ABSTRACT
Karl Jaspers 's understanding-explanation dichotomy is an invention of epistemology, the philosopher's effort to discern the different ways we arrive at the truth about the world and its people. Adolf Meyer attempted to undercut this dichotomy in his psychobiological approach by first establishing the facts of a person's life then "reducing" these facts to the phenomenon or phenomena that constitute the patient's mental illness. A brain scan showing that a symptomatic patient has more, or less, blood flow in a specific brain area than normal subjects tells us little about the biological essence of the illness, or how to treat that illness. The fact is that a clinician using the DSM-5 isn't required either to understand or explain the symptoms that comprise a mental illness. The DSM-5 became the standard for diagnosing psychiatric illness during a time when neuroscience was producing data that were expected to explain psychiatric symptoms.
