What do we know ?

The Johari Window

Honesty.

…not always the best approach for every circumstance.

It would be useful in methods, though:

Science.

Philosophy.

Mental Health.

Psychology, though, i’d say it’s more a pure contingent ideology. Yes, we love to say that psychology as a science, but I’d say it’s more a contingent ideology. And at that, contingent because what it wants to deal with, and what it sees we should deal with, is ultimately dependent upon whether or not we need to manipulate a situation.

I’m not making an ethical judgment here. On the contrary, I’m saying that psychology and indeed has its function, but let’s be honest about what that function is, what that functioning is.

I have difficulty with the idea that science is based on neutral, objective observation and experiment. I think there is more than a few theorist and philosophers have shown us that science, as we generally understand and know of it, is filled with subjectivity. Never mind the potential for manipulation involved in the “pure objective” methods of statistics and probability.

I’m not gonna get into all the Ends and outs of all the nonsense here.

What I was thinking about this morning was how we really don’t know very much, even as we pretend to.

But then my mind went to, well, I’m not even sure if that’s the case. Because, I’m sure that there are a bunch of things that we know truly. Despite what Philosopher would want to arguments, I would say that one thing I know for sure is if I run really fast into a brick wall it will hurt. I’m not really sure what the function is of a type of discussion or argument that would pull that apart to say that that instance and that knowledge of that instance it’s not true, And I would have to question the motivation of anyone who would want to argue that it is not true.

As I’ve been saying in this blog for a long time, I feel that we need to be more honest and more clear about what we’re doing with any endeavor. I’ve said this in the context of philosophy, because I feel like Philosophy. as a discipline is, at once, filled with many projects that speak over each other and into each other such that philosophy becomes this “eternal process” instead of really coming to any conclusions that are useful, but then also within philosophies the intention so motivates discourse that it crosses so many lines of agenda it never notices in its self, in its motion.

I tend to suggest that the culprit in these methodological transgressions is transcendence itself. What I generally lumped together to say “phenomenology”. Phenomenology mixed together with philosophy, like an unseen partnership, gives license to thinkers to be unclear under the guise of intellectual clarity. And I think this moves all the way up into our type of academic intelligence. For, anymore, it would seem, it matters less about how honest and clear we are for the sake of our position in society. We are not even allowed to indict any theoretical discussion as honest or clear in itself, because the method itself is taken to be sacrosanct. It’s taken to be “natural” Or “of course”, methodologically consistent, logically coherent or cogent. We are not allowed to personalize discourses to themselves. Even the idea of hermeneutics, it’s self has become a distortion of what it most likely was attempting to do when whoever decided to come up with that name for a project.

But this post is more about science. Because it says though the method of science requires room for a reasonable doubt. It seems terribly ironic for a method that is supposed to be giving us empirical truths. I ask only that science and medicine be honest with its abilities. And I think anymore that science has such terrible, In itself, upheld by scientists often enough, has such terrible hubris that it will not even admit it’s limitations. It says it’s method and the results if it’s method as revealing truth inherently and obviously.

But all I’m calling for really is maybe for science to do an inventory of itself and admit what truth of it do we actually know, and what other knowledge do we just assert that we know, we pretend that we know for the sake of some responsibility to that society that is looking to science and medicine to solve its problems.

It seems to me that a lot of our problems with medicine, but particularly mental health, arise in this area. 

 not so much truth for the sake of truth. Rather, honesty. 

And, not across-the-board. Not transparent to everyone. But at least honest and what we are trying to accomplish.