Why don't our institutes teach the methodology of clinical psychoanalytic evidence?

One of the most pressing theoretical, therapeutic, and educational problems confronting the advance of psychoanalysis is our confusion about the nature of clinical evidence. There is considerable disagreement among psychoanalysts about how to define evidence. Recently, there has also been a growing tendency toward evidential nihilism, justified by some of the more radical constructivist-narrative views of postmodern epistemology. Two surveys, conducted ten years apart, of all the psychoanalytic institutes recognized by the American Psychoanalytic Association, indicate a continuing and disturbing neglect of this topic in the curricula of our institutes. This paper reports the views of a number of psychoanalytic educators who participated in these surveys and is intended to stimulate discussion about the causes of this critical problem.     

The empirical basis of color perception

Rationalizing the perceptual effects of spectral stimuli has been a major challenge in vision science for at least the last 200 years. Here we review evidence that this otherwise puzzling body of phenomenology is generated by an empirical strategy of perception in which the color an observer sees is entirely determined by the probability distribution of the possible sources of the stimulus. The rationale for this strategy in color vision, as in other visual perceptual domains, is the inherent ambiguity of the real-world origins of any spectral stimulus.     

Expanding the universe of categorical syllogisms: a challenge for reasoning researchers

Syllogistic reasoning, in which people identify conclusions from quantified premise pairs, remains a benchmark task whose patterns of data must be accounted for by general theories of deductive reasoning. However, psychologists have confined themselves to administering only the 64 premise pairs historically identified by Aristotle. By utilizing all combinations of negations, the present article identifies an expanded set of 576 premise pairs and gives the valid conclusions that they support. Many of these have interesting properties, and the identification of predictions and their verification will be an important next step for all proponents of such theories.     

A Pragma-Dialectical Analysis of the Inquisition

Disagreement space consists of all the commitments and understandings required for an utterance to take on its discourse function. These are virtual standpoints that can be called out for explicit argumentation. This paper shows how the Inquisition systematically controlled disagreement space, preventing some apparently important standpoints from ever being argued about, and requiring attention to others that may not have initially seemed relevant. This control of disagreement space constituted violation of the rules for critical discussion. The essay suggests that the idea of disagreement space be slightly enlarged, to show the distinctions among virtual, possible, and actual disagreement spaces. The Inquisition's extra-argumentative power is what permitted its specification of the possible disagreement space. The analysis suggests that pragma-dialectics may have application in the criticism and analysis of social institutions.     

Deductivism and the Informal Fallacies

This essay proposes and defends a general thesis concerning the nature of fallacies of reasoning. These in distinctive ways are all said to be deductively invalid. More importantly, the most accurate, complete and charitable reconstructions of these species and specimens of the informal fallacies are instructive with respect to the individual character of each distinct informal fallacy. Reconstructions of the fallacies as deductive invalidities are possible in every case, if deductivism is true, which means that in every case they should be formalizable in an expressively comprehensive formal symbolic deductive logic. The general thesis is illustrated by a detailed examination of Walter Burleigh's paradox in his c. 1323 work, De Puritate Artis Logicae Tractatus Longior (Longer Treatise on the Purity of Logic), as a challenge to the deductive validity of hypothetical syllogism. The paradox has the form, ‹If I call you a swine, then I call you an animal; if I call you an animal, then I speak truly; therefore, if I call you a swine, then I speak truly'. Several solutions to the problem are considered, and the inference is exposed as an instance of the common deductive fallacy of equivocation.     

Two Sides of Any Issue

Seneca in his Moral Epistles to Lucilium ridicules Protagoras’ claim that both sides of any position can be equally well argued. Cicero, on the contrary, in the surviving fragments of his dialogue, the Republic, maintains in the person of Laelius that the thorough exploration of the strengths and weaknesses of any position pro and con is the best and often the only dialectical avenue to the discovery of difficult truths. There are therefore at least two sides to the issue of whether philosophers ought to address their arguments to the two sides of any issue. This paper examines the epistemic advantages and disadvantages of the same reasoning agent playing both roles of advocate and critic, as opposed to encouraging only distinct independently minded reasoning agents each to consider any of the opposing sides of an issue in dispute. The question in argumentation theory posed by this inquiry in simplest terms is whether a single thinker considering both sides of an issue is more able to arrive at truth, or whether, as the popular adage has it, two minds are inherently dialectically better than one. The answer proposed here is that it does not matter provided that the conflict of opposing views are in some manner resolved with the sincere intention of arriving at the truth.     

The PHQ-9 as a brief assessment of lifetime major depression

The Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9; R. L. Spitzer, K. Kroenke, J. B. W. Williams, & The Patient Health Questionnaire Primary Care Study Group, 1999), modified to ask about the worst period of depression lifetime, was validated against lifetime mood disorder diagnoses established by the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV (SCID; M. B. First, R. L. Spitzer, M. Gibbon, & J. B. W. Williams, 2001) in 526 participants. PHQ-9 dichotomous scores corresponded highly with major depressive episode (MDE) Criterion A, MDE, and major depressive disorder (MDD), odds ratios >or= 9.5, and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) >or= 0.84. The continuous scale score was higher in participants who did (M=17.14, SD=7.36) than in those who did not (M=6.05, SD=6.29) meet MDE Criterion A, t(524)=18.09, p<.001; was correlated with number of MDE Criterion A symptoms, r(525)=.67, p<.001; and detected MDE Criterion A (AUC=0.88). The PHQ-9 as a lifetime measure may be used to complement or replace more costly interview assessments.     

Concurrent Validity of the Multidimensional Health Profile—Health Functioning Scales (MHP-H) in the Pre-operative Assessment of Applicants for Gastric Bypass Surgery

The concurrent validity of a brief screening test, the Multidimensional Health Profile-Health Functioning (MHP-H) was examined in conjunction with a much more lengthy pre-operative assessment procedure in 449 applicants for gastric bypass surgery (GBS). The MHP-H is a 69-item screening inventory that assesses five areas of health functioning: Adult Health History, Health Habits, Health Care Utilization, Health Beliefs and Attitudes, and Response to Illness. The more lengthy procedure included a comprehensive 273-item structured interview plus the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 (MMPI-2), Basic Personality Inventory (BPI), and Beck Depression Inventory (BDI). The MHP-H showed significant correspondence with the more comprehensive assessment on measures of potential relevance to outcome in GBS, supporting the use of the MHP-H as a low-cost alternative to the more extensive procedure. The utility of the MHP-Psychosocial Functioning (MHP-P), a companion instrument to the MHP-H, was demonstrated in an earlier study.