Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!cmcl2!harvard!caip!lll-crg!lll-lcc!pyramid!decwrl!spar!ellis
From: ellis@spar.UUCP (Michael Ellis)
Newsgroups: net.philosophy,net.sci
Subject: Science and Freud
Message-ID: <260@spar.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 16-May-86 07:17:19 EDT
Article-I.D.: spar.260
Posted: Fri May 16 07:17:19 1986
Date-Received: Sun, 18-May-86 13:58:09 EDT
References: <13695@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> <457@gargoyle.UUCP>
Reply-To: ellis@spar.UUCP (Michael Ellis)
Distribution: net
Organization: Schlumberger Palo Alto Research, CA
Lines: 79
Xref: linus net.philosophy:4938 net.sci:559

In article <457@gargoyle.UUCP> carnes@gargoyle.UUCP (Richard Carnes) writes:
>Matt Wiener writes:
>
>>And Freud is still considered garbage by the scientific community....
>>[Freudian garbage] still fails every known test that the scientific
>>community throws at it.
>
>This is an extremely uninformed statement. 

    Blasphemy! How dare you question the Word of Wiener!

    Seriously, as one who, in the past, has held Freud's "distasteful" theories
    in low regard, I urge Matthew to reconsider his opinions about one of
    the most creative thinkers in history. 
    
    In addition to the points made in Richard Carnes' excellent article,
    I'd like to add a few of my own..

    Our notions of what science is have changed enormously in the wake of
    the spectacular advances in physics and chemistry since ~1600 such that
    many feel the methodologies of these `hard' sciences are the only ones
    which are `scientific'. Do you believe that modern physics and chemistry
    could have occurred without any basis whatsoever, such as the
    description, classification, and codification of folks like Aristotle,
    followed up by centuries of formula gathering by alchemists and
    astrologers? Wayne stated this point quite well a few months back:

	Current attempts to define understanding are like Aristotelean
	physics.  We don't yet know the players in the game, but we are
	trying to assign names to them anyhow. Looking at the world,
	Aristotle "saw" the existence of certain "players" in physics.
	Some, he got mostly right (in some sense), such as "mass", and
	"time", and some he got drastically wrong, like "impetus".
	- Wayne Throope

    As I see things, Freud played a role in psychology similar to that of
    the Greek philosophers of science. By modern standards, perhaps you'd
    say Freud created the hermeneutics, rather than the science, of mind.
    Freud's tentative model of the mind was an attempt to perceive and
    assign names to the "players" in the psychological "game".  No doubt,
    many of Freud's ideas were only valid for the community in which he
    practiced. However, it seems pretty obvious to me that many of his
    "players" will ultimately prove to be universal across all cultures and
    times; it will require decades (perhaps centuries) before the models of
    psychology have progressed to the power of those in the hard sciences. 
   
    As to the verifiability of the fundamentals of psychology (eg: mind),
    consider that the fundamentals in the hard sciences are not verifiable
    either, and were at one time denied by Pythagoras and Plato. Can you
    prove that we have sensations? Can you prove that our sensations are
    sometimes observations of facts?  How?  By observing reports from other
    people which confirm our own observations??? Can we prove empirical
    induction???? Can we prove that physical things exist???? Are there
    really objects moving in space and time? And so on, ad nauseam.. We
    don't prove these things. We simply accept them as unquestioned
    requirements of physical science, and only properly concern ourselves
    with these issues when paradoxical contradictions seem to arise (which
    is why I feel QM is a proper topic in net.philosophy).
           
    Perhaps Hawking's speculation that all the basic laws of physics will be
    known in a few decades will prove to be as illfounded as it was at the
    turn of the century. My belief is that understanding of the mind itself will
    become the ultimate focus of scientific interest long after most other 
    forms of knowledge have exhausted themselves.

    Since Freud, there have been a huge number a theories of mind by folks
    as diverse as Jung, Wertheimer, Skinner, Lashley, Chomsky, Von Neumann,
    Husserl, Putnam, Gibson, Pribram, Searle.., an explosion of thought
    comparable the fertile speculations of Heraclitus, Democritus,
    Parmenides, Zeno, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle.. If Freud offends 
    one's sense of what science ought to be, so much the worse for
    everybody.

-michael

    If the world of sense does not fit mathematics, so much the worse for
    the world of sense.

- attributed to Pythagoras by Bertrand Russell