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- General A2: Falsifiability (Psychoanalysis)
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AT: Not FalsifiablePsychoanalysis = FalsifiableExperimental data and empirical evidence prove the validity of psychoanalysis – their authors are dogmatic hacks Petocz 15 – PhD in Psychology, currently teaches history, psychology, and critical thinking at the University of Western Sydney. Visiting researcher at the Department of Philosophy, Kings College, London University in 2000 (Agnes, 1/12/2015, “The scientific status of psychoananalysis revisited”, Philosophy, Science, and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Meeting // SM) A reservoir of experimental data pertinent to Freud’s work currently exists and, as we have shown in detail, offers support for a respectable number of his major ideas and theories … However, a sizeable proportion of those observers who are presumably concerned with evaluating the standing of psychoanalysis have simply refused to acknowledge the existence, or accept the credibility, of such findings. (Fisher & Greenberg, 1996, pp. 284-285) After a hundred years of controversy, we can now put to rest the criticism of psychoanalysis that its most fundamental assertion- the importance of unconscious processes—is mistaken or without empirical foundation. The data are incontrovertible: consciousness is the tip of the psychic iceberg that Freud imagined it to be. (Western, 1999, p. 1097) There is a cornucopia of empirical evidence in the cognitive neurosciences, attachment field, infant-observation research, develop- mental psychology, clinical psychopathology, and the therapeutic process that are corroborations, validations, extensions, revisions and emendations of Freud’: contributions. (Mills, ZIIJ7, p. 540) Psychoanalysis is both falsifiable and accurate GRANT AND HARARI 2005 (Don and Edwin, psychiatrists, “Psychoanalysis, science and the seductive theory of Karl Popper,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry 39) Attacks on psychoanalysis and the long-term therapies derived from it, have enjoyed a long history and much publicity [1-4]. Yet, the justification for such attacks has been challenged on many grounds, including their methodology [5] and the empirically demonstrable va- lidity of core psychoanalytic concepts [6,7]. Also, bur- geoning neuroscience research, some of which is sum- marized below, indicates likely neurological correlates for many key clinically derived psychoanalytic concepts such as self-coherence [8], repression [9] and projective identification [10]. Furthermore, the effectiveness of psychoanalysis and its derivative therapies has been supported by empiri- cal research [11,12], particularly for patients with DSM axis II pathology. Despite this evidence, the attacks on psychoanalysis continue unabated, not only from some psychiatrists [13,14] but also from the highest levels of politics and health bureaucrats [15], although what ex- actly is being attacked is often unclear.
But a funny thing happened to Freud on the way to becoming a trivia question: as researchers looked deeper into the physical structure of the brain, they began to find support for some of his theories. Now a small but influential group of researchers are using his insights as a guide to future research; they even have a journal, Neuropsychoanalysis, founded three years ago. “Freud’s insights on the nature of consciousness are consonant with the most advanced contemporary neuroscience views,” wrote Antonio Damasio, head of neurology at the University of Iowa College of Medicine. Note that Damasio did not refer to psychoanalysis or the Oedipus complex. Instead the work is going on at the fundamental level where emotions are born and primitive passions lurk in the shadows of dreams. HOW THE MIND WORKS Beyond the basic animal instincts to seek food and avoid pain, Freud identified two sources of psychic energy, which he called “drives”: aggression and libido (the latter encompasses sexuality but also had a more expansive meaning, involving the desire for stimulation and achievement). The key to his theory is that these were unconscious drives, shaping our behavior without the mediation of our waking minds; they surface, heavily disguised, only in our dreams. The work of the past half-century in psychology and neuroscience has been to downplay the role of unconscious universal drives, focusing instead on rational processes in conscious life. Meanwhile, dreams were downgraded to a kind of mental static, random scraps of memory flickering through the sleeping brain. But researchers have found evidence that Freud’s drives really do exist, and they have their roots in the limbic system, a primitive part of the brain that operates mostly below the horizon of consciousness. Now more commonly referred to as emotions, the modern suite of drives comprises five: rage, panic, separation distress, lust and a variation on libido sometimes called seeking. Freud presaged this finding in 1915, when he wrote that drives originate “from within the organism” in response to demands placed on the mind “in consequence of its connection with the body.” Drives, in other words, are primitive brain circuits that control how we respond to our environment—foraging when we’re hungry, running when we’re scared and lusting for a mate. The seeking drive is proving a particularly fruitful subject for researchers. Although like the others it originates in the limbic system, it also involves parts of the forebrain, the seat of higher mental functions. In the 1980s, Jaak Panksepp, a neurobiologist at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, became interested in a place near the cortex known as the ventraltegmental area, which in humans lies just above the hairline. When Panksepp stimulated the corresponding region in a mouse, the animal would sniff the air and walk around, as though it were looking for something. Was it hunger? No. The mouse would walk right by a plate of food, or for that matter any other object Panksepp could think of. This brain tissue seemed to cause a general desire for something new. “What I was seeing,” he says, “was the urge to do stuff.” Panksepp called this seeking.
