Erik Moeller wrote:
Delirium-
That is completely irrelevant to my comment. The
American Psychiatry
Association represents a particular faction within psychology, with a
particularly extremist viewpoint that there is no such thing as mental
illness, but only physical illness, and all mental illnesses are
actually "brain diseases" that they will begrudgingly call "mental
disorders" for historical reasons, with the understanding that they are
wholly the result of physiological medical conditions.
At least Wikipedia is biased in the right direction, then.
Perhaps you meant "biased in the direction of stupidity" but mistyped?
The current articles expound on a view that only MDs with no
philosophical sophistication hold, because they simply make no sense.
If you pick up any book on the philosophy of mind, or read a philosophy
journal on the subject, you'll see these views of the mind/body problem
not even being discussed, because they're too ridiculous to merit
serious consideration.
Held by whom? Since when is the general public relevant
when it comes to
scientific claims? By that standard, we would have to preface every
article on biology with creationist claims, because they are so widely
held. Overall popularity is the worst possible standard to use when it
comes to NPOV.
And who makes the decision that the creationists' claims are inferior to
the biologists' claims? If Wikipedia is to neutrally document the
world, it cannot take its own members' biases into such strong
consideration. Sure, most of us think the creationists have invalid
arguments, but Wikipedia is not the place to claim that, just to
document what the arguments are. We can report studies that debunk
their claims, and report who thinks what of the studies, but we should
just be reporting. We can say things like "the majority of the
mainstream scientific community thinks [blah], although the majority of
the population thinks [blah]."
If there are distinct scientific traditions, then I
agree with you that we
should not favor one over the other.
What if there are distinct scientific and philosophical traditions, and
they conflict? Science is not the arbiter of all knowledge, and often
scientists are philosophically unsophisticated (bioethics being a good
example).
-Mark