Health, Disease, and the Mind-Body Problem: Linguistic Parallelism

Abstract

The mind-body problem is of practical importance in medicine. Current thinking about it is confused, and leads to significant errors in considering health and disease and in dealing with individual patients. “Psychological” and “physical” cannot usefully be thought of as referring to different kinds of states or events; rather, they are names of different but parallel languages that may be used for describing exactly the same events. “Functional” and “organic” are at best useless concepts and at worst seriously misleading. “Psychogenic” may be used meaningfully to refer to causation either by a state of the organism or by an external stimulus. Recognition of “linguistic parallelism” is helpful theoretically and in patient care.