Today NPR reported on fMRI research that indicates that when people think of issues pertaining to religion regions of the brain involved in interpersonal relations light up. The human brain, it appears, responds to God as if he were just another person, according to a team at the National Institutes of Health. A study of 40 people — some religious, some nonreligious — found that phrases such as “I believe God is with me throughout the day and watches over me” lit up the same areas of the brain we use to decipher the emotions and intentions of other people. The researchers speculate that the development of this sort of cognition was crucial to the development of civilization: Without religion, Bulbulia says, “large scale cooperation, which now spans the world, would be impossible. He adds that humans differ from other species in their ability to cooperate in very large groups. Religion can help foster cooperation because it ensures that people share the same set of rules about behavior, and think they’ll be punished if they don’t follow them, Bulbulia says. Religion also unites people, especially in times of great uncertainty. This theory, I think, would indicate that it’s rather inaccurate to suggest that the brain processes thoughts of God exactly as it processes thoughts of other persons. Rather, if the evolution of religious thought played a large role in the ability of humans to engage in large scale cooperation, then this is because the thought of God would be something like the “Person = x” similar Kant’s famous “object = x”, functioning as a general structure allowing for the possibility of empathy towards all people irregardless of their differences. Just as Kant’s “object = x” isn’t any particular object but a formal structure that allows objects to be thinkable, so too would the person = x be a formal structure enabling all interpersonal relations (cf. Deleuz’es “Tournier and a World Without Others” for a good gloss on this Other-structure). Where individual encounters with particular people tend to be governed by the same/different schema, allowing for empathy towards those whom we code as “like us”, the formal schema of the “Person = x” would allow these individual differences to be surmounted– to a greater or lesser degree, anyway –allowing for the different to be seen as a part of the same. In this way, differences between different tribes, cultures, languages, customs, etc., could be surmounted to allow for cooperative activity. Of course, at this meta or transcendental level of personhood– the person = x –the same/different schema would still be operative but in a way in which sameness was no longer defined by local and immediate social relations between individuals. In other words, what this neuro-research seems to have uncovered is something like belief in the existence of the Lacanian big Other, where the subject believes, through the screen of fantasy, that the Other is structured in a particular way and that it desires specific things (the transformation of desire into demand via fantasy that fills out the lack in the Other). General A2: Falsifiability (Psychoanalysis)Their falsifiability argument is wrong—seven reasons GRANT AND HARARI 2005 (Don and Edwin, psychiatrists, “Psychoanalysis, science and the seductive theory of Karl Popper,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry 39) Popper's falsifiability criterion of science is seductive in its simplicity, but its simplicity is achieved by its failure to address not only the clinical issues but also the many philosophical issues, which have been raised in the extensive scholarly published work critical of Popper's account. Curiously, this published work is ig- nored by those who invoke Popper to criticize psycho- analysis. The main criticisms may be summarized as: 1 Historians of science [23,24] using the case-study method of theory change in science, including psy- choanalysis [23], have shown the inadequacy of Pop- per’s criterion as a description of how scientists ac- tually work and how theories change in the practice of science. In these accounts, inductive reasoning and the verification of hypotheses play a crucial role. 2 Some medical scientists describe Popper’s criterion as counterproductive in the real world [25]. For ex- ample, in formulating epidemiological hypotheses concerning the spread of HIV-AIDS, which have public health and clinical implications, a Popperian approach which insists on strict falsification of hy- potheses is less useful and less frequently used in actual practice than one which uses induction to gen- eralize from observations in a professionally disci- plined way. 3 Popper neglected the crucial role played by concepts and models in scientific theorizing [24,26]. Concepts and models (including ideational, mathematical and material models) are not epiphenomena produced as an incidental by-product of scientific thinking, but actively shape the way scientists think about their field and the questions they ask. Watson and Crick’s use of a material model to discover the double helix structure of DNA is a well-known example. 4 The probability calculus posed difficulties for Popper as did Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle which challenged a strict falsificationist view of sci- ence and led to some personal friction between Pop- per and Heisenberg [16, pp.257-259). 5 Popper insisted that there is but one scientific method, equally applicable to the natural sciences (mathemat- ics, physics, biology, astronomy, geology) social sci- ences (anthropology, linguistics, sociology, ethnol- ogy, history) and all other endeavours which claim to be scientific [27,28]. 