ABSTRACT
References 14
All clinical categories, including those pertaining to the dementias, are the result of the coming together in the work of an author of selected behavioural markers, explanatory concepts and terms to refer to them. Complex social and economic variables will determine whether or not the ensuing ‘convergence’ will last. For reasons that have to do with the rhetoric of science, these social acts are sold to the throng as pure ‘scientific acts’. For example, it would be naive to believe that the decision to consider a symptomcluster such as, for example, ‘dementia with Lewy bodies’ as a ‘new disease’ is solely based on the ‘discovery’ of powerful, ineluctable and replicable correlations (Perry et al., 1996). Given that not all correlations are privileged in this way, and that there is no clear theory linking all the symptoms to each other and to the Lewy bodies themselves, it is not difficult to surmise that such consideration is also driven by social variables. The current model of science as a pure pursuit of truth, however, leaves no space for broader explanations and hence all manner of social variables remain understudied.
