Originally Posted by
capocannoniere
I feel like "mentally healthy" is not what we should be looking for. It's a broad, hard to define term, or even a platonic ideal that will never exist.
We are really looking for members who
- Don't act as if they were on Twitter, 4chan or Reddit, i.e. not using simplistic ad hominem fallacies every time their opinion gets confronted.
- Don't insult members with no reason, or simply as a form of recreation.
- Add up to conversations and are able to hold them with their fellows.
- Aren't negative attention whores (example Richie).
Obviously the forum is full of members who have irony and sarcasm as the pillar of all opinions, and I have no problem with it at all. It's as fun to see people falling into baits as it is in real life (I already fell prey of some). But when someone does these things with total honesty, they're bad members.
I ask you: How many mentally healthy people, use your own meaning to that, do you all know? And out of these, how many have to deal with long work hours, short budget, family problems, parenting duties and all other challenges of life? If your average Joe opens the DSM, he'll easily be diagnosed with 10 mental health problems, and in that I agree with Bondo, but I don't really stay by his side on anything because his behavior towards me and others is disrespectful. Mental illness denial is not a weird niche theory. It has supporters on serious intellectual circles, and I can give you the simple example of Michel Foucault as an anti-psychiatrist.
"Mental Illness" is a term that conveys literally no information or knowledge about the world and all the states of affairs that exist in the world. It is an oxymoron that can at best be used as a metaphor but metaphors belong to the liberal arts e.g. poetry not science. You might hear scientists use metaphors off the cuff informally but not in formal mathematical and scientific settings since maths and science use a specialized more exact nomenclature. Math is the Queen of the sciences and physics is the king (in that all sciences must obey the laws of physics). While physics is acutely mathematical psychiatry uses mickey mouse level maths that is easily manipulated for political reasons. Mathematics—like poetry—divides into the thing said and the way of saying. Also, as in poetry, the beginner is well advised to distinguish between the two. In mathematics, the thing said ordinarily consists of declarative statements that take the form of definitions or theorems. These statements are set down in the subject’s abstract and symbolic language. The way of saying in mathematics consists of the technical manipulation of these symbols so as to produce proofs of the theorems. Unlike poetry, the statements in mathematics have precise meanings. Words in the theorems have exactly the meanings given in the definitions. There are no analogies or metaphors to peel away. In this sense, mathematics is easier than poetry. On the other hand, the way of saying in mathematics also follows certain precisely described rules. In the proof of any particular theorem, mathematical symbols may be manipulated only according to rules that are described in the definitions or that have been established by previous theorems. Mathematics is precise or else it is nothing. The commitment to precision makes mathematics more difficult than poetry. . Aristotles' natural philosophy turned into what we now know as physics (even though many of Aristotles ideas are wrong) and the the concept of the mind is an intangible metaphysical idea that belongs to Plato or the Platonic realm in stark contrast.
Does a mathematician find new mathematics or does he simply make it up? The first point of view—that of discovery—is known as the “Platonist,” or the “absolutist” viewpoint. The other—that of creation—is referred to as the “constructivist” position. The Platonist view is the more passive, seeing mathematicians more or less as discoverers of an existing mathematical reality. The constructivists see mathematicians as makers, as creators of a mathematical world that without them would not exist. But as the question is pursued at deeper philosophical levels, the two views tend to fuse and the mathematician emerges as creator sometimes and as discoverer at other times. An individual mathematician mathematician often feels he is inventing some or other specific piece of mathematics while simultaneously uncovering bits of mathematical reality through his work as a whole. However, the fundamental question remains: “Is mathematics created or discovered?”
The question is philosophically complicated and has yet to be settled to anyone’s satisfaction. We are not about to settle it here. Nor should we try. But I want to make two points.
The first is that my own view is the constructivist view: mathematics is created.) Mathematicians live in the real world and they create the objects that live in the mathematical world. The second point is that mathematicians themselves are divided on this issue and my position is the minority view. However, If the Platonists are to prevail, they must come to grips with a fundamental, and yet unanswered, question: If mathematics is discovered, then it must already exist. Who created it?
Obviously, you can discover only that which already exists. The Platonists must then provide for mathematics a creator other than a mathematician. Or else, they are obliged to provide a process by which mathematics came to be. Those who believe the world to be made of mathematics should first convert the cosmologists. For the cosmologists—who worry about the creation of the universe—clearly are looking at the wrong problem. What the Platonist position requires is not a theory for the origin of the physical universe, but rather one for the origin of mathematics. We could, of course, put our faith in a revised version of Genesis 1: In the beginning God created mathematics. Otherwise, we need a new cosmology. We need a big bang theory for mathematics. I have none to offer. Neither have the Platonists. I’ll settle for the constructivist viewpoint. Mathematicians create mathematics.
Maybe, you think I am merely splitting hairs superficially :
All philosophy is "Critique of language" (but not at all in Mauthner's sense).Russell's merit is to have shown that the apparent logical form of the proposition need not be its real form.
The truth of tautology is certain, of propositions possible, of contradiction impossible.
Logic is not a theory but a reflexion of the world. Logic is transcendental.
Mathematics is a logical method.
The propositions of mathematics are equations, and therefore pseudo-propositions.
Mathematical propositions express no thoughts.
In life it is never a mathematical proposition which we need, but we use mathematical propositions only in order to infer from propositions which do not belong to mathematics to others which equally do not belong to mathematics.
The totality of true propositions is the total [of] natural science (or the totality of the natural sciences).
The right method of philosophy would be this. To say nothing except what can be said, i.e. the propositions of natural science, i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy: and then always, when someone else wished to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had given no meaning to certain signs in his propositions. This method would be unsatisfying to the other—he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy—but it would be the only strictly correct method.
--Ludwig Wittgenstein
The DSM is not a work of science it is merely a roster of billing codes for insurance companies.
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