Citation

Maltzman I. J. Psychoactive Drugs 1998; 30(1): 99-104.

Affiliation

Department of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles 90095, USA.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1998, Haight-Ashbury Publications in association with the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

9565213

Abstract

Lilienfeld's attack on my conceptual examination of the disease concept of alcoholism suffers from erroneous interpretations, fallacious reasoning, and a lack of familiarity with relevant alcoholism research. He offers an alternative nominalist interpretation of the disease concept of alcoholism based on a fuzzy boundary between disease and wellness. He fails to recognize that the basic issue between nominalist and realist accounts of a lower-order concept such as alcoholism is the presence or absence of general principles that may account for the observed signs and symptoms characterizing a specific disease entity, not fuzzy boundaries between higher-order categories. Extensive evidence (which Lilienfeld ignores) of biological bases for the pathognomic signs and symptoms of alcoholism, particularly loss of control, demonstrates that the disease concept of alcoholism refers to a disease entity that has a biological basis. It is not a "mental construct."

Language: en