alex3619
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Hi peggy-sue, I love your story about the Prof! One of the problems that occurs in these arguments, from my experience with philosophers, is that they use highly specialized alternate definitions for things that help keep their thinking in check. When talking to them and they use a word, such as "context", it may not mean what most people think it means. I also agree with you about the science. While it is not true to say that all such degrees have very little science, I know of some that have a lot of neuroscience content, but psych has been dominated by babble for too many decades for every subject of every degree to be grounded in hard evidence.
One of the longest disagreements I ever had (it was never resolved) was about "meaning". In the sense I use "meaning", I intend for it to be similiar to understanding. To a philosopher it is related to truth values. To a linguist its related to definitions. I had a signed statement on the wall of a profs office at my university, which stated my opinion on something (and I still think this is correct): "The Rosetta Stone had no meaning until sombody deciphered it." Meaning, as in understanding, has little to do with symbols. Its in the brains and culture of people. Its something we create. To get meaning from text you need a symbol-brain-culture interaction. Culture of course exists as memories in the brains of people.
We simply do not know enough about the brain to make the kinds of diagnoses that some psychiatrist like to make, including hysteria and functional somatic syndromes. The fact that so many schools of thought in psychiatry exist should be a wake-up call to the profession that its mostly hypothetical - but while some acknowledge that they still act as though it were based on hard evidence.
Bye, Alex
One of the longest disagreements I ever had (it was never resolved) was about "meaning". In the sense I use "meaning", I intend for it to be similiar to understanding. To a philosopher it is related to truth values. To a linguist its related to definitions. I had a signed statement on the wall of a profs office at my university, which stated my opinion on something (and I still think this is correct): "The Rosetta Stone had no meaning until sombody deciphered it." Meaning, as in understanding, has little to do with symbols. Its in the brains and culture of people. Its something we create. To get meaning from text you need a symbol-brain-culture interaction. Culture of course exists as memories in the brains of people.
We simply do not know enough about the brain to make the kinds of diagnoses that some psychiatrist like to make, including hysteria and functional somatic syndromes. The fact that so many schools of thought in psychiatry exist should be a wake-up call to the profession that its mostly hypothetical - but while some acknowledge that they still act as though it were based on hard evidence.
Bye, Alex