Myth or Illness: On the Function of Consensus

IN LOOKING FOR EVIDENCE upon which to make statements about schizophrenia, psychiatrists routinely interview patients with a view to eliciting symptoms, complaints, reports of experience, evidence for "orientation" and the like. The point it is easy to forget is that all such interviewing is done by talking, and that all conclusions are therefore based upon verbal report, or upon the absence of an anticipated or expected verbal report. If a patient does not answer questions, we say, for example, that he is "withdrawn" or even that he has "regressed, " quite ignoring the fact that all such statements are interpretations of sentences made or not made in accordance with standard systems of expectation. In using language in this manner, we perform a series of operations somewhat similar in principle to that in which we use eyeglasses when we cannot otherwise see. We look through the glasses, ignoring them when they work all right. Similarly, when language yields a consensually satisfying result, we can ignore the myriad ways in which we know how frail a vessel language can be.

The basic shape of language-use is that of a reciprocity in which each statement complements the preceding one and leads on to a succeeding one. The pattern holds for a series of statements made by a single person or a series of statements made by a pair or a group of speakers. The expectation is that of a continuity from one such sentence to the next. When we do not find such a regularity, the tendency is to move to the interpretative stance and say, for example, that the series is characterized by "distractibility." This term, a noun, suggests strongly that distractibility exists, and it is possible then to set up elaborate investigations of distractibility, with discoveries of the "cause" and the "cure, " perhaps. Now we have a "disease, " distractibility, that is sometimes a part of the disease, schizophrenia—but in both instances, it is important