Exact psychiatry: Six axioms

Abstract

Psychiatry is a clinical technological practice where the rational fundaments, methods and knowledge “corpus” have a scientific nature. The science philosopher Mario Bunge proposes that philosophy, as well as science, may tend to be exact. Philosophy of science is the rational setting where any scientific discipline can ascribe sense to its theoretical models and factual sentences. Axiomatization is the method to exactify a discipline. By axiomatization, we can exactify psychiatry as “medicine of the soma”, therefore avoiding fallacies in the theoretical models we use.

Objective

To describe six axioms for the definition of “exact psychiatry” as “medicine of the soma”. Six axioms will be defined and explained. They are ordered attending to hierarchical and historical priority:

–axiom of the cultural universal of social cohesion: since the antiquity all cultures have cultural universals which promote social cohesion;

–axiom of healing as a form of “isonomia”: health-related cultural constructs are related with help receiving due to body vulnerability. It appears with Hippocratic medicine;

–axiom of nosological realism: diseases really exist. They are biological regularities that accelerate death. It appears in the 17th century;

–axiom of illness subjectivity: the personal impact of disease is subjective. There exist diseases in patients. It appears in the 20th century;

–axiom of the unification of neuroscience: psychiatry and neurology have the same ontological reference, brain diseases. It consolidates in the 21st century;

–axiom of clinical phenomenology as the epistemological specificity of psychiatry: clinical phenomenology characterizes “soma” as the referring of psychiatry. The future.

Disclosure of interest

The author has not supplied his declaration of competing interest.