frorum for week of 31 October: error, ignorance, use

I'm not going to answer the question Prof. Morton originally posted, but I wanted to write about something related to what we talked about today in class.

Prof. Morton, near the end of class, talked about how our explanatory concepts change our definitions in the way we order and classify knowledge (eg. the Pluto example and our classifications of animals and diseases). This reminded me of an interesting project being worked on by Vancouver-born philosopher Ian Hacking called Kind Making.

For Hacking, there are two types of kinds: Indifferent and Different kinds.

An indifferent kind is something that is indifferent to how humans name and categorize it in their field of knowledge, ie. how we order and relate different beliefs we hold to be knowledge (I'm coming at this from a coherence perspective). So, an example of this would be electrons, camels, ostriches, etc.

Then there are different kinds: a thing that reacts to how it is named and placed in our field of knowledge. The prime example here would be humans. Hacking specifically deals with different human kinds in relation to mental diseases. For example, the Diagnostic Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) organizes our different definitions of mental disorders and diseases. One particular disorder he takes issue with is Paraphillic Coercive Disorder (link: http://www.dsm5.org/ProposedRevisions/Pages/proposedrevision.aspx?rid=416). The disorder is defined as someone who derives recurrent and intense pleasure from coercing people into sexual acts. His issue is how such strange definitions come about. Many people might not consider someone who enjoys coercing people into sex an actual mental disorder, as if there is a chemical imbalance in their brains. So, how do these definitions created?

His explanation is as follow: If we label someone with sexual sadism when they are not actually a sexual sadist then they will begin to exhibit the qualities of a sexual sadist, but probably not 1 to 1 with the official definition. If someone deviates far enough from the definition, then researchers might say "Gosh! Look at the person who is diagnosed with sexual sadism, but doesn't exhibit the exact qualities. They must some undiscovered disorder!" So, they create a new disorder that defines what qualities this person exhibits, even if they have no chemical imbalances at all! So, perhaps they create something like Paraphillic Coercive Disorder. The issue is are we not actually discovering knowledge, but creating a new field of knowledge that is specifically not discovered, but made by people.

This raises many epistemological, political, social and ethical issues, which I won't go further about here.

Hope people found this interesting.