hey maven, thank you for your thoughts :-)

> I don't think being around people who believe certain things will change your beliefs, unless there's something that you find within their beliefs, or something you experience at that time, that convinces you.

yeah. i guess my thought was... that sometimes we can accept something as true on rational grounds, but kind of have trouble believing it because we don't have this sense of conviction or something.

E.g., 'I'm a worthwhile person who is worthy of love'.

I believe this on rational grounds (I believe that EVERYBODY is a worthwhile person who is worthy of love and so since I'm a person I must believe that I'm a worthwhile person who is worthy of love).

But... Sometimes... I have trouble feeling convinced that this is so. To say it just seems empty.

How do I go about truely coming to believe it? I hang around people who really do believe that I'm a worthwhile person who is worthy of love.

So...

'Mentally ill people are defective'.

If you don't want to believe that anymore then there are arguments... And... Hanging out with people who don't treat mentally ill people as defective is likely to go some way towards your really coming to endorse it on an emotional level.

That was my thought there.

> I agree with you that the issue is why I believe humans are meant to be a certain way.

Yeah.

> It's the logic I've grown to believe, based on those experiences in my life. I remember your example in a previous post about females being considered malfunctioning males, and I agree, that's a false thing.

Right. What my concern is... Is that if you take someone from the 1930's and you asked them to list what they believed to be defective (based on their past experiences) they might well list such defects as:

- Homosexuality
- Being female

If we take you and ask you to list what you believe to be defective (based on your past experience) we will get a different list.

If we take a variety of different people we will get a variety of different lists.

Now... While it is true that you believe what you believe and it is true that they believe what they believe... Since there is conflict in the way different people take the world to be... Not everybody can be right.

So: What we want to know is: Are people with mental disorder defective? And then (on the assumption that the aim of belief is truth people should alter their beliefs to conform to the best theory we have of the way the world actually is).

Back to the 'females are defective males' case. To say that something is defective is to say that it deviates or fails to conform to some standard or ideal or norm.

Back then males were taken to be the biologically normal or ideal or standard human being and females differences were described with respect to how they deviated from the male standard.

Now... Textbooks typically offer both males and females to be the biologically normal or ideal or standard human being and other sex differences are described with respect to how they deviate from the male or the female standard.

One might talk about processes of cell regeneration and then use that model as an ideal or standard so one can describe cancerous cells as deviating or failing to conform to the ideal or norm of cell regeneration.

One might instead construct a model of the statistically usual progression of cancer whereby 'standard forms' of cancer are ones that follow the processes described in the model and devient cancer forms are forms that deviate from the model.

So...

1) Firstly you need to construct / find the 'ideal' standard.
2) Secondly you need to identify deviations from the standard as devient.

But...

Is there an objective standard that we should adopt? Is there a fact of the matter that means we should model one sex (whereby all other forms are devient) or two forms (whereby all other forms are devient) or ten forms...

Whether something is devient or not seems to depend crucially on what we take the ideal standard to be. And... Which ideal standard we adopt does in fact seem to be a matter of human decision.

What this shows us... Is that whether something is devient or not is not solely a matter of objective fact (for the sciences to discover). It depends crucially on what norms we choose. Hence... To describe something as devient is crucially a value judgement of saying that someone fails to conform to some ideal.

Platonists think that the right ideals or the true ideals or the ideals that we should adopt are fixed by 'ideal forms'. Plato thought that there was this other realm of forms that contains such ideal forms as the perfect triangle and the perfect dog and the perfect person etc. (Is the perfect dog big or small or middlesized do you think? Does it have short fur or long fur?) Plato thought that everything in the actual world deviates somewhat from the ideal. The world contains but 'dim copies'.

I suppose religious people can appropriate the Platonic realm of forms and reinterpret it as 'heaven' where God sets the standard of 'supposed to' or 'ideal' or 'perfection'. I wonder if God thinks that big dogs are better than small dogs... I wonder if he thinks big dogs are more ideal because they are in fact more ideal or whether his thinking that they are ideal makes it so...

Sigh.

I think I hear what you are saying with respect to a non-normative (judgemental) notion of malfunction / devience. I'm not sure that there is one, however.

(Unless you are talking about statistical abnormality but even statistical abnormality requires us to pick a class of people to compile the statistics around e.g., '20 year old males' or 'people over 5 feet tall who live in the antartic' or whatever)

There is a big debate at the moment over whether there is an objective notion of devience / malfunction / defect...

It comes up with respect to people campaigning:

'I'm not deaf (where to be deaf is a 'bad thing') I'm hearing impaired'.

Where 'hearing impaired' means that if you take a biological model on how the ear works... Their ears don't work like that.

If you make a biological model of people who are hearing impaired in the same way (and label it 'a model of hearing#)... Then anyone whos ears didn't work like that would be hearing# impaired. Either because they didn't hear for different reasons or because they could hear (which would be a very big deviation from the model!)

Likewise cancer cells that weren't rapidly replicating... Would be malfunctioning cancer cells. (Cancer cells 'normally' rapidly replicate).

Probably just confusing the issue.

It IS hard.

(I just don't think that it is obvious that mentally ill people are defective compared to just being in a way that is different (where that difference is yet to be specified) from non mentlly ill people)