A Semiotic Critique of the Scientific Status of Psychiatry and the Contribution of Psychiatric Evaluation in the Formation of Judicial Judgment
21 Pages Posted: 15 Aug 2013
Date Written: August 14, 2013
Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to expose the pseudo-scientific status of psychiatry as a legitimate discipline, capable of exerting considerable influence on and occasionally constituting the sole source whereupon judicial decisions are based. By drawing on Peircean semiotics, and particularly on the triadic classification and posited inter-relationship between sign-object-interpretant and the role of abduction in formulating and testing hypotheses, and by comparing and contrasting this aspect of Peircean semiotics with the rhetoric popularized by the so-called medical (or psycho-pharmaceutical) model, it will be shown that not only ‘mental illness’ is essentially a metaphorical construct without any diagnosable ‘reality’ (a standpoint that was raised, emphasized and popularized as early as 1961 by Szasz in his seminal work "The Myth of Mental Illness") and ‘objective grounding’ in the bio-chemical processes of the brain, but that the non-falsifiable pseudo-objectivism of psychiatric rhetoric by virtue of naturalizing inherently semiotic phenomena is prone and highly conducive to severe violations of the criminal law, involving, but not being restricted to, falsification of medical records and intentionally leading astray judicial opinion.
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