From: ccw94-AT-aber.ac.uk
Date: Mon, 23 Sep 1996 09:48:43 +0100
Subject: Re: Mental illness


And just to add a footnote in support of the following: is there not some
confusion between epistemology and ontology that occurs when mental illness
is reduced to instances of its description? "EF" perhaps?

>
>               State University of New York at Stony Brook
>                       Stony Brook, NY 117777
>
>                                            Michael Sprinker
>                                            Professor of English & Comp Lit
>                                            Comparative Studies
>                                            516 632-9634
>                                            22-Sep-1996 08:31pm EDT
>FROM:  MSPRINKER
>TO:    Remote Addressee                     (
_bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.virginia.edu )
> 
>Subject: Mental illness
>
>I must confess that the explicit, even vehement cultural
>relativism that is being expressed in some quarters on this
>question leaves me cold.  I take no position on the reality
>of mental illness, since I don't pretend to know the clinical
>literature or the theory, other than what I've read in
>Freud and that tradition over the years.
>
>But the notion that just because another culture construes 
>a phenomenon differently from the way in which that phenomenon is
>conceptualiz in the modern West (or what one might
>call the dominant tradition in the modern West), then the existence
>of something like mental illness  must necessarily be called
>into question strikes me as insupportable.  By that criterion,
>we ought to accord equal respect to the Ptolemaic concept of
>the universe and Cartesian mechanics to that given the Galilean/
>Newtonian science that displaced them--are we really willing
>to do so and accept the consequences?  Just try persuading the
>folks in NASA on that one.  No one attached to the ontological
>predicates of critical realism could possibly hold to such a view.
>It renders the whole notion of scientific progress unintelligible,
>as Bhaskar has argued endlessly, not least in relation to
>the Feyerabend-Kuhn-Rorty conception of science.
>
>Michael Sprinker
>

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Colin Wight
Department of International Politics
University of Wales, Aberystwyth
Aberystwyth
SY23 3DA

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