bobr (09/18/82)
In response to Eric Strobel's recent submission which said that
(i) there was a certain limit of atrocity beyond which he felt
incapable of going, and
(ii)"the entire realm of psychiatry is little more than a
fabrication." :
1. I do not want to step on anybody's christian feet, BUT
I think that it is essentially a fallacy to deny that there
are "evil" sides to every human (saints, Christ, Buddha etc.
*probably* excluded). And by evil I mean EVIL, like wanting
to kill in the most atrocious way.
Take note, for example, of the particular Germans who committed
massacres in WWII; MOST of them were "normal" people. If they're
still alive and have not been jailed they lead a "decent" life,
indistinguishable from many other old people.
(My own interpretation of this FACT is that *normalcy*, *decency*
etc. are much more brittle than we like to think.)
2. Now the above is just one fact which needs to be explained;
looking for an explanation means that one will come up with
*concepts* which link the known facts to other known facts
and enable one to predict future observations to some degree.
This, to me, is the germ of any scientific or scholarly endeavour:
Trying to make sense of the *world* around oneself, of perceptions,
measurements, and yes, feelings.
The *scientific* method is certainly distinguished from
others in that it is (usually deemed to be) more rigid, operational
and all that. But, of course, there is a LOT of imagination,
phantasy, guts, prejudice, preconceptions, in the realm of "hard"
science. And, last but not least, the answers you get from nature
depend on what questions you ask, i.e. what kinds of experiments you
set up.
Granted, the degree to which scientific predictiions can be verified
is higher than in "soft" sciences; but then soft sciences try to
make predictions about something which is inherently fuzzy, e.g.
human behaviour. To claim that only the investigation of the
"lowest level", namely the neurological level, of human behaviour
is of any value, seems somewhat narrowminded to me.
Christoph Bobrowski utcsrgv!bobr