in the head and bleeding out is only considered to be a physical injury because that’s how we define the concepts ‘physical’ and ‘injury’. Why, in another culture, being shot in the head might be seen as a means of recreation.”
-And yes, you do indeed need evidence to support a claim that (you claim) is anchored in ‘alternative interpretations’ of the same data points. Again that you don’t understand that is weird. It’s like arguing that nobody needs to provide proof for the claim that JFK was killed by a massive conspiracy since, after all, they’re using the same data points as the rest of us.
We could test your assertion any number of ways. Hell, a double blind study on facility with pattern recognition would be a very good place to start. If a quadriplegic told you that he can run faster than an Olympic sprinter, would you agree that, yeah, he’s interpreting the same data points differently and we just can’t know. Or would you ask for proof?
-Now, if there’s contention to be made for higher functioning along certain dynamics (the possibility of which I’ll readily grant), then the null hypothesis is that there is no such increase in functioning due to the condition of schizophrenia and we’d need a valid statistical study to falsify the NH. It’s interesting enough to posit that it is the case, but without that study all we have is the claim.
Just like your claim that I assume schizophrenics would feel proud ‘only of the negatives’ when nobody has provided any evidence of the positives of the condition. It’d be like me being proud of my dyslexia. It makes no sense.
- Getting back to your earlier claim of ‘enhanced cognition’ along certain lines, you seem to be missing the answer. You want to define it as getting a lot of ‘chaff’ but your higher-functioning mind ends up with some real quality ‘wheat’. All you’ve done is provide an example for the old saw about a broken clock being right twice a day. The ability to ‘perceive connections’ is not, in fact, a cognitive enhancement is the vast majority of connections that are perceived are in fact wrong. And of course, if you come up with enough connections sooner or later one will stick. We could invent a computer program which would take random words and put them into various combination. If it came up with “benzine is like a snake biting its tale” that wouldn’t mean that the computer was evincing enhanced perceptual functions. Especially not if that was .01% of its output and the other 99.9% consisted of things like “Monkeys stole my trousers using laser guns”.
By your same fallacious logic, people who predict (each and every year) that the financial market will crash had their enhanced perception validated by the recent market crash.
-And again, no. Hearing voices that aren’t there is denotative based. What you’ve described is, in fact, ‘hearing thoughts as if they were voices’. Likewise, arguing that ‘the CIA is controlling my mind through the fillings in my teeth’ is rather objectively a paranoid delusion. You may take objection to the ‘inflammatory’ nature of that, but, well… it just makes your argument look rather silly.
Objectively, it’s a paranoid delusion. Is the CIA actually doing that? No? Then it’s a delusion. Is it a delusion about how others are out to get you? Yep, then it’s a paranoid delusion. As it’s both obvjectively paranoid and objectively a delusion, it’s odd to call it “inflammatory”. And while I’m not gay, your comparision seems very strange there too. If someone was describing gay male sex as anal sex, I doubt that it’d be much of a problem.
What would you prefer that paranoid delusions be called, anyways? I half-suspect that you’d prefer that they be classified as just another way of looking at the same data points, but I hope I’m wrong.
You’re entitled to your opinion, but I disagree with you.
You put WAY too much investment into the idea that there is not only an objective world out there on every single level but also that we, collectively speaking as a species, know damn good and well what it is.
I consider “objective meaning” to be a convenient fiction, like “the world is flat and you can navigate using North South East and West”. Convenient because in a great many circumstances nothing is lost by using that simplified model, and because it’s easier than dealing with how things actually are.
But it just ain’t so. Meaning does not inhere in any object, therefore there is no such thing as objective meaning. Meaning inheres in the relationship of object to a subject; it is an interactive phenomenon. The illusion of objectivity comes from the huge array of things for which MY interaction with that thing is identical (or so nearly identical as to not matter) as YOUR interaction and HIS and HERS and so on, so that we all readily and quickly agree that we’re all experiencing the same thing the same way. It is akin to the parallax phenomenon in astronomy: if the item in question is sufficiently far away from us we will see it “in the same place” no matter whether we stand in Alexandria or in London. Or whether we view it at aphelion or at the opposite end of our orbit, at perihelion. (the latter, if I recall correctly, being the source of the term “parsec”: a parallax of one second of arc’s worth of difference in apparent location between opposite ends of the earth’s orbit)
Whenever the subject matter is PEOPLE and their behavior, what appears to be self-evidently and undeniably true can depend very much on your viewing angle. The social world does not readily lend itself to the absolutes and neutrally established definables as many of the hard sciences, not because folks who study people and society are too stoopid to do science but because we are in the midst of each other. Parallax problems abound.
It happens to be true of the behavior of carbon molecules and the laws of thermodynamics, too (that there is no objective meaning) but it would be annoying and frustrating to pay any attention to that, so we don’t.
But schizophrenia? Sorry, uh uh.
Most people who claim JFK was killed by a massive conspiracy claim to have additional data points. But if we assume for the moment that they do not, that they are clalming that the existing evidence looks like that to them, then no, they don’t need to provide proof. You either see it that way or you see a more likely explanation from the same data points. Neither of you can PROVE yourselves to be right. All you can do is what Charles Taylor, in his discussions of hermeneutics, described as follows:
Or, as Sarah McLachlan put it: