 Ghaemi (2003. ch 12) offers a different defense of zooming-out. He argues that current DSM diagnoses function as ideal types in Weber’s sense. One way to understand Weber’s idea is just as a forerunner of modelling, in which essential variables are isolated and inessential ones put aside. Ghaemi, though, locates it in a tradition of hermeneutic understanding that is most closely associated in psychiatry with Karl Jaspers (1997). This approach looks for meaningful psychological connections between phenomena and is contrasted with causal, scientific explanation. In Ghaemi’s view the DSM categories are designed to foster understanding of this type by directing clinical attention to aspects of the patient’s life that are relevant to the disorder at hand. He sees this as an application of the methods of the humanities, rather than those of the sciences.