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Laurentius-rex:

If you stick with the criterion that something must be falsifiable, you are stuck with the superficial. If Freud is dead, Popper is deader:

http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/gardner_popper.html

If Popper is to be taken seriously, we can dismiss Darwin’s theories as psuedo-science.

There have to be valid alternate approaches to knowledge that don’t measure up to Popper’s stern criteria. Otherwise we would never have been able to retore dead languages or decipher secret codes. One way to do this is to make a model and be prepared to discard it the moment any evidence comes along that doesn’t fit. Then make another model. That’s how Darwin did it, and that’s how Freud did it.

Freud was always ready to abandon pet hypotheses. One of the big modern attacks on Freud had to do with the fact that he abandoned his seduction theory. And yet, when feminist ideologues tried to reintroduce it, an ignorant witch hunt ensued in which daycare providers all over America were falsely jailed for child abuse.

It is a phenomenon that can be viewed in a variety of ways, but above all since the impairments of autism are considered to be in the social realm I can cheerfully say it is probably the most socially constructed diagnosis of all.

Really it is about sub optimal adaptations in certain environments and the disability arises out of the systems capacity to adapt to the alternative episteme that autism represents.

I guess that is why the interface of ideas at various levels of explanation, ontological, rational, empirical, metaphysical all fascinate me.

No one ever gets behind the how’s and the what’s and the wheres of autism to the why’s

A cause is not a reason why, because why is the cause?

Psychoanalysis and psychodynamic explanations are dead, and RAJ is somewhat cognitively blinkered in failing to appreciate the cutting edge of it all right now. A quality he shares with SBC I might add, of being all too single minded and unprepared to consider just what pyschosocial and cognitive detours in there own makeup have to say about there personalities and approach to the subject)

(Not that I can say I am much better, but I am actually prepared to be wrong and that is how research should proceed, as falsifiable)

RAJ whether you know it or not, you are actually arguing for a thoroughgoing re-evaluation of the Kraepelinian paradigm, at which point my own needle becomes stuck

RAJ whether you know it or not, you are actually arguing for a thoroughgoing re-evaluation of the Kraepelinian paradigm, at which point my own needle becomes stuck

RAJ whether you know it or not, you are actually arguing for a thoroughgoing re-evaluation of the Kraepelinian paradigm, at which point my own needle becomes stuck

Baron-Cohen and Frith also represents the worst of the overspecialization in medicine. He looks at autism but not other neurologically impaired populations who have the same cognitive impairments (but not autism).

His Autism Spectrum Quotient test is not a test for the presence of a developmental disability, but is rather a personality test, not surprising since cognitive psychology conceptualizes autism as a psychological disorder rather than a developmental disorder.

I second that.

Even so, modern science is too quick to ignore the contributions of psychoanalysis in this.