> OK. What's the definition of psychopathology here? As
> I understand it, it is a mode of insanity, extreme
> dislocation from reality. I don't think belief in
> witches etc. classifies with that, as such things were
> the common knowledge, received wisdom, of the day,
> believed in by everyone much as everybody today thinks
> things are composed of atoms. Belief in Jewish Blood
> Libel was common sense to an everyday Russian peasant
> in 1850 -- they killed Christ after all, our priest
> told us that; they speak a funny language and dress
> weird; they refuse to accept the Truth of Orthodoxy
> and its rites, which are what guarantee the harvest
> and keep us from starvation; why _wouldn't_ they kill
> Christian children, they are obviously in league with
> the Devil?
Here again you seem to be taking as the criterion of the "realism" of beliefs the extent to which they are shared i.e. "common knowledge, received wisom of the day, believed in by everyone". There are independent grounds on which to base the judgment that "belief in Jewish Blood Libel" is extremely unrealistic, aren't there?
I use "psychopathology" in its psychoanalytic sense. It's in this sense that, as I've frequently pointed out, Keynes judges the thinking, willing and acting characteristic of "modernity", including that characteristic of modern "science", to be significantly "psychopathological".
He does this, for instance, in his psychobiographical essay on Newton and in some unpublished discussions of Hume's personality. He also does it in his psychobiographical protraits of economists, e.g. in his essays on Jevons and Edgeworth, two of the originators of the now wholly dominant understanding of "scientific" economics as "mathematical psychics".
Since Keynes, economics has come to be more and more dominated by this psychopathology. Thus those who now control it judge a mind characterized by psychotic paranoia (John Nash's) capable of brilliant insight into human thinking, willing and acting. Consistent with this mistaken judgment (and with Keynes's psychoanalytic understanding of their own approach as psychopathological), modern economists, including those styling themselves Keynesian, New Keynesian, Post keynesian, etc., are incorrigibly blind to the psychological foundations of Keynes's economics.
Ted