Suchergebnisse

In his Treatise of Human Nature (1739-1740), David Hume asked how people succeed in constructing edifices of belief from their limited store of sensory impressions and derived ideas. Hume could adduce no evidence to support the existence of an inner self that intelligently manipulates impressions and ideas. At the same time, he recognized in himself the conviction that there is inner self. Today, there is a growing conviction among cognitive neuro-scientists, behavioral scientists, science journalists, and their publics that neuroscience is on the verge of providing us with the ultimate (reductionist) solution to ''Hume's problem.'' This article describes two approaches to this solution.

PTSD's most distinctive feature is its etiological event. With out this event, PTSD symptoms are indistinguishable from symptoms associated with combinations of other psychiatric diagnoses. The DSM definition of PTSD assumes that the relation between the etiological event and its symptoms is equivalent to a cause and effect. In reality, these events are often reasons rather than causes of the syndrome. Where this is true, the syndrome loses its specificity. This paper explains why it is often impossible to distinguish between the reasons and causes of PTSD, and why this difficulty is generally ignored.

A people's medical beliefs and practices persist because they answer instrumental and moral imperatives, and they are empirically effective. This is not the same thing as saying that they are effective from the standpoint of Western medical notions or that they always bring the results for which people hope. The empirical effectiveness of these practices has important ontological consequences, since it enables sickness episodes to communicate and confirm ideas about the real world.