Abstract

SANCHEZ DE LAS MATAS MARTIN, María del Carmen. Mereological Confusion And Psychiatric Practice: Aspects Of Theoretical And Empirical Failure. InterSedes [online]. 2016, vol.17, n.35, pp.59-94. ISSN 2215-2458.  http://dx.doi.org/10.15517/isucr.v17i35.25564.

On the following pages, standing from theoretical (Bickle, Mandik & Landreth, 2012) and critical (Choudhury, Nagel & Slaby, 2009) neuroscience, certain aspects concerning the anthropological, ethical, logical and empirical insufficiency of the conceptual construct of "schizophrenia" are raised, placing special attention to its exclusively biologicist reduction on the physicalist unidirectional course (Sass, 2014). In the Western diagnostic categories, there are underlying cultural assumptions about what 'consciousness' and the 'pathological states of consciousness' (Lewis-Williams, 2015) are, which in turn, set forth cultural judgments about "normality" or "abnormality" (Geertz, 2006; Fourasté, 1992; Harris, 2014a) of the 'states of consciousness' and the behavior of certain individuals that our present tradition call "schizophrenic" (APA, 2013/2014). The mereological confusion of the neuroscience (Bennett & Hacker, 2006; 2007) has its praxic equivalent in brain-reductionist research and in its associated biomedical praxis (Bentall, 2004; Sass, 2014). On these bases, international standards are inefficient to prevent situations such as the one exemplified by the prestigious psychiatrist Nancy C. Andreasen regarding the loss of brain tissue due to antipsychotic drugs (Dreyfus & Andreasen, 2008; Andreasen, 2013; Valverde, 2010; Sánchez Vallejo, 2013). Reductionist empirical research of the "schizophrenic" brain accumulates subcontrary individual propositions, fallacious inductions and ad hoc hypothesis, failing in itself its scientific criteria, and without having responded adequately to neuroepigenetics (Ming, 2015). In this sense, a logical progression of the neurosciences toward the human sciences is understood, in the context of a paradigmatic rupture of postcognitivism and of a demanding transdisciplinarity (Decety & Christen, 2014; Clark & Chalmers, 1998; Noë, 2010; Northoff, 2014; Kirmayer & Ryder, 2016).

Keywords : Consciousness; mereological confusion of the neuroscience; continuum; culture; schizophrenia; fallacious induction; neuroepigenetics; subcontrary propositions; postcognitivism.

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