Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2013 December 22

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December 22

What's the difference between sociopath and psychopath?

I looked at the definitions and they look nearly identical to me. Both are antisocial right? ScienceApe (talk) 01:56, 22 December 2013 (UTC)

Colloquially, a sociopath is taken to lack empathy or a conscience, whereas a psychopath is taken to be violent or criminal as well. This is not a recognized distinction by the DSM-V. See psychopathy. μηδείς (talk) 02:10, 22 December 2013 (UTC)

That's the way I generally hear it, too. "Sociopath" seems to mean introvert, the kind of guy who obsessively plots and imagines murder in his mom's house. "Psychopath" better fits those who just "go psycho" and suddenly eat your face outside a bar. Officially, they're all "individuals" with "antisocial personality disorder". Most don't kill anyone. InedibleHulk (talk) 02:31, 22 December 2013 (UTC)

The guy who eats your face outside a bar would be more accurately described as psychotic, which is not the same thing as psychopathy. Someguy1221 (talk) 04:37, 23 December 2013 (UTC)

Yeah, if we're talking about something like the Miami "zombie". In my mind, my example was more Hannibal Lecter. Eats you because he feels like it, not to stop earthquakes or because the neighbour dog commanded it. Psychosis is certainly a whole other ball game. InedibleHulk (talk) 08:20, 24 December 2013 (UTC)

I hadn't read the article before I Wikilinked it, but turns out it was (possibly) relevant. Lecter was a sociopath in the book, but a "pure" psychopath in the film. Weird. InedibleHulk (talk) 08:27, 24 December 2013 (UTC)

A sociopath is not necessarily (or primarily) taken to be a loser. See The Sociopath Next Door for a popular, if not necessarily academically well-respected treatment. μηδείς (talk) 02:50, 22 December 2013 (UTC)

She seems to use the word as a catch-all for anyone who meets the ASPD criteria, so her sociopaths include those who might be colloquially called psychopaths. Of course, language works differently all over the place. I didn't mean to imply the way I generally hear it is the way the entire world uses it. Here, losers can be extroverts or introverts. InedibleHulk (talk) 22:56, 22 December 2013 (UTC)

It doesn't seem like a scientific diagnosis, just some legal runaround. For example, as I interpret the criteria as explained in the article, someone who is caught having homosexual relations in a country where it is outlawed would be dubbed a "sociopath" (provided he started doing it by age 15, that is). The concept that societal norms exist, and that violating them generally expresses some kind of biological phenomenon, seems highly suspect to me. Surely someone who rats out a gang is just as much if not more of a "sociopath" in relation to his own chosen sovereign, but would a shrink dare say that? Wnt (talk) 21:36, 22 December 2013 (UTC)

I thought the whole point of calling them disorders instead of diseases was to eliminate the association with biology. Each of the behaviours required for a mental health diagnosis can be caused by different things, but causes aren't taken into account. We "are" what we do, not why. InedibleHulk (talk) 22:56, 22 December 2013 (UTC)

@Wnt The original diagnostic criteria for Antisocial personality disorder AKA Sociopathy AKA Psychopathy were not created to shun a group of people who behaved differently, but to predict recidivism amongst convicts. The concept of psychopathy is that the individual is completely incapable of empathy, which is almost universally considered a normal human trait (though what you are supposed to do with your empathy varies from culture to culture). That itself has its detractors, with some evolutionary psychologists who believe that psychopathy may be advantageous to a society in small doses. In any event, here we have a disconnect between the literal definition implied by the diagnostic criteria and the colloquial definition. That is, there are people who may meet the diagnostic criteria who nonetheless feel empathy. Since one would expect a true and criminal psychopath to lie to his court-appointed psychologist, imperfect diagnosis is unavoidable if one wishes to avoid a 100% rate of false negatives. @Hulk, the phrase "disorder", in medicine, is typically though not exclusively used to refer to a constellation of symptoms devoid of any suggestion as to their origin. So to say someone has a "disorder" is to say that they are different in an undesirable way, without stating why. Someguy1221 (talk) 04:56, 23 December 2013 (UTC)

