The other philosophy of social science and psychiatric diagnosis (appendix with code) Author's name (parents' draft): Terence Rajivan Edward (now Doctor) Dialogue on names (fictional): "Now why do you want a name?" So that my works can be identified - that is one reason. "You need a number really." Author's name (my first draft): 0161__Rajivan Abstract. There are the social sciences, such as economics and social anthropology, and philosophy of social science has questions such as "Can this discipline predict?" and "Is it actually a science?" But there are other matters which one addresses at a high level of generality and involve much reflection probably and philosophical talent, so some people will probably count addressing these as doing philosophy: for example - an issue philosophers have some familiarity with from W.V. Quine - "Will I be too nervous working with your preferred assumptions, philosopher?" Beyond social science, consider psychiatric diagnostic systems. The Lacanian system is simple and elegant, but maybe reality is messier than that; but too many categories and the average psychiatrist will find it too stressful to use. There is probably a battle over swing-voter-like figures: a psychiatrist who thinks, "I want to help people but I have some ordinary aims in life too. Relax at the end of the day. Have a family perhaps. Be a consultant with some authority, not having to politely answer every annoying person." Draft version: version 3 (21 June 2026; v2 15th May 2026, poem edited, Quine field linguist material added) Maybe I should write this live: Display my thought and how they arrive "What is philosophy of social science? I am in a school of social science, but I don't know anything about this really." A respected philosopher of science once asked me this question. Here is an obvious answer. "Well, you are a philosopher of science: you can just apply the general questions of that subfield to social science. In general philosophy of science, we have a debate over when something counts as a science or when it is pseudo-science. So you can ask: Is economics a science? Is social anthropology a science? Also we ask whether one science can be reduced to another. You can ask that about social sciences." But there is another philosophy of social science or people will count it as this. You have to set up a framework which these people can sensibly use and which enables their discipline to flourish. For example, for social anthropology and related linguistic projects, the fieldworker must not be too nervous using the assumptions of the framework. Professional philosophers are already acquainted with this issue from W.V. Quine. Quine asks us to imagine a field linguist who finds that a certain sentence is used by natives if and only if in the presence of a rabbit. The linguist is disposed to translate it thus: "Lo, a rabbit!" or some very similar sentence, in terms of its metaphysical commitments. But Quine says that the very same sentence could be translated differently and still fit with the evidence of when the sentence is used. An example that is sometimes given is "It is rabbity," comparable to "It is foggy": there is no commitment to a bounded entity, a rabbit. But a linguist who assumes that for any sentence, there can be alternative translations which fit with the evidence, and considers such translations, will likely become nervous. ("Why? Why not indifferent?" you ask. If this example does not work as illustration, see the next one!) Quine describes them as a cagey and caged linguist. So one has to develop a framework of assumptions which enables the linguist to do their research without becoming too nervous, so that they cannot or can barely function. This setting up a framework requires reflection and thinking at a high level of generality and philosophical talent, so you are going to be counted as a philosopher in some people's eyes. But you typically need to understand a lot about what it is to be an empirical researcher in a given social science. I shall give another example. Social anthropologists traditionally go to exotic and small scale societies, by our standards, and report what they found. You realize: "We need massive concessions to Kuhn for social anthropologists, because people want to hear about differences and of the kind that interest Kuhnians: this is our set of concepts for making sense of the world and this is their set. They don't want to hear, or read: you went to this remote tribe and you found that the average person there distinguishes between urinating and defecating (or wee/peeing and pooing, or pissing and shitting, if you prefer it worded like that, my apologies to the censors)!" ("Who is Kuhn?" someone wonders. See appendix 3.) Then you realize this: the Kuhnian fieldworker who is not making progress is likely to get depressed and think, "They just have another paradigm - an alien system of concepts and associated assumptions - and I cannot get into it somehow." Perhaps it is indeed a paradigm-difference situation but it is much healthier for them to think, "They are deliberately making life confusing for me. I get the message. Some groups kill you, others have subtler ways of driving you away." How are you going to solve this problem? Kuhnianism is required; Kuhnianism brings this risk. Don't be surprised if someone says: "You solve problems like and I would call you a philosopher of social science!" These frameworks are set up by very clever people, it seems, and with decades of refinement, maybe centuries. Let us now turn to psychiatry, where the problem of setting up a framework that ordinary workers in the discipline can use also arises. The Lacanian framework with a few tweaks can probably be sold to some analytic philosophers, believe it or not. It is simple and elegant. There are three diagnostic categories: psychotic, perverse, and neurotic. (It seems an echo of the old Victorian classification: the delusional, the morally insane, and the normal. "Sell the English back their own history thinly coated, and observe tantrums about French obscurity"?) You are one of these kinds, according to it. "But I am healthy." For Lacan, you can be of that type without displaying symptoms at present. Moving on. Diagnosis is based on language use, not gestures and other behaviours. And the same outward symptom can be displayed by individual A and B even though they belong to different types. (Reminds you of: two things which appear the same