|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
A public highway {trafficway} or street is the entire width between property lines {or other boundary lines} of every way or place, of which any part is open to the use of the public for purposes of vehicular traffic as a matter of right or custom. A roadway is that part of the public highway designed, improved, and ordinarily used for vehicular travel. (ICD-10, 1: 274) |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
As the ICD records accident statistics, including place and mode, such precision is needed for the compilation of effective safety statistics, for example. This drive for precision is in principle unending. How much of the social and natural worlds would have to be described within the ICD to produce an exhaustive system? |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The point here is not that these are bad definitions of lipstick areas and streets. It is that they are ineluctably arbitrary ways of cutting up the world. The goal with a classification system is to produce homogeneous causal regions. Homogeneous causal regions are zones without effective subdivision. For the vermilion border, there is no real distinction between upper and lower lip; for streets, there is no real distinction between tarred and gravel roadways. There is no in principal way that such ontologies can be other than a bootstrapping operation. All research work that explores medical causality has the ICD or a similar system as its base referent and so necessarily assumes the ICD's set of homogeneous regions to design its tests, experiments, or projects. It is analytically always possible to act otherwise, to carve the world up differently into other kinds of causal regions. Latour reminds us of this in Science in Action (1987) where he posits the thought experiment: How would someone challenge the basic premises of quantum mechanics?
16 No one would deny that it is possible that these premises are wrong; nor that an experiment might be designed to prove this. The economic and administrative cost of doing so, however, would be huge. Who would fund the proposal? Who would referee the papers? How, in short, would the inertia of the networks involved be overcome? In the same way it is always possible (and somewhat more common than in the quantum mechanics case) to challenge basic ICD categories. It is in practice, however, much easier to hypostatize them and duplicate them for local usage. Exceptions occur when particular categories are linked with social movements and social problems; an outstanding example of this occurred with the demedicalization of homosexuality in the DSM-3, after challenges from the gay community (Kirk and Kutchins 1992). |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
We have seen in this section that medical classifications split up the world into useful categories. They do not describe the world as it is in |
|
|
|
|
|