被迫又得去 "演講" ，隨便翻出一篇十幾年前的舊稿充數，實在很煩。人生如此血肉，而我們卻在玩一些蒼白無謂的概念遊戲。過去難以娛人，只能自娛，現在卻似乎連自娛都提不起勁了。

陳真
2022. 11. 20.

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Abstract

My lecture has two parts. One is to deal with the problems created by an attempt to replace traditional epistemology with the scientific study of how we reason by proposing accounts of epistemological statements entirely in terms of scientifically legitimate objects and properties. This can be seen as a form of scientific reductionism, i.e., the view that higher-level theories can be reduced to lower-level theories, which underpins the claims to preeminence of biological psychiatry and the assumption that brain imaging techniques are ipso facto ways of seeing the mind. By arguing that intentionality and consciousness are both relational and semantic, I try to show that the process of belief ascription presupposes irreducible normativity, and hence the attempt to establish the naturalistic status of the notion of mind through reduction eventually to the austere language of physics will fail.

Secondly, I argue that, in resonance with the neo-Kantians in the 19th in Germany, there are two ways of acquiring knowledge, i.e., nomothetic and idiographic, which differ not only in their objects of study but also in aims and methods.  The former seeks to establish general laws by using analysis, quantification and explanation, while the latter is concerned with the uniqueness of individual things by hermeneutic understanding.  Psychiatry, in which I suggest a return to the individual, with its dual nature of human experiences, seems to serve a paradigm case that sheds light on this philosophical campaign.