6 Popper misrepresented historicism in general and Marxist theory in particular [29,30]. The term *his- toricism’ was used by historians long before Popper to refer to the historian's attempt to empathize with peo- ple about whom they were writing so as to understand them and their social conditions as they understood themselves and which gave rise to certain actions and events, that is, a contextualist, empathic method of historical scholarship. Popper used the term his- toricism in an idiosyncratic way to mean a belief in deterministic or teleological laws governing histor- ical change which he attributed to Plato, Marx and Hegel. Thus, Popper claimed that some of Marx's predictions, such as the increasing pauperization of the working class under capitalism which would cre- ate the conditions for revolution, were clearly falsified by the time he (Popper) was writing, almost a cen- tury after Marx. In response, some scholars have ar- gued that two World Wars and the rise of the Welfare State served to distract the working class in devel- oped society from its lack of economic and political power, while the pauperization that Marx predicted has occurred in the so-called underdeveloped coun- tries. Other commentators believe that the pauperiza- tion of the working class has in fact occurred, relative to the advance of other socioeconomic groups. Still others hold that the Welfare State was a direct re- sponse to Marx's theory, raising the question of how human will operates in the social sciences in ways that make them radically different from the natural sciences. So social sciences may still claim to be scientific but Popper’s falsification criterion is irrele- vant/inappropriate to social science. 7 Contrary to Popper’s claim against psychoanalysis, the use of a theory to save itself from apparently fal- sifying instances does not, prima facie, render it un- scientific. Most scientific theories include so-called auxiliary statements, including those which guide the use of instruments and methods of observation that may be relevant to the apparent falsification of the theory in question [31). Thus, the fact that an aero- plane crashes on take-off is not a valid refutation of the Newtonian mechanics which were applied to the design of the aeroplane. On the contrary, auxil- iary hypotheses to do with wind resistance, surface friction and metal fatigue are invoked to explain the accident, explanations which are themselves derived from Newtonian mechanics.
The successful use of controlled experiments in science to corroborate or falsify hypotheses has led many to consider this testing process as the defining characteristic of scientific inquiry. Sir Karl Popper articulated this criterion when trying to find a way to distinguish apparent pseudosciences such as Freudianism and Marxism from genuine science. Popper asserted that a truly scientific theory must be “falsifiable,” that is to say, it can be subjected to a controlled experiment that could conceivably contradict it. Conversely, any theory that does not admit the possibility of empirical falsification is regarded as pseudoscience. The falsifiability standard has attained widespread acceptance among scientists, though philosophers of science have pointed out several problems with such a definition of scientific method.
So-called pseudosciences such as Freudianism, Marxism, and astrology do not meet the falsifiability standard, to the extent that their defenders resort to special pleading to explain away failed predictions, rather than admit a failure of their theory. This seems to make the scientific or pseudoscientific status of a theory depend more on the behavior of its adherents than on any intrinsic characteristic of the theory as such. Tautological knowledge, which may be deduced by philosophers and mathematicians, would seem to be inherently unfalsifiable. This exclusion reminds us that a theory of empirical science can never serve as a general theory of knowledge, as there are other possible paths to knowledge. Thus pseudosciences that do not meet the falsifiability standard are not thereby discredited in the least. All that is proven is that they are not empirical sciences of nature, but neither are mathematics and philosophy, and that is not to their discredit. The falsifiability standard counterintuitively suggests that the credibility of a scientific theory is derived from the possibility of it being wrong. It is more accurate to assert that a scientific theory gains credibility from its verifiability, by successfully passing tests where it might have been proven wrong. What is paramount is that a theory is consistent with observation, and this has been the hallmark of physical science for the last three centuries, without explicit reference to a falsifiability standard. As long as a theory is confirmed by controlled experiment, the hypothetical possibility of a negative result is of secondary importance. Equally counterintuitive is the implication that a theory lacking falsifiability loses credibility. Intuitively, if a proposition is absolutely not falsifiable, it is certainly true, though it may be merely a tautology. Regarding pseudosciences as non-falsifiable gives them too much credit, when in fact their excuses for failed predictions can be refuted by evidence and argument. All too often the falsifiability standard is used as an excuse to refuse to engage a theory, maintaining that its exponents will not accept any refutation.
