Yeah, I don’t want to make a claim that reference to an individual’s mental condition would be categorically inappropriate. However, I think at a minimum there needs to be a reason for making the assertion that furthers an important interest, that the assertion is tailored to that interest, and that there isn’t a clear yet less inflammatory & invasive way to get the information across.
I think there are few cases in which this test would be met as applied to a critic. Saying that the critic has a long history of dishonest, volatile, paranoid, or whatever kind of behavior (and showing the receipts where appropriate) is more convincing to explaining why people shouldn’t engage than a thinly-supported armchair diagnosis.
While I don’t agree with everything in that quote, I do see some points of convergence—there is awareness of downsides, consideration of what is potentially to be gained from the discussion, a suggestion that this should not occur without significant object-level engagement first, and some sense of narrow tailoring (insofar as discussion of “psychologizing explanations and intuitions” is more narrowly tailored than trotting out a stigmatized DSM/ICD diagnosis).
Yeah, I don’t want to make a claim that reference to an individual’s mental condition would be categorically inappropriate. However, I think at a minimum there needs to be a reason for making the assertion that furthers an important interest, that the assertion is tailored to that interest, and that there isn’t a clear yet less inflammatory & invasive way to get the information across.
I think there are few cases in which this test would be met as applied to a critic. Saying that the critic has a long history of dishonest, volatile, paranoid, or whatever kind of behavior (and showing the receipts where appropriate) is more convincing to explaining why people shouldn’t engage than a thinly-supported armchair diagnosis.
While I don’t agree with everything in that quote, I do see some points of convergence—there is awareness of downsides, consideration of what is potentially to be gained from the discussion, a suggestion that this should not occur without significant object-level engagement first, and some sense of narrow tailoring (insofar as discussion of “psychologizing explanations and intuitions” is more narrowly tailored than trotting out a stigmatized DSM/ICD diagnosis).