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Notes -
Scott has posted a short article: You Don’t Want a Purely Biological, Apolitical Taxonomy of Mental Disorders.
Takeaway:
Some of Scott’s best work comes from the tension between categories-as-descriptive and categories-as-prescriptive, so I’m pleased to see him tackling this subject.
He has a couple potentially spicy sentences which have been interspersed with extra letters to ward off journalists. Legends say they aren’t able to remove text without an invitation, preventing context-removal. A handful of commenters immediately proceed to demonstrate why this will do nothing to keep some people from thinking Scott is literally Hitler, but perhaps it will keep them from publishing that? I’m not optimistic this will keep an opportunistic editor from stripping out letters with no direct relevance unless they’re legally required to put “…” in their place.
This post continues Scotts tradition of having jarringly different Ideas about what relationship categories have to truth than me. Scott is of the opinion that categories are just word games and that technocrats should be able to shift their borders are any time to maximize public utility. Being rhetorically gifted as he is he describes this position well. There is no natural force that decides whether whales are fish or some other category so we ought to define fish however this best serves us. It's a difficult position to assail. And yet...
I think firstly that there is such a thing as a natural category. These are things people can intuit about the territory, like canyons etched by the simple combined implications of gravity causing water to flow down hill and precipitation taking that water back uphill. This forms natural borders between things. Creatures capable of flight are an intuitively useful category, people use it for things like determining if a wall is going to keep that creature out. This kind of category cannot and will not bend to our word games. We may call it something different or create new categories that mostly but don't exactly match this category(maybe you'd like to include or exclude insects based on some further need) but the natural category remains.
What people want out of things like the DSM is for it to have as its first goal to reflect a natural category. And there are a few options here, I think whether we pick a natural category that includes or excludes homosexuality is an important debate that could go either way. But it should be about which category to pick, not whether we should shift between different categorical systems from line to line. Because if you're switching up the justifying for inclusion from one definition to the next the actually underlying category is just "Whatever I find expedient" which is a maximally bad fit for a document meant to describe reality. It makes a farse of the whole project and in the end it turns the DSM into just another locus of power in the culture war with no more legitimacy than a piece of paper that says "I do what I want".
Perhaps some terms really do (or really should) denote "natural categories" or "natural kinds". Examples might include "iron" and "mammal". But I don't think all terms can be like that. Some seem to fit better with a "family resemblance" model. Moreover, some terms have normative implications or consequences. I sympathize with the idea that we should try not to let our normative views "contaminate" our scientific understandings of how things work, or of the terms we use to express those views. But I don't think we can really dispense with using some words that reflect values and goals - perhaps including goals about which treatments are funded by health insurance.
I would dispute even "mammal" -- in the present time, you have basal species like the platypus that, while solidly classified under Mammalia, have generally un-mammal-like features such as laying eggs and lacking nipples; and in prehistory, you have the whole series of mammalian ancestors gradually emerging from reptiles, developing the characteristics trait of mammals through many intermediates. Granted, in most practical circumstances this is pointless pedantry, and the intuitive category works just fine -- how often are you going to deal with a platypus or a Procynosuchus in real life? But there are very few categories that have really sharp borders; most things blur at the edges.
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