I did consider social norms as a possible rebuttal when i made this thread. So according to you, in so far as objective truth is concerned, there is actually no such thing as mental illness. We have never experienced a mind not working. But if i am assuming anything then certainly what you have said here is just as much an assertion. You haven’t actually proven my premise false, but rather you have merely brought it into question by suggesting that our sense of insanity is an illusion of social norms.
But why should i agree with that possibility if my experiences strongly suggest that there is evidently mentally ill people? It seems evident to me that some people are crazy. Wouldn’t it be just valid to say that we have a natural sense of sanity and insanity, just like we have a natural sense of the world in general?
You’re missing the main point of my post. But I’ll get to that. Let’s deal with your objection first.
Yes, there are people who are judged to be mentally ill. It seems to me that behaviour is extremely complicated, and can be considered to exist upon multiple continua. Behaviour on each of these continua could be represented by a bell curve. What we consider to be normal is the intersection of the upper and lower limits of ‘normality’ along all these continua; and what we consider to be normal is driven by what the majority of people do (that’s what drives the upper and lower limits of “normal” behaviour). Mental illness can take many forms, some extremely difficult to detect.
From that perspective, it’s theoretically easy to determine whether someone is mentally ill, although of course judgement becomes fuzzy at the limit, and opinion among experts may differ at these limits.
And of course we’ve experienced minds “not working.” Dead people’s minds don’t work. Some people’s minds don’t work
normally. Normally meaning, of course, “like the majority of other people.”
But “objective truth” - how would one derive this? I don’t see how “objective truth” can ever exist other than as a concept. There are always assumptions and caveats involved.
But my main point was that even if we agreed a “gold standard” for mental health, there is no evidence at all that this proves the existence of an
actual “ultimate mind.” Using “ought” in this way is disingenuous, because it implies that what is normal, is what some agent has decreed to be normal. The argument assumes its conclusion in its premises. It’s begging the question.
I haven’t proven your premise false - your premise is unfalsifiable, like all such arguments. But I have shown that it has no logical or empirical basis for serious consideration.
If, in your original post, you replace the word “people” with “trees,” “mentally ill” with “stunted growth,” and so on, do you think your argument would prove the existence of an “ultimate tree?”
When you use the phrase “ought to be” in your post, surely you’re really saying “should be, if it is to conform to what we think of as normal?” That doesn’t constitute evidence of an objective, immutable standard or of an “ultimate mind.”
