Abstract
Neuropsychiatrists confer a seeming validity on their ideas by linking them to numbers. The brain itself has been selected as an object of study because of its measurable dimensions: length, width, depth, weight, motion, temperature, and electrical charge. Indeed, the rising tide of neuropsychiatry might be best understood as little more than a search for one-to-one numerical correlations between mental symptoms and abnormalities within the brain. In this way, biological psychiatry tries to conform to demands of technical science for objectivity and quantitative exactitude.1
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Notes
Genova, p. 20.
E. T. Bell, pp. 20–24.
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This definition, despite use of the word “one” in the phrase “one-to-one,” is not circular. The hyphenated expression, its appearance notwithstanding, does not presuppose the actual concept of a number [Morris Kline, Mathematics, the Loss of Certainty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 223; Scruton, From Descartes to Wittgenstein, pp. 246–247].
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William Kessen and Emily Cahan, “A Century of Psychology: From Subject to Object to Agent,” American Scientist 24 (November-December 1986), p. 647.
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Fechner’s statistical innovations resulted in the methods of average error and of right and wrong cases. His experimental efforts produced a law relating the intensity of a sensation to the logarithm of a stimulus magnitude. The principle led to the acoustic decibel scale and later found parallels in observed relations between light stimulus intensities and evoked neural impulse frequencies. The logarithmic aspect of Fechner’s law ultimately gave way to S. S. Stevens’s power equation in the 1950s, but Stevens owed his methodology to Fechner’s influence (Hearnshaw, pp. 126–129).
Capra, pp. 169.
O. L. Zangwill, “Fechner, Gustav Theodor,” in Gregory, ed., The Oxford Companion, pp. 258–259.
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Hearnshaw, pp. 134–137.
O. L. Zangwill, “Wundt, Wilhelm Max,” in Gregory, ed., The Oxford Companion, pp. 816–817.
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Kerry Buckley, “Watson, John Broadus,” in The Social Science Encyclopedia, eds. Adam Kuper and Jessica Kuper (New York: Routledge, 1985), pp. 891–892.
Robert Epstein, “Watson, John Broadus,” in Gregory, ed., The Oxford Companion, p. 808.
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Kessen and Cahan, p. 647.
Hearnshaw, pp. 226–227, 230–233.
Justin Weiss and Larry Seidman, “The Clinical Use of Psychological and Neuropsychological Tests,” in Nicholi, ed., The New Harvard Guide, pp. 47, 48, 58.
Frattaroli, p. 73.
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© 1994 Donald Mender
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Mender, D. (1994). Neuropsychiatry and Numbers. In: The Myth of Neuropsychiatry. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-6010-8_4
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