PEN-L message, Re: Skewering stilted language and theory: F. Crews

Before you start on this route, you have to read Crews. He doesn't proceed from an a priori conception of scientific method. He doesn't have impossibly high standards. He doesn't have illusions and other social science. Above all, he is detailed and precise about specific psychoanalyticla clams and the supposedevidence for them. Best thing if you want to defend irt against him is to read his views as stated, e,.g., in the NYRB pieces, and respond to them. I used to be a lot more agnostic about psychoanalysis, and I have a very liberal, almost Feyerabendian notioon of what counts as science, but Crews convinced me that psychoanalysis is a fraud as science. As philosophy, that's another story. jks

>Now you might want to define "scientific method" as
being identical with the use of statistical methods on
the results of double-blind experiments, but then it
seems pretty clear that if you do this, the charge that
psychoanalysis is "unscientific" loses all of its
rhetorical force; you've simply reduced the scope of
the term "science" until Freud falls outside it, not
pushed him out the door. I'm not a Freudian, but nor
do I like attempts to create a "quick way" with
theories that people don't like in this manner.<

this was the point of my missive. It's hard to criticize Freud without applying the same standards to other social scientific research -- and it turns out that most other social studies don't do very well either.

BTW, in reading a critique of the "revisionist" history of the origins of the Cold War (which says that the US played a big, if not _the_ big, role in starting the CW), the critique invokes Popper, saying in effect that "these revisionists don't state their views as falsifiable hypotheses but instead argue for specific conclusions." (quel horreur!) This ignores the fact that the revisionists were trying to falsify the orthodox theory (the Reds did it) and that using Popper in this way is a way to avoid such falsification. I think Popper was used that way a lot. It's probably unfair to Popper.

Jim