may belong to different natural kinds. Fools gold and real gold?) An important difference between Lacan and psychiatry - as we ordinarily assume it to be and probably as it is practised - is this: Lacan thinks a delusion is recovery rather than the problem. But we can get to this or a similar perspective by means of Quine: a different use of Quine to above! You can rationally hold whatever belief you want as your core belief, if you make sufficient changes elsewhere. A psychotic privately believes "You are a demon," but also "I am such an angel that it is safe for me to talk to you." Everyday life continues. "But don't psychotics suddenly commit extreme crimes?" I don't know what to say about this, but don't neurotics sometimes bomb people? (I have encountered people who seem to think it is wrong to push you into an oncoming car, but okay to walk in your direction in a way that makes it likely you will step out onto the road.) There are things which make me suspicious about this Lacanian system though. It has lots about very rare but glamorous disorders, for example Folie à Deux. It seems a lot of work has gone into attracting a worker in the system who is interested in these: "Don't give me a run-of-the-mill psychosis; I will just work for cognitive science." The very best psychiatrists may prefer a considerably less elegant system. But there may be problems with getting the average psychiatrist to use it. If it has too many subtly different categories, it is probably stressful to use. When examining a psychiatric system, you may have to think of it as the outcome of compromise between numerous "forces," not just what an expert psychiatrist thinks is the best diagnostic system given an ideal team. I will repeat a comedy sketch I wrote, which I put on Instagram. A master psychiatrist is teaching three student psychiatrists. He shows them two cases and asks if they can recognize the difference. The first student psychiatrist cannot but nods his head. The second student psychiatrist can but thinks, "The average psychiatrist won't be able to. You, master psychiatrist, are clever and good at diagnosis but you need to understand the average psychiatrist, up-and-coming trends in the field, and much more about social reality." Anyway, she says she can. The third student psychiatrist also can but thinks, "This second case is a massive problem for me. You could not possibly expect me to deal in the medically expected way with them. They will soon be a better psychiatrist than me." Will she say: yes or no? I don't know. (Not sure how realistic this is, but I suspect something like this happens.) Appendix 1: code (related to previous homework? find if a person has closed the brackets) This is BASIC code to check the number of open brackets in a string of letters, you can change the test string. 10 TESTITEM$ = "helo01(((p" 20 PRINT "Open bracket test for this: "; TESTITEM$ 30 ITEMLENGTH$ = LEN(TESTITEM$) 40 XPOS = 1 50 NUMOBRACKET = 0 60 LETTER$ = MID$(TESTITEM$, XPOS, 1) 70 IF LETTER$ = "(" THEN NUMOBRACKET = NUMOBRACKET + 1 80 XPOS = XPOS + 1 90 IF <= ITEMLENGTH THEN GOTO 60 100 PRINT "Number of open brackets: ", NUMOBRACKET Appendix 2: Binoche comedy sketch #4? An examination room of desks, at each of which sits a Juliette Binoche lookalike, one of whom is the real Juliette Binoche. "If you get first class on this exam, you can go into philosophy. You will have long-term success. You can wear whatever clothes you want." Move forward a week. The Binoches are at the desks with one desk empty. "There are too many who passed. We are going to have to add other tests," says the instructor. "What tests?" Instructor asks if any can cartwheel. Some say, "This is ridiculous." The real Juliette Binoche says, "I will do it." She walks to the front but looks pained. The sketch ends before we find out what happens next! Appendix 3: Thomas Kuhn Thomas Kuhn presented a vision of the history of the natural sciences, which has been exported to explain other histories. (Some say that everything in Kuhn was there before; if so, it is in one convenient text.) This is very brief. The history of a scientific community is divided into normal and revolutionary periods. In a normal period, a scientific community has an accepted theory. We can think of them as having a set of theoretical assumptions, ones which are not essential to any research with that community's aim - earlier they might have made other assumptions. The set is a "paradigm" in a sense Kuhn popularized. Problems build up for the paradigm and there is a revolutionary period in which there is search for a new paradigm. A normal period begins when a new one is established. Kuhn thinks the difference between the old paradigm and the new one is so large that the scientists from the period are like speakers of a language we cannot translate. Donald Davidson denies this and argues that there is vast common ground of shared beliefs (and concepts) between scientists from different periods. References Davidson, Davidson. 1973-4. On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme. Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 47: 5-20. Available at: https://eltalondeaquiles.pucp.edu.pe/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/On-the-Very-Idea-of-a-Conceptual-Scheme.pdf Edward, Terence Rajivan. 2025. Why can't television comedy sketch shows flourish because of convenience? No scouring the Internet required. Available on PhilPapers. (Source for the homework, early on.): https://philpapers.org/archive/EDWWCT-3.pdf Edward, Terence Rajivan. 2025. For anthropologists? The worldview of analytic philosophy - the method as technology assumption (the camera assumption). Available on PhilPapers. (Explains a solution to the homework.): https://philpapers.org/archive/EDWFAT-6.pdf Fink, Bruce. 1997. A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Kuhn, Thomas S. 2012 (fourth edition). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Earlier edition available at: https://www.lri.fr/~mbl/Stanford/CS477/papers/Kuhn-SSR-2ndEd.pdf Lacan, Jacques. Collected works. Quine, W.V. 1951. Two dogmas of empiricism. The Philosophical Review 60(1): 20-43. Available at: https://www.theologie.uzh.ch/dam/jcr:ffffffff-fbd6-1538-0000-000070cf64bc/Quine51.pdf Quine, W.V. 1968. Ontological Relativity. Journal of Philosophy 65 (7):185-212. Available at: http://www.thatmarcusfamily.org/philosophy/Course_Websites/Readings/Quine%20-%20Ontological%20Relativity.pdf