ABSTRACT
There are two things wrong with the attitude of that department. First is the element of subjectivism, which increasingly infects contemporary social science; questions about the existence of categories (types, taxa, species, disease entities) are treated as a matter of taste rather than as factual questions involving causality and mathematics. It is as if, in espousing a theory of, say, schizophrenia, one was like a willful child contemplating the offerings in a candy store, “That one looks good,” “I’ll take two of those,” “I hate chocolate,” and the like. Second, aside from wallowing in subjectivity, we have a polarization in which one is for or against the use of certain concepts, rather than trying to understand the conceptual and statistical relations that might exist between them.
