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