Lately I think the difference is it's the politician who beats everyone else in the primary but then loses the general, compared to the politician who actually gets elected! ^{Market St.⧏} _{⧐ Diamond Way} 04:29, 23 December 2013 (UTC)

Are you talking about the politicians themselves, or the ones that vote for them? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 06:54, 24 December 2013 (UTC)

Last of the House of Trastámara

Were there any discussion of the possibility of considering the descendants of Infante Henry, Duke of Villena as potential successors to Ferdinand II of Aragon given his desire to keep Aragon independent and out of Habsburg hands. They were still male line Trastámara.--The Emperor's New Spy (talk) 02:22, 22 December 2013 (UTC)

First Modern State?

Resolved

According to Max Weber, a state is defined by having Monopoly on violence. A modern state also has a beauraucracy (and a few other things). Two questions here, really:

1. Does anyone know which state Max Weber himself considered to be the first?
2. Professor francis fukuyama suggests that China was the first modern state since it has a beauraucracy . However, I have seen some other suggestions as to which was the first modern state, Sweden, Denmark and ancient Egypt among them. Any more suggestions, and hopefully why? DanielDemaret (talk) 12:22, 22 December 2013 (UTC)

Converted your "1. 2." into normal numbered lines I learned from an Usborne book that Persia was the first "independent" country. I have no clue whether that position's held by scholars as well, but you might want to check into it. Nyttend (talk) 14:31, 22 December 2013 (UTC)

According to State_(polity)#History, the earliest proto-states existed during the Neolithic period. The earliest clear states probably were city-states of Mesopotamia during the early 4th millennium BC. It's likely that we cannot reliably identify a single one as "the first" as several candidates rose up within the same broad time period, and it's difficult to date any of them to within an exact year. Uruk is a particularly well-known site from this period, but it's only one such city among many, and well known more for its state of preservation and as being well studied more than for its absolute primacy. --Jayron32 18:39, 22 December 2013 (UTC)

The earliest literary texts involve Uruk's political affairs, so that seems to correspond with the archaeological picture. Til Eulenspiegel /talk/ 01:33, 23 December 2013 (UTC)

The word modern is confusing me. You comment that a modern state has not only a monopoly on violence but also "a bureaucracy (and a few other things)". However, many ancient states had both a monopoly on violence and a bureaucracy. So which, if any, of those "other things" distinguish a "modern state" from earlier states in your view, since "modern state" isn't a widely recognized category? By "modern state", do you mean anything other than state, since you list ancient Egypt as a candidate for that status? Marco polo (talk) 23:04, 22 December 2013 (UTC)

I am trying to get more exactly at what Max Weber meant by a *modern* state. His definition of a "state" is the de facto standard definition of a state. His definition of a *modern state" is seldome cited. It is so unclear to people that different writers seem to have interpreted it differently. My quest may be futile, since we can not ask Max directly, but I would be very interesting in knowing a good way of clearly characterizing a state on a clearer ground than just that is "violoent". There are of course measures of democracy, freedom , liberal, libertarian, etc of a state out there, but I would prefer it if one could measure just how "modern" a state is in a way that is less connected to ideology and more , well, "objective" in some way. DanielDemaret (talk) 23:15, 22 December 2013 (UTC)

The "other things" I referred to first of all that beauraucacy had to be a rational-legal authority, and he also wrote that the modern western states were defined by :

1. Monopolization by central authority of the means of administration and control based on a centralized and #stable system of taxation and use of physical force
2. monopolization of legislative organisation of an officialdom, dependent upon the central authority

