Props to Deep Ghataura who pushed this article in my path: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/aa1b/5d36450c1f7c0e441afac5be28ca90f69586.pdf
It gives a great overview of the debate between the post-modern "paradigmatic" thinking of Khun and the more pragmatic problem-solving approach of Karl Popper before launching into a quite spectacular broadside of contemporary psychometrics. Joel Mitchell takes psychometrics to task by arguing that the web of premises that constitute "the paradigm" of psychology hasn't gotten to grips with the inherent (in)measurability of the subject of study itself.
In a nutshell, psychologists say that the indicators they use to refer to certain basic psychological phenomena are in fact measuring those psychological phenomena in a way that can be expressed as a quantity. The next time someone says you "are" narcissistic or you "have" any personality disorder, they should be able to point to some "point" at which someone doesn't have a narcissistic personality disorder. We can measure when someone has cancer or aids because there is a corresponding physical correlate; in the case of consciousness, this is more problematic, when measuring the brain we tend to have to infer a phenomena that has some neurobiological properties and some behavioural properties and it's not easy to match these up.
The psychometricians response is that there are other physical sciences that measure "proxies" for something instead of the real thing. Energy is one example that is "inferred" from the phenomena but never actually "experienced directly". However, science normally progresses in such a way that the theory should create a problem that observation and measurement can help solve, so theory and observation develop together and interact. Gravity is a good example of a phenomenon that was "inferred" from the behaviour of objects falling, but only through the development of better theory and technology could actually be measured. We measured gravity waves! We cannot measure "narcissist waves".
To use a more concrete example, to what extent does a term like "dyslexia" refer to a specific neuro-biological state and to what extent does it refer to a "state" of a system that is relative to a particular point in time demonstrated through behaviour? The answer is probably both. There are "neurobiological states" that can be described, there are performance measures that more or less match up to those states. Importantly, however, in most dyslexia analyses, the brain isn't scanned. In fact, often the biological state of the brain is "inferred" from the lowered performance in different measurements of reading. This leads to the quite understandable view that if you have dyslexia or some other learning difficulty this "neurodiversity" is measurable with respect to some defined idea of "normal" and furthermore the "step" into being dyslexic (vs not being dyslexic of course) is "well defined". Of course, professionals wish it to be well defined (same goes with ADHD) because if it isn't a problem "with the kid's biology", then there is a problem with the instructional methodology. The issue is that it just isn't well defined so distinguishing when it's a problem of faulty instruction and when it's something biological is incredibly hard. The obvious answer is that it's always a case of the interplay of these two things.
This links to the so-called "hard problem" in Philosophy of mind. We can quantify the physical phenomena of a system without knowing anything at all about what it's like to "be" that physical system. One solution to this is to simply say that "being" X or what it's like to experience something simply is not amenable to scientific study. This is not because the problem is too "hard" but because what it's "like" to be conscious (to put it another way, the experience of being awake) cannot be assigned predicates. In fact, a definition - at least according to ancient Buddhist thinking - is that the self (and actually all phenomena) are empty of inherent existence. If we think about it scientific terms this simply means we cannot say anything about the self.
This requires us to say that the experience of a thought or emotion or perception isn't "the self". This seems weird. If I am thinking of a tree with my eyes closed, the tree is part of myself, right? Well, no, not really. The image of the tree is a kind of perception. It's a transitory phenomenon that isn't so different from the perception of a real tree. It has different causal properties and we can describe it in a different way but it still corresponds to the concept "tree". Same goes for a feeling of pain. That pain isn't a part of me, it's a perception. What it's like to feel that pain IS *me* and yet we cannot ascribe that *me* predicates because it's empty. Essentially what we SHOULD do is treat all the phenomenological contents of experience as perceptions and that which underlies them - the self - as something which isn't amenable to empirical study.
It would certainly have implications for the legal system if we were to accept that our thoughts actually think themselves and are presented to something about which nothing can be said. Is nothing a predicate? If existence isn't, nothing shouldn't be either. This is the ideology of no-ideology. If you say the ideology of no-ideology is "just another ideology" you kind of missed the point.
The hard problem is hard because it's looking for something that isn't there. If I see a bird floating past my window there is a particular physical state that matches up to the bird. If I close my eyes imagine a bird there is a particular physical state that corresponds to that bird. To say that the two are of a different nature is to fall into dualism. All we need to do is say that they (thoughts and everything else) have different causal relationships within the same complex information ecology and are equally interconnected and empty.
To return to the point of the blog, if psychometric premises are "quantifiable" and we have a way of delineating one from another, or identifying different gradations of disorders in a way that is agreed-upon, then they are physical. Thoughts are quantifiable, to take an obvious example, I can imagine one lemon. there is one lemon on the table and one lemon being clearly and distinctly imagined in my mind. Thoughts and non-thoughts are quantifiable in a very similar way. What isn't quantifiable is the "self" that lies beyond phenomena. However we try to ascribe attributes to the nuonema of ourself, we cannot. Kant said "there is something about which we can say nothing" but attributes this to the limitations of our senses; in fact, there is no-thing than lies beyond the scope of our intuition. there is no self, there is no "disorder", there are only temporary states of complex systems of information.