The scientific method is an excellent way to arrive at near-certain knowledge in areas that are susceptible to both physical observation and controlled experiment. Many ordinary types of knowledge are not susceptible to controlled experiment, as is the case with the study of history or any other aspect of the past, which can never be replicated. Such sciences must use different rules of evidence, and the basis of certitude in their results is of a different quality than that of the natural sciences. Other types of knowledge are not susceptible to physical observation, such as our conscious experiences (as opposed to their neural correlates), or abstract reasoning about mathematical or metaphysical entities. This non-physical knowledge is not inferior to that of the empirical sciences, but on the contrary is considered the most certain knowledge of all, as we directly comprehend the truth of a tautology and directly experience our own consciousness. The knowledge of empirical sciences, on the other hand, is mediated indirectly through the exercise of our consciousness and abstract reasoning. From this, the foolishness of philosophical materialism is evident: we only know matter through the mind, so it is absurd to doubt the existence of the mind or soul without doubting the existence of matter. Similarly, physics is only intelligible against a background of logical, metaphysical, and mathematical assumptions. The natural sciences are still epistemologically subordinate to philosophy, in fact if not in culture. Our cultural rejection of abstract philosophy in favor of “hard” science has not eliminated the need for philosophy, but has simply removed it from conscious discourse, reducing it to a set of unconsciously held and poorly understood assumptions. Popper himself recognized this in his study of quantum mechanics, which he called “the great quantum muddle,” in reference to how physicists incoherently invoked contradictory philosophical interpretations of quantum mechanics. Even the most radically anti-philosophical man has a philosophy, but if he consciously rejects the study of philosophy, he is doomed to hold his philosophy unconsciously and incoherently. Empiricism BadLacan’s approach is rationalist rather than empirical—it’s still scientific and contrasts with other kinds of psychoanalysis EVANS 2009 (Dylan, “Science and Truth: an introduction I,” The Symptom 10, http://www.lacan.com/thesymptom/?p=59 I added “Jung” in brackets to correct a typo by the author) Lacan bases this account of the history of science on the writings of Koyré, whose account of Newtonian physics seems to have been a great influence on Lacan. In addition to Koyré, Lacan is indebted to the philosophical work of Bachelard and Canguilhem, which clearly place him in the rationalist rather than the empiricist tradition in the philosophy of science. In other words, for Lacan, what marks a discourse as scientific is a high degree of mathematical formalization. This is what lies behind Lacan’s attempts to formalize psychoanalytic theory in terms of various mathematical formulae. These formulae also encapsulate a further characteristic of scientific discourse (perhaps the most fundamental one in Lacan’s view), which is that it should be transmissible (Lacan, 1973: 60). Lacan’s allegiance to the rationalist tradition helps to explain the often biting criticisms which he levels at much modern scientific research. These criticisms are almost always aimed at forms of science based on empiricist assumptions (whicb Lacan regards ultimately as a false form of science), and not at science itself. When he criticises modern science for ignoring the symbolic dimension of human existence and thus encouraging modern man “to forget his subjectivity” (Lacan, 1953: 70), he clearly has sueh empiricist vehicles as communication science and behaviourist psychology in mind. Thus Lacan is not criticizing Science itself, but only a particular form which he regards as a deviation from ‘true science’.Thus it would certainly be wrong to describe Lacan as a luddite, fiercely opposing the advance of any and all scientific enquiry. Far from it; he insists that the subject of psychoanalysis can only be the subject of science, for in the era of science it is impossible to recapture any ‘humanistic’ subject. Indeed, Lacan stresses that this is what separates Freud from [Jung]lung. Whereas lung wanted to restore ‘a subject gifted with depths’, a subject with some direct, archetypal access to knowledge (which can be seen as a form of intuitionism), Freud insisted that an exclusively rational route to knowledge is now such a common