Unfortunately, rational-legal authority seems to have been interpreted differently by different people. There are other ways of defining a state today, like the declarative and constitutive theories of states, but these do not describe a state in a way that is very clear and useful, so I was hoping that Weber was onto something that I can not clearly see. DanielDemaret (talk) 23:31, 22 December 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for clarifying that you are looking for the first instance of what Max Weber would have considered a modern state. Of course, we can't put ourselves inside Weber's head, but I think that the key for Weber was that in a modern state the bureaucracy operates on impersonal, rational, regular (legal) principles. Weber also identifies the modern state as a Western development, which quasi by definition rules out imperial China or other non-Western states. The bureaucracies of ancient and medieval states generally served the personal interests of the monarch rather than impersonal, rational principles. Since bureaucracies evolved gradually from a state of near-complete subservience to personal interests (usually of the monarch) to a state of independence, it is almost impossible to pinpoint a time and place where independence was first achieved. Maybe an argument could be made for the expansion of the power of the States-General of the Netherlands after 1597 as the first modern state in this sense. However, I think Weber wouldn't have seen much point in identifying the first, since Weber's "modern state" was a parallel evolution in all western European states and their colonial offshoots during the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. Marco polo (talk) 02:25, 23 December 2013 (UTC)

It's also hard to define the "first" even on those terms, since the creation of such a "state" is evolutionary and not revolutionary in nature, in the sense that it developed slowly over centuries. It wasn't like someone woke up one day and decided "Today, England is going to operate entirely on impersonal-rational principles rather than on the personal whim of the monarch". Without an event to pinpoint at a "time" and "place" it's hard to rank-order states by date when they became Weber-defined "modern" states. --Jayron32 03:47, 23 December 2013 (UTC)

What sort of principles did the witan operate on? Til Eulenspiegel /talk/ 04:15, 23 December 2013 (UTC)

Did you read the article? --Jayron32 04:27, 23 December 2013 (UTC)

Thank you, @Marco polo and all others for your very good answers. Various questions on how to characterize a state pop up in the back of my mind now and again when reading. I am marking this as resolved, with my gratitude to all. DanielDemaret (talk) 12:27, 23 December 2013 (UTC)

Paranormal auras

Our paranormal article includes a quote from Terence Hines placing "human auras" among a group of several things he considers pseudoscience. What kind of aura does he mean? I'm quite familiar with an Aura (symptom), and the usage of "he has an aura of [character quality] about him", but neither makes sense. Aura (paranormal) sounds right, but that article sounds more like a Halo (optical phenomenon) around a person than a phenomenon that he would find worthy of attention. Nyttend (talk) 14:29, 22 December 2013 (UTC)

Aura (paranormal) is the correct reference - for unimpeachable pseudoscientific (as opposed to merely mystical) examples, see Walter John Kilner and Rupert Sheldrake. Tevildo (talk) 15:07, 22 December 2013 (UTC)

When you see pictures of paranormal auras, it's probably produced through Kirlian photography. At least so was the case in the bast. I don't see any reason not to sue photoshop nowadays. OsmanRF34 (talk) 17:33, 22 December 2013 (UTC)

I assume you mean "past" and "use". There seems no question that these phenomena are real, just that what they actually are was wildly misinterpreted by those who either came in wanting to believe, or just plain guessed wrong. Not really so far removed from the famous astronomer who first saw (or thought he saw) the "channels" ("canals") on Mars. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 11:17, 23 December 2013 (UTC)

Not quite the same. As our article mentions, there weren't any canals on Mars to be misinterpreted; it was all optical illusion and fantasy. On the other hand, Kirlian photography is quite real and easy to misunderstand; even the proper description sounds vaguely mystic to a layperson. Matt Deres (talk) 19:27, 23 December 2013 (UTC)

One of the articles cited indicates that when people claim to see an aura around someone, they might actually be experiencing a vision problem. In effect, the aura is likewise an optical illusion. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 19:31, 23 December 2013 (UTC)

That article has sections entitled Parapsychology research and Claims. Thelma Moss was a disciple; "Moss came to believe that Kirlian photography depicts the astral body. She made several trips to the Soviet Union to explore Russian work in the field, and wrote two books on that and related subjects, plus lesser works" Alansplodge (talk) 02:23, 23 December 2013 (UTC)