Comment by savolai | Hacker News Reader

Comment by savolai | Hacker News Reader

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Care to offer evidence of pseudoscience status? All I could find was debunkings of this claim as myth and outdated, and to my understanding research in the field has caught wind in past decades. I’d love to learn more about the debate, so any pointers are welcome.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6020924/

https://cosmonautmag.com/2021/10/on-the-scientific-status-of...

” Depending on where your philosophical allegiances lie, Karl Popper might be a friend or an enemy to whatever version of philosophy of science you accept. Falsificationist approaches to science imply that psychoanalysis makes untestable and unfalsifiable claims! Popper made the very same claims about Marxist social theory as well. There are two issues with this approach. One, if falsificationism is true, then all social sciences, and even some natural sciences, are pseudo-scientific. This is an unacceptable conclusion since much of social science is clearly science. Lots of cutting-edge physics whose models do not lend themselves to controlled experimental testing would also lose their status as science. That is also an absurd conclusion. Newtonian mechanics, for example, would never have been accepted as a theory if we use Popper’s standards of theory corroboration and falsifiability. The theory offered better ways of explaining phenomenon that previous theories were already decent at predicting reliably. The process of legitimizing Newtonian physics had nothing to do with testability.4 A good theory of science does not rule out obvious cases of scientific rigor.5”

I'm not a psychologist myself, and I know nothing about modern academic psychoanalysis. I've tried to read some but it was indecipherable to me.

Modern clinical psychoanalysis is a strange field. It went out of vogue with the advent of behavioral and later cognitive psychology in the latter half of the 20th century, as well as psychiatry. Psychoanalysts tend to believe their way is the only way, while more modern psychologists are much more eclectic. They're often extremely critical of the use of medication even in cases where the evidence supporting their use is overwhelming, like stimulants for ADHD.

Psychoanalysts have their own strange nomenclature that's often incompatible with modern developments. So it's hard for other psychologists to even talk to them at all.

Those are some of the reasons psychoanalysis is viewed as pseudoscientific by modern clinical psychologists.

Rejecting an assertion because you don't like it's conclusion is pretty specious. I fully endorse the notion that any practice which makes unfalsifiable claims is not science. But that doesn't necessarily make such a practice pseudo science -- this is a false dichotomy. There are disciplines which are neither scientific nor pseudo-scientific.

Well hang on, let me go find my logic book from college to decipher...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychoanalysis#Debate_over_sta...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5459228/

https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/science/research/psychoanaly...

https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-94-...

https://www.skeptic.org.uk/2021/07/psychoanalysis-science-or...

https://philarchive.org/archive/FERIPA-6

That quote you included seems a little funny. It’s not making any direct or compelling argument in favor of psychoanalysis being science, it’s just saying well if psychoanalysis isn’t science then other disciplines aren’t science either, and since that’s sometimes not true, then Popper is wrong. It’s a slippery argument with some assumptions and big holes, and perhaps most glaringly it is intentionally ignoring the magnitude or degree of scientific experimentation, and attempting to frame the issue as only binary: science or not science.

I’m sure there is some modern psychoanalysis that is scientific, but OTOH it seems like the foundations of psychoanalysis, especially Freud, are certainly problematic from the perspective of science, right? Psychoanalysis has a valid, earned reputation that may take a very long time to fix, even if today’s practitioners are being careful and scientific. This could be compared to chiropractic medicine - some of it is valid medicine today, but it definitely came from non-medical, non-scientific origins.

There appear to be at least 2 separate arguments going. One is whether psychoanalysis can be a science, and the other is whether it actually was a science historically. This is why both sides are somewhat right: proponents of psychoanalysis argue that it can be scientific, which is true, and opponents argue that it wasn’t scientific in origin and has a troubled past, which is also true.

The issue for me is that the popular claim against psychoanalysis seems to be exactly that, binary.

Thanks for bringing nuance and providing quotes!

I’ve personally benefited tremendously from work with the ego structure and from realizing I can strenghen my will/ego capacities and learn to more and more discern and deny excessive power from my superego - from past learnt protective and restrictive impulses that no longer serve a purpose. This understanding alone seems like a treasure trove that keeps on giving year after year while doing introspective work and self inquiry with others interested in the work.

However I have little understanding how this fits in a modern understanding of psychoanalysis or psychodynamic psychotherapy.

What I do know is that CBT I did younger didn’t seem to have nearly sufficient explanatory powers to help me personally. Most of the skills I was offered seemed more or less trivial or perhaps were taught ineffectively.

Another thing that I would have needed was tapping into the resources of my body in the context of therapy and how that links to having capacity to work with myself. CBT seemed obsessed with, umh, overly just cognition.

As I understand it, the notion of falsifiability is really more like, "Theory X is acceptable if it can be shown to be false by the use of tools whose principles meet the same standard of falsifiability, even if those tools aren't currently available."

So a theory that can be tested only with later scientific refinements -- say, by increasing measurement precision beyond what's currently available -- is indeed eligible to be classified as science. That criterion would allow for Newtonian mechanics to be accepted in its time, and for things like string theory to be accepted provisionally in ours.

Basically, the ultimate failure of the Newtonian model can't be used as an argument that it should never have been considered valid science.

Demarcation problem is unique to Popper's philosophy of science. That problem doesn't exist in other philosophies of science. The best attack on psychoanalysis comes from the late philosopher of science Adolf Grunbaum's "The Foundations of Psychoanalysis: A philosophical critique"

Interesting quote, since my mind immediately went to Critical theory, one of the schools of philosophy probably targetted by Popper.

Over the last 200 years, the definition of science has been deliberately narrowed down a lot, mainly to combat pseudo-science and misinformation, but I think partially also to create an in-circle of academics. There are few good definitions of science, and usually they are a bit self-contradictory or insufficient to capture the underlying goal of science; the building of a corpus of verified knowledge. Falsification is a very high standard, that cannot always be applied, but it is still a good first test to filter out possible bullshit.

In deductive studies (formal sciences but also often in other fields) we need to have acceptable axioms, and rigorous deductions from these axioms. In inductive studies, you need good data and valid methods to derive meaning from that data. A lot of research actually falls somewhere in-between, and we wouldn't want to outright dismiss it, as many subjects would be too elusive to study at all, but we still have a vested interest in understanding them.

A lot of research, and I would count psycho-analysis in there for the most part, kind of walks the line between pseudo-science and proper deductive or inductive studies. These fields definetely build a corpus of knowledge, which often turns out to be true, but there are fewer good measures of filtering the bullshit from the nuggets of truth, and that substantially devalues the field. The risk, not exclusive but especially pronounced, is that acceptance of research becomes more a measure of eloquence than depth of enquiry.

And fields can be collectively wrong, even in the more rigorous fields that lend themselves to proper testing or deductive reasoning: You mention Newtonian Physics, but there are too many examples to enumerate: Quantum superposition was extremely controversial when first proposed, and poor Lobachevsky was ruthlessly mocked for his perfectly valid development of hyperbolic geometry.

IMO, modern psychology “walks the line between pseudo-science and proper deductive or inductive studies”. Psychoanalysis at best sometimes stumbles in the right direction.

The burden of proof lies on them that claim it’s a “real” science.

It appears to me the burden of proof lies on whoever wants to draw the line on what ”real” science is. Only natural sciences, then?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

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