To follow up on yesterday's post: Beware of a field of knowledge that doesn't have clear definitions for its terms. You will often find that such a field is purposely unclear and the reasons are often for control, power and/or money.
A prime example of this is the field of psychiatry. What is the definition of "schizophrenia"? Most people will say "split personality" but that is not the psychiatric definition. Wikipedia defines it as "Schizophrenia is a psychiatric diagnosis denoting a persistent, often chronic, mental illness variously affecting behavior, thinking, and emotion." It goes on to broaden the definition to such a degree that it can mean any type of behavior you want it to mean. This indefinite definition was routinely used in countries such as Communist Russia to labelled dissidents as mentally ill so they could be locked up and electro-shocked to help "cure" them.
In the modern United States and Europe children are labelled as having "Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder" but the definition is so general that it covers normal childhood behavior and indeed the definition even states that the condition will go away as the child gets older. The result is millions of children taking mind altering drugs with the pharmaceutical industry making billions of dollars every year out of them.
So a field with unclear, imprecise definitions can be very dangerous.
Demanding "Action Definitions" for terms in a field is the solution to this. Action definition: one which delineates cause and potential change of state of being by cause of existence, inexistence, action, inaction, purpose or lack of purpose.. An action definition demands that "cause" be clearly stated. So for example in the definition of a medical condition such as measles one can name the cause as the measles virus, one can state the effect that cause has upon the body (produces spots, fever, etc.) and one can then state what will change the condition (the vaccine) by its effect upon that cause. There is no question, ambiguity or uncertainty when an action definition is used.
Action definitions would destroy the field of psychiatry because there are no causes in psychiatry. To determine if a person is schizophrenic a psychiatrist subjectively evaluates the person's behavior. There is no objective test to find the cause. No blood is tested, no x-rays are taken, no medical tests of any kind are made because there is no cause for the condition. The same applies to the entire list of psychiatry's mental illnesses. Sometimes they make up a cause, such as "a chemical imbalance in the brain" but there are no tests to show that such a condition exists.
If you have measles a medical doctor can take a blood sample and detect the virus causing the condition, he can give you a shot and kill the virus so you recover and don't have the disease anymore. In other words the treatment ends because the cause has been handled.
In psychiatry there is no test (because there is no cause), the psychiatrist makes a subjective determination and then prescribes one or more drugs which don't handle the cause and therefore have to be taken forever to keep the "condition" at bay. But a lot of money is made from the never-ending treatment by both the psychiatrist and the drug company.
So the moral of the story is, "demand action definitions."
