For a number of years now whenever I read material on the disabled, I do so with a preliminary focus on the *explicit* definition given of "the disabled" (implicit here will not do any more than does the implicit reference of "mankind" to women). A subdivision (which also contains its own *vital* subdivisions) is between those whose symptoms are "hard" and those whose symptoms are "soft." "Soft symptoms" is nearly a technical term in political discussions of the issue: those symptoms that are not visible (to the eye, to the x-ray camera, to pet, etc). *Then*, within "soft symptoms" one must (always, without fail) note those "soft" symptoms one must divide those that are *generally* neurological, immunological, etc. (e.g., migraine, which will show up on an eeg) from those which are strictly *brain* disorders: Depression or Unipolar Affective Disorder (my malady), bipolar, bpd, schizophrenia, etc. and have no direct physical manifestations whatever. While many writers include both hard and soft symptoms, *most* (and Marta did this) *fail* to include brain disorders. And yet almost all efforts (see numerous WSJ editorials) to downplay the disabled play on this last distinction (their goal seems to be to make all "soft" symptoms "mental illness, then define mental illness as (to reverse the slogan of NAMI) character defects. Hence the political weakness of so many efforts to call attention to the condition of the disabled: by failing to *explicitly* include brain disorders, they continue to allow the *implicit* assumption of almost everyone that the disabled are always visible.
Now, I assume Marta *does* implicitly include brain disorders within her definition of the disabled, but by allowing the almost universal assumptions to go unchallenged by so much as a parenthesis she implicitly commits herself to what she calls "physicalist" assumptions.
Carrol