Hey Carl, Carl said: Time for a big slice of humble pie here. I did confuse the definitions. (Who was it that said something about a little learning being a dangerous thing?) See the following for a one-page definition of the distinction between psychopath and sociopath:
http://helpingpsychology.com/sociopath-vs-psychopath-whats-the-difference Matt: That's fair enough. The DSM-IV itself doesn't use the terms officially (like, in the index for example) and you have to know ahead of time what the history of label-transformation in the field is. In common parlance, for example, there's no difference at all between psychopath and sociopath (that I've found). People pretty much use them as slang for the same thing: people who lack social empathy. (Though, my impression is that "psycho" was earlier appropriated into slang, though lately "socio" has begun displacing it: witness Dexter. Angel Batista is constantly calling Dexter, ironically, "socio," though given the weblink, Dexter is clearly a charming psychopath. Come to think of it, Dexter is a good version of the thought experiment I fielded. Certainly he's sick, but what does he tell us about our ways of moral thinking, particularly if we suppose that he is never outed to the public.) And, on the other hand, it was clear you were talking about psychosis and antisocial personality disorder, which is the interesting thing to bring to bear on Pirsig's philosophy of insanity. I'm not sure if Pirsig's insights have anything interesting to say about the distinction between sociopath and psychopath found on the weblink above. Carl said: >From reading the thread, it strikes me that Persig's definition of DQ is very similiar to the concept of superposition in quantum theory. Once a particular option is chosen, it then becomes SQ. Does that sound too far 'out there'? Matt: No, it sounds about right to me, though I don't like analogies between social phenomena and scientific phenomena (in the past, they have often been gateways for reductionism, as people try to stop thinking of it _as_ an analogy, and for pernicious forms of cosmos-projecting, i.e. taking one pattern and finding it everywhere, and drawing conclusions from it and making those conclusions fit back onto the phenomena, which sometimes creates a square-peg/round-hole forced feeling). I prefer the analogy with the practice of common law: there are laws, but also judgments by judges, and past rulings have the force of law. This kind of practice mimics the authority of tradition and codifies it as a principle: stare decisis, the rule of precedent. You can't just make up the law (pure chaos), you have to take seriously past judgments (SQ) and--if you disagree with how to fit a current experience before you into the past's purview--find in the past a latent principle that, on the surface might seem to break past interpretations of the particular law, but in the eyes of future judges, holds true as what the law really meant all along (DQ). That's for English and American common law what betterness replacing past static patterns would look like. Matt Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
