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“incurable illness” is a linguistic fallacy

<this is from a comment on another blog of mine:
http://jrfibonacci.wordpress.com/2012/03/01/the-shaiming-animosity-of-my-god-can-beat-up-your-god/#comment-2233
You can go there to read the comment I was responding to, which makes reference to “fundamentalism” and superstitions about how demonic spirits cause disease.>

Daniel

Image via Wikipedia

…if some [scientific] fundamentalist insists that there is such a thing as something like baldness OTHER THAN AS A LABEL, that is still fundamentalism. There is such a thing as hair, but there is no such thing as a baldness. Bald is just an adjective. Baldness is not an actual tangible something, so to say “my baldness was caused by ____” is a convenience in language, but is not literally sensible.

Baldness is not incurable. Baldness does not cause hair loss. Baldness is a label for hair loss (or no growth). Baldness does not need a ritual exorcism to remove it from someone’s head. There is no such physical thing or substance as baldness. Baldness is just a convenient label in language to point to a contrast with the physical presence of hair. Again, there is no such thing as “incurable baldness” (except as a convenience in language).

Likewise, as for those who insist that there is such a thing as scurvy and that it is incurable, those fundamentalists are just as idiotic as the ones who insist on the existence of diabetes or cancer or demons, then call them incurable. Entire linguistic models are fallacy from the beginning.

Scurvy is just a label. It is not a physical thing. It does not do anything like cause baldness (and baldness does not cause hair loss). Infants born without hair do not have a case of baldness. They have heads. Some heads have hair and some do not. That’s it!

As for scurvy, some organisms have lots of Vitamin C and some do not. There is no such presence as a scurvy to be “cured” or to be labeled as “incurable.” Same for cancer and diabetes and autism and all the various diagnostic labels for the natural physiological developments that correspond to particular metabolic and biochemical patterns.

Cancer does not cause tumors. Cancer is just a label in language. Tumors are the concentration of physical substance from when the immune system is overwhelmed (lacking the capacity to handle the removal of a particular amount of “waste”). In the presence of tumors, some idiot can come along and say “you are possessed by a cancer and now we need to do an exorcism and it will take 3 years and cost $300,000, but we will charge most of that to the taxpayers of Canada, so just relax.”

English: Retinol 3D structure

Image via Wikipedia

In other words, “incurable illness” is a linguistic fallacy. So, for instance, is autism curable? No, autism is just a diagnostic label, like the label on a jar of “cured” pickles. We cannot cure a label on jar of pickles either.

However, if mainstream medical science advances to comprehend and incorporate the basics of nutrition and physiology, as taught by thousands of years by “witch doctors” and “shamans” sprinkled throughout time and space, then the physical patterns that have been given the convenient label “autism” can be reclassified in relation to the new understanding.

Similarly, people do not talk much lately about “catching scurvy.” There is no such thing as scurvy to catch. It is just a label like the label on a jar of pickles.

Why? Because finally mainstream medical models recognize that the diagnostic label scurvy just references the level of functionality of an organism when there are lots of things working and lots of vitamins and minerals present, but not Vitamin C. The absence of various nutrients results in the functioning of less and less organs and systems, resulting in the application of approximations in language called “diagnostic labels” which are useful in making a prognosis.

Vitamin C does not “cure” scurvy because there is no such thing as scurvy except as a label in language. Vitamin C does not even cure the label on a jar of pickles.

If anything, ignorance is curable. The presence of intelligence “cures” ignorance just like Vitamin C cures scurvy, which is to say, that is a figure of speech that could be useful, even if it is not literally precise, given that there is technically no such presence as an ignorance to be cured.

I took this photograph April 7, 2006. Edited w...

Image via Wikipedia

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This entry was posted on March 11, 2012 at 10:15 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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