Abstract
In general, in our ordinary life, we manage to make the difference between “strange” behavior and error or extravagant beliefs. The question is here to know how we do so, and against what background. There are also specialized contexts for evaluating whether certain types of behavior or discourse are normal or abnormal: courts of law and psychiatric hospitals are two examples. In these contexts, judgments are formed against a background of technical or scientific knowledge, but they also result from epistemic means of evaluation that are similar to habitual ones. The paper seeks to highlight this similarity with respect to recognizing mental disturbance. Starting from Wittgenstein’s On Certainty, it attempts at extending it by drawing on notions of reciprocal perspectives and of judgments of incongruity. It documents its investigation by analyzing sequences from Malek Bensmail’s documentary, Aliénations, which examines the treatment of mental suffering in contemporary Algeria.
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Notes
Our starting point is an analytical interest in both the procedures discriminating the normal and the abnormal, and the praxiological characterization of errors. This is such an interest which motivated our selection of sequences in the documentary under study.
INA Editions put out the DVD in 2012, as part of a box set titled “Looking at Algeria Today”. For a general presentation of the film, see Dupret, 2011.
According to Wittgenstein (1967), there are internal relations between rules and practices. It signifies a grammatical relation between the expression of a rule and the techniques of a normative system, which has nothing to do with the idea of a private concept. An action may occasionally be qualified as a flawed interpretation of the rule, but this expression has meaning only to the extent that it is made from a place situated inside the recognized institution of a normative system. Rules are acquired and embedded in explanations, instructions, examples, errors, training, verification, etc. In other words, they are embedded in practices (Coulter 1989: 67). There is no externality here, nor relativism that would make it possible to dismiss all theories, back to back, as equivalent alternatives based on nothing. Lack of understanding manifests the failure of understanding, not the relative nature of the rule’s meaning and application. The established practices and techniques of a normative system may not be separated from the very terms in which a precise action is described as understanding, alternative understanding, or misunderstanding. A rule can only have meaning, can only be applied and followed, against a general backdrop of institutions, practices, and behavioral techniques that are socially shared and that provide criteria allowing one to distinguish a situation in which a rule is really being followed from another kind (Coulter 1989: 66). Rules and the practice of rules are the expression of a form of life exhibited in the very coherence of our activities. And, due to this coherence, one notices errors, disturbances, and misunderstandings, and their authors are held accountable (Lynch 1993: 176–180).
On trust, see Garfinkel (1963), Watson (2009), and Quéré (2011b). Trust as evoked by Garfinkel is very close to Wittgenstein’s concept of “Ur-trust,” as described by Moyal-Sharrock: it is manifested by the “utter absence of distrust”. This is an “excluder concept”: “Rather than affirm itself, it excludes something: ‘distrust’ or ‘mistrust’” (Moyal-Sharrock 2007: 197).
This is in a way Frazer’s attitude in The Golden Bough, and Evans-Pritchard’s stance with regard to the Azande.
This is the suggestion made by Wittgenstein, against Frazer, and by Winch, against Evans-Pritchard (see herein).
“It does not make sense to suppose that human beings might have been issuing commands and obeying them before they came to form the concept of command and obedience. For their performance of such acts is itself the chief manifestation of their possession of those concepts” (Winch 1958: 125).
On psychiatric reasoning, see Ogien (1989).
Note, however, Maurice Drury’s remark, according to whom, in psychiatry, “[w]e have indeed a nomenclature, but we have no system of naming” (1973: 3).
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Dupret, B., Quéré, L. Error, Aberration, and Abnormality: Mental Disturbance as a Shift in Frameworks of Relevance. Hum Stud 38, 309–330 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-014-9323-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-014-9323-3