Читать книгу Finding Jesus in the Storm - John Swinton - Страница 26

It’s not that biological descriptions are not relevant or important. The problem is that they can easily become reductive. In his work on the nature of explanation, the sociologist Alan Garfinkel points out the reductive tendencies of explanation. When people think they have explained something, they tend to exclude other explanations, thus reducing understanding of the situation to a single explanation. “The reductionist claims that one class of phenomena, more or less well explained by some body of theory, is really explainable by some other theory, which is thought of as deeper or more basic; this, we say, reduces the apparent complexity of the world.”37 Such explanations reduce the complexity of multifaceted situations and experiences to a single explanation. Explanations become hegemonic when they insist on explaining unconventional mental health experiences without reference to other possible explanations. Garfinkel suggests that we

pay more attention to what exactly is being explained by a given explanation. Too often, theories talk as if they are addressing some problem, though they are really addressing different problems or different aspects, interpretations, or readings of the problem. For when a theory talks about a phenomenon, it inevitably does so in terms of its own representation of it. The phenomenon gets incorporated into the theory in a particular way, structured by a definite set of assumptions and presuppositions about its nature. This makes it very important that we recognize those presuppositions and discover how the theory has represented a particular object of explanation.38

For current purposes, it is important that we recognize the kinds of presuppositions that lie behind reductive biological explanations of mental health challenges and the dangers of uncritically accepting such explanations.