This is why meditation practices are so effective when it comes to mental health problems. They treat thoughts as clouds to be let go. Anxiety and anger should be seen as no different in nature from cars that drive by your house with frequent loud regularity. You might be unlucky enough to live near a busy road, either get used to it or move but the cars aren't *you* because *you* is something to which predicates cannot be ascribed.
In a nutshell, psychologists say that the indicators they use to refer to certain basic psychological phenomena are in fact measuring those psychological phenomena in a way that can be expressed as a quantity. The next time someone says you "are" narcissistic or you "have" any personality disorder, they should be able to point to some "point" at which someone doesn't have a narcissistic personality disorder. We can measure when someone has cancer or aids because there is a corresponding physical correlate; in the case of consciousness, this is more problematic, when measuring the brain we tend to have to infer a phenomena that has some neurobiological properties and some behavioural properties and it's not easy to match these up.
The psychometricians response is that there are other physical sciences that measure "proxies" for something instead of the real thing. Energy is one example that is "inferred" from the phenomena but never actually "experienced directly". However, science normally progresses in such a way that the theory should create a problem that observation and measurement can help solve, so theory and observation develop together and interact. Gravity is a good example of a phenomenon that was "inferred" from the behaviour of objects falling, but only through the development of better theory and technology could actually be measured. We measured gravity waves! We cannot measure "narcissist waves".
To use a more concrete example, to what extent does a term like "dyslexia" refer to a specific neuro-biological state and to what extent does it refer to a "state" of a system that is relative to a particular point in time demonstrated through behaviour? The answer is probably both. There are "neurobiological states" that can be described, there are performance measures that more or less match up to those states. Importantly, however, in most dyslexia analyses, the brain isn't scanned. In fact, often the biological state of the brain is "inferred" from the lowered performance in different measurements of reading. This leads to the quite understandable view that if you have dyslexia or some other learning difficulty this "neurodiversity" is measurable with respect to some defined idea of "normal" and furthermore the "step" into being dyslexic (vs not being dyslexic of course) is "well defined". Of course, professionals wish it to be well defined (same goes with ADHD) because if it isn't a problem "with the kid's biology", then there is a problem with the instructional methodology. The issue is that it just isn't well defined so distinguishing when it's a problem of faulty instruction and when it's something biological is incredibly hard. The obvious answer is that it's always a case of the interplay of these two things.
This links to the so-called "hard problem" in Philosophy of mind. We can quantify the physical phenomena of a system without knowing anything at all about what it's like to "be" that physical system. One solution to this is to simply say that "being" X or what it's like to experience something simply is not amenable to scientific study. This is not because the problem is too "hard" but because what it's "like" to be conscious (to put it another way, the experience of being awake) cannot be assigned predicates. In fact, a definition - at least according to ancient Buddhist thinking - is that the self (and actually all phenomena) are empty of inherent existence. If we think about it scientific terms this simply means we cannot say anything about the self.
This requires us to say that the experience of a thought or emotion or perception isn't "the self". This seems weird. If I am thinking of a tree with my eyes closed, the tree is part of myself, right? Well, no, not really. The image of the tree is a kind of perception. It's a transitory phenomenon that isn't so different from the perception of a real tree. It has different causal properties and we can describe it in a different way but it still corresponds to the concept "tree". Same goes for a feeling of pain. That pain isn't a part of me, it's a perception. What it's like to feel that pain IS *me* and yet we cannot ascribe that *me* predicates because it's empty. Essentially what we SHOULD do is treat all the phenomenological contents of experience as perceptions and that which underlies them - the self - as something which isn't amenable to empirical study.
It would certainly have implications for the legal system if we were to accept that our thoughts actually think themselves and are presented to something about which nothing can be said. Is nothing a predicate? If existence isn't, nothing shouldn't be either. This is the ideology of no-ideology. If you say the ideology of no-ideology is "just another ideology" you kind of missed the point.
The hard problem is hard because it's looking for something that isn't there. If I see a bird floating past my window there is a particular physical state that matches up to the bird. If I close my eyes imagine a bird there is a particular physical state that corresponds to that bird. To say that the two are of a different nature is to fall into dualism. All we need to do is say that they (thoughts and everything else) have different causal relationships within the same complex information ecology and are equally interconnected and empty.
To return to the point of the blog, if psychometric premises are "quantifiable" and we have a way of delineating one from another, or identifying different gradations of disorders in a way that is agreed-upon, then they are physical. Thoughts are quantifiable, to take an obvious example, I can imagine one lemon. there is one lemon on the table and one lemon being clearly and distinctly imagined in my mind. Thoughts and non-thoughts are quantifiable in a very similar way. What isn't quantifiable is the "self" that lies beyond phenomena. However we try to ascribe attributes to the nuonema of ourself, we cannot. Kant said "there is something about which we can say nothing" but attributes this to the limitations of our senses; in fact, there is no-thing than lies beyond the scope of our intuition. there is no self, there is no "disorder", there are only temporary states of complex systems of information.
This is why meditation practices are so effective when it comes to mental health problems. They treat thoughts as clouds to be let go. Anxiety and anger should be seen as no different in nature from cars that drive by your house with frequent loud regularity. You might be unlucky enough to live near a busy road, either get used to it or move but the cars aren't *you* because *you* is something to which predicates cannot be ascribed.
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