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Comment by chamomeal | Hacker News Reader

I still remember my psychology class in high school pretty well. It was memorable cause we’d spend a week learning about some theories Freud came up with, and then there would be a very short footnote of “turns out it was all totally made up and never scientifically verified in any way”. I was like what? So psychology isn’t science??

Recently a friend explained to me that Freud really wasn’t a scientist, but he was so influential in getting western cultures to think about the mind in new ways that we still learn about him. Like nobody cared about psychology until he get famous

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The 19th century was a wild time. Everything was a science back then. That's why communists speak of the "immortal science of Marxist-Leninism." Marx literally said he was performing science, but that wasn't seen as an absurdity because that is how everyone spoke.

It wasn't until the mid-20th century when people started to get more serious about defining science. Philosophers started critiquing it in the early 20th century like the Vienna Circle and Popper, and eventually the definition of what constitutes science was narrowed down to one that was defined as a particular sort of empiricism.

That, too, has its own problems.

Feyerabend: the only rule is "anything goes"

I don't think it's any less science, inasmuch as science seeks to explain the natural world. It's just at a higher level of complexity and a different point in the learning curve than more externally observable levels of science.

Would we say that Copernicus was a charlatan or not a scientist because the heliocentric model turned out to be wrong? As you acknowledge, Freud pushed the collective understanding further.

The heliocentric model turning out to be wrong made Copernicus more of a scientist. Freud didn’t even make it to the level of falsifiability.

Then how do we know that Freud was "wrong" or "inaccurate" or "just made up" or "a fraud"?

It's definitely a lot more murky and there are massive gaps in our understanding between biology and neuroscience and psychology, and fundamental differences and limits on methodology that we may never surpass, but his work still has its place on the timeline of progress does it not?

What about something like phrenology? It's easy to laugh at it now and consider its proponents charlatans or lunatics but at a time it was considered a worthy avenue of exploration, that turned out to be a dead end, but that's part of science.

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