TimS comments on The Useful Idea of Truth - Less Wrong

77 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 October 2012 06:16PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (513)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 October 2012 05:31:04PM *  0 points [-]

Psychological diagnosis (like those listed in the DSM) function to separate the socially acceptable from the unacceptable and do not even try to cut the world at its joints.

The difference is that post-modernists believe that something like this is true for all science and use this to justify this state of affairs in psychology, whereas LWers believe that this is not an acceptable state of affairs and should be fixed.

Edit: Also as MizedNuts pointed out, the diagnoses do try to cut reality at the joints, they just frequently fail due to social signaling interfering with seeking truth.

Comment author: TimS 02 October 2012 05:44:49PM 3 points [-]

First, if physical anti-realism is true to some extent, then it is true to that extent. By contrast, if Kuhn and Feyerabend messed up the history, then physical anti-realists have no leg to stand on. People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it.

Second, folks like Foucault were at the forefront of the argument that unstated social norm enforcement via psychological diagnosis was far worse than explicit social norm enforcement. They certainly don't argue that the current state of affairs in psychology was (or is) justifiable.