even if one accepted the implied unlikely propsition that no such persons exist or ever have existed, the terminological question would remain
I don’t think so: psychiatry has no need for terms that fail to refer. (On the other hand, psychiatry might have a term for something that doesn’t exist—because it once was thought to have existed.)
I don’t think so: psychiatry has no need for terms that fail to refer. (On the other hand, psychiatry might have a term for something that doesn’t exist—because it once was thought to have existed.)
At the risk of stating the obvious: I did not intend to restrict the terminological question to psychiatry specifically.
But in any event: you could say the same thing about zoology. And yet we still have the word unicorn.
Unicorns were indeed once thought to have actually existed.