presupposition that it cannot be ignored. In stating that psychoanalysis operates only on the subject of science, Lacan is arguing that psychoanalysis is not based on any appeal to an ineffable experience or flash of intuition, but on a process of reasoned dialogue, even when reason confronts its limit in madness. Lacanian psychoanalysis is scientific—it’s rationalist, not empiricist—but they first have to win that empiricism is better than rationalism or their mode of science is just paranoia EVANS 2009 (Dylan, “Science and Truth: an introduction I,” The Symptom 10, paragraph ends with a comma for some reason, http://www.lacan.com/thesymptom/?p=59) This brings us back to our initial problem. What status are we to attribute to psychoanalytic theory? Is it a truly scientific discourse? Lacan’s confident claims in 1964 about psychoanalysis ‘proceeding from the same status as science’ seem to imply that it has already attained scientific status. However, in “Science and truth”, only a year later, there are signs that Lacan is becoming more cautious. Thus he now distinguishes psychoanalysis from science on the grounds that each has a different mode of relationship to truth as cause. His growing uncertainty is reflected by apparently contradictory statements in the same paper; he both states that psychoanalysis is not a science but a “practice” (pratique) with a “scientific vocation” (Lacan, 1965: 863), and also speaks of ‘the psychoanalytic science’ (Lacan, 1965: 876). By 1977 he has moved even further away from the confident claims of 1964, and now explicitly denies that psychoanalysis is a science; Psychoanalysis is not a science. It has no scientific status – it merely waits and hopes for it. Psychoanalysis is a delusion—a delusion which is expected to produce a science… It is a scientific delusion, but this doesn’t mean that analytic practice will ever produce a science. (Lacan, 1976-7: Ornicar? 14: 4 [seminar of 11.01.77]) However, this statement is perhaps less categorical than it seems at first sight. For in psychoanalytic theory, ever since Freud’s remark on the similarity between delusions and philosophical systems, there has been an awareness of the logical rigour of psychotic phenomena (Freud, 1912-13: 73). Indeed, in his later work, Lacan goes on to describe psychosis as “an essay in rigor”, and half-jokingly (but only half) muses that if he had been a little more psycholic he might have produced a more rigorous theorisation of psychoanalysis than he did. However, in the paper on science and truth, it is not psychoanalysis that Lacan compares to a delusion. but science itself; he describes science as “a fully realised paranoia” (Lacan. 1965: 874). This is because scientific constructions resemble the architecture of a delusion in their rigour and explanatory power, and because both science and paranoia are based on the operation of foreclosure. Thus the statement in 1977 that psychoanalysis is not a science but a delusion invokes an opposition that is simply not present, even undermined, in the 1965 paper on science and truth. In terms of the 1965 paper, the statement that psychoanalysis is a delusion can only be read as confirming its scientific status. This radical position places, Lacan at an even further distance from the empiricist tradition than do his appeals to rationalist philosophers. And this is what makes Lacan particularly impervious to’the kind of criticisms levelled at psychoanalysis today by Anglo-American philosophers of science. Inspired by Eysenck’s famous tirade against psychoanalysis in the 1970′s (Eysenck & Wilson, 1973), a new generation of philosophers have argued in recent years that psychoanalytic theory is not scientific because it is not falsifiable (eg. Grunbaum, 1984; Macmillan, 1991;’ Esterson, 1993). Such criticisms are based entirely on the empiricist account of science which Lacan rejects, Alt: Internal ConsistencyInternal consistency is a better standard for evidence—even the requirement of material proof would exclude most scientific knowledge CASTELLANO 2012 (Daniel, The Insufficiency of Empiricism, http://www.arcaneknowledge.org/philtheo/empiricism2.htm) All scientific theory worthy of the name, not just that which uses thought experiments, explains the observable in terms of the unobservable. Our intelligible, mathematical principles are believed to be the real underlying basis of the regularity of what we observe, even though we almost never see them operating in ideal conditions. Observed reality is messy: there is always friction or air drag or other complicating factors, as well as measurement error, leading us to