09/06/2025
>>When I rode my bike back home it was raining even worse. I was angry, disappointed, hurt, humiliated, and sad, and I had a pile of broken dreams that were scratching the inside of my heart. It was the kind of distressed that you can only get as a teenager who’s been betrayed by a friend and had a dream shattered and suffered humiliation. And while I was biking in the rain, one sentence kept lingering in my head. It was a sentence from a natural science book from school, the theme “the horse.” It said that “the horse is a ungulate that stems from the ancient horse eohippus with three toes,” and that sentence, in all its insensitive factuality, seemed to me as one of the most stupid things anyone could ever say. It was correct, it was impossible to grasp, and it was completely useless in my situation. Which made it a mockery.
Many years later, when the schizophrenia was over and I had become a student again, I encountered a similar sentence. It was from my textbook on psychology, and my heart recognized it immediately: “Schizophrenia is characterized by impaired social functioning, including difficulties in establishing and maintaining interpersonal relationships, problems with work or to work in other roles, and an inability to take care of themselves, e.g., through poor or lack of personal hygiene.” I am sure this may be correct and completely true, and most certainly factual and sensible—but what good is it? Well, it may be used from the outside, as a description and classification, much like “the horse is a ungulate” (“Schizophrenics have impaired social functioning”). And it can be used as an explanation to those who are watching from the outside, pupils and students: “. . .that stems from the ancient horse eohippus”; “. . .including difficulties in establishing and maintaining interpersonal relationships.” But these sentences don’t explain, and have no intention of explaining, the individuals, no matter if they are humans or horses, and the very unique circumstances that made them what they are in a specific situation. These are sentences that present the universal, elevated truths, far from dreams and joy and betrayal and tears. Sentences that are completely true and, thus, pretty useless. They do not give comfort, and in all their correctness they don’t even encourage much curiosity. That is the way it is. Horses are ungulates. Schizophrenics have impaired social functioning. And then what is left to ask? A lot, of course, but it doesn’t necessarily shine through. And therefore I am always on guard when I hear such sentences. Truth without curiosity may quickly turn scary.
(Arnhild Lauveng, The Road Back from Schizophrenia)
>>The problem with traditionally positivist, traditionally constructionist/constructivist and traditionally interpretivist definitions of objectivity, therefore, is that they have come to equate subjects to mean “people” and objects to mean “things”; and to conflate ontological concepts with epistemological ones, existence itself with our knowledge of it. On the one hand, positivist science conflates ontology with epistemology by claiming that an objective reality is accessible, measurable, and quantifiable and it is so despite the researcher’s personal subjectivities. However, as Collier (2003) puts it: “there is no guarantee that something objective will be measurable, and trying to force the unquantifiable into a quantitative straitjacket is subjectivity in the worst sense” (p. 132). Interpretivist, and constructionist approaches on science, on the other hand, conflate ontology and epistemology by claiming that we cannot know if reality outside our knowledge exists, thus its existence, or lack thereof, is not epistemologically meaningful. What ends up happening, therefore, is that we conflate an object itself with our concept of the object, despite the fact that whatever concepts of that object we have are still our concepts (Collier, 1994). Critical realism is not the only philosophy to have pointed that out; Hacking (1999), for example, has also come to similar conclusions when examining how social constructs have been used in American sociology and philosophy and provides similar reasons as to why they might not be as useful. Transcendental realism, therefore, defends epistemological relativism as much as it does ontological realism.
[...]
This type of objectivity can help us untie a lot of ontological and epistemological knots around the theory of autism. First of all, we do not need to know about autism for the phenomena we have come to describe as autism themselves to exist. Autism will be autism independent of who is looking into it or describing it. The states and characteristics themselves do not exist because of our descriptions of them. Our understanding of them does depend on those descriptions however, and therefore so does our epistemology of autism. But whatever our epistemology may be, it will always be an epistemology of autism, in the sense that it will always be about a set of traits and characteristics that we have currently come to label as autism. This does not mean that we will not adjust, redefine, modify, and even expand what can constitute autistic traits or characteristics. Indeed, it is not even dependent on them being called autism at all. It may be decided in the future that the term “autism” is not a helpful term to describe what we currently use it for, just as it was decided that the term “Asperger’s Syndrome” was not a useful description in the publication of the DSM-5 (Happé, 2011). It may even be decided that the category of autism is too restrictive or too broad; any and all definitions and descriptions will however, still be definitions and descriptions of an intransitive realm that is, and will always remain, independent of its transitive epistemology.
(A Critical Realist Approach on Autism: Ontological and Epistemological Implications for Knowledge Production in Autism Research by Marianthi Kourti)
