>From the initial discussion here, however, I already see links to two
recent experiences.
One, at a conference on discourse analysis where a visiting
neuropsychologist explained that the DSM had all but single-handedly
revived the status of psychiatry and restored its opportunities for
scientific funding after the prior era in which inability to agree on
diagnoses had been seen as evidence of the unscientific character of the
field.
Two, an analysis I did of the discourse of a group of medical students
being coached in diagnosis by a clinical mentor, in which it seemed to me
that the disciplinary insistence on categorical distinctions between
diagnostic categories was (a) distorting in relation to the data being
discussed, and (b) resisted by the students who kept mobilizing all the
(limited range of) available semantic resources to express
meaning-by-degree ("topological" as opposed to categorial or "typological"
meaning) and using visual-motor communicative resources in the same way to
elude the strictures of a classificational approach and stay closer to the
actually reported data about a real patient.
>From the conclusion of a talk I gave on this (the discussion itself is
being published, as are a set of related articles on this discourse data):
"What I take from all of this as a general point is that issues of
typological vs. topological meaning provide an interesting lens through
which to look at medical education and perhaps at technical and scientific
education generally. The typological, categorical approach is so dominant
in our disciplinary and conceptual picture of things that we don't give
sufficient official status to the topological way of looking at things. We
know that professionals do their magic precisely by coordinating their
topological, continuous-variation sense of things -- the in-betweens and
the maybe's -- with the categorical certainties of our official theories
about the world."
If you traces the connections of classificatory-typological-categorical
practices far enough, you find, I think, a very important connection (quite
evident in semantic analysis, for instance) between categorical
classifications, two-value (true/false) logics, and the whole rhetorical
apparatus of "I'm right, you're wrong, so do as I say." From this spreads
out the power networks of technocrats, adversarial proceedings in law,
scholarship, and the professions, and, I'll venture, the masculinist basis
of gendered power relations. The latter will be my theme at ISCRAT.
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
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