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I'm going to go out on a limb and say that after last Monday's discussion many of us are feeling a bit lost for words...

(Example... Me in my last post:  "My God... !!  We can't say anything about anything.  Nothing is for real.  There is no healthy/ill, good/bad, wrong/right, up/down...  Where do we go from here?")

Ok, maybe it's just me.  But with that in mind, thank you for bringing some new perspectives to the table, Marty. 

I want to dive a bit deeper into some of your ideas...  It is suggested that If something is broken, it should be fixed.  Someone who is unable to live a life that is distinctively human is broken, and therefore, should be fixed.  

This concept of a distinctively human life is interesting to think about.  What criteria constitute a distinctively human life?  Three were mentioned:  1. able to engage reality 2. participate in community 3. acknowledge and improve understanding of reality.  Beyond this, I feel it is left up to us to fill in the blanks intuitively.  

However, this maybe isn't so intuitive... as Sophie suggested.  Who is to say what a distinctively human life is?  The doctors?  The politicians?  Spiritual leaders?  Each and every individual?  The task seems overwhelming to say the least.  

With this in mind, can we ever really define if a person is broken?  

And speaking of broken... if we are defining a broken/not broken dichotomy, I would say that a three armed man is broken.  However, it's suggested that we can acknowledge his difference without making value-judgements.  Why can't we do this for "mentally broken" people?  

Finally, there was also the idea that "getting it less wrong" implied an objective reality.  I don't have much to say about that besides for I am slightly envious of your conviction.  However, I am not sure that trying to get it less wrong suggests an objective reality.  Here's a quote from Dr. G's paper:   

"My answer to these challenges is not only that one can indeed do science in the absence of the concepts of truth and reality, but, whatever one (the I-function?) may think, that is in fact, operationally, the way science is done. "Progress" in science is not measured by increasing closeness to "truth" or to the "real"'. It can't be, because neither "truth" nor the "real" is a known location against which proximity can be measured. Progress in science has instead always been (and can't but be) measured in terms of distance from ignorance. Science proceeds not by proving "truth" or "reality" but rather by disproving falsity, not by painting the "right" picture but by painting a picture "less wrong" than prior pictures. And that, rather than either "objectivity" or some other privileged access to "reality" is in fact the basis of the demonstrable power of science.

This is, of course, simply another way of describing "pragmatic multiplism", the notion that inquiry proceeds by assuming that, at any given time, there exist at least two admissible interpretations of available observations, the one currently used and the different one that will, by accounting for available observations as well as some new ones, replace it."