Abstract
The boundary between theory and data may be clear to the outside observers of a particular field of science, particularly those who call themselves the philosophers of science, but for the practitioners, working day by day moving constructs into practice, gaining facility for translating abstract notions into operations and back again to revise their theoretical definitions, the boundary tends to dissolve. In the case of a psychiatric physician, for example, libido may start to become observable intensity, the drive behind a compulsion, attachment strength, sexual practices, characterological rigidity, or a variety of other intuitively derived clinical notions. Thousands of pages are spent untangling such confusions, and some gain in understanding results from the enterprise, but the boundary is never clarified. Perhaps the work of clarifying boundary conditions is the task indigenous to research.
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Mandell, A.J. (1977). Some Old and New Theories in Biochemical Psychiatry. In: Gershon, E.S., Belmaker, R.H., Kety, S.S., Rosenbaum, M. (eds) The Impact of Biology on Modern Psychiatry. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-0778-5_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-0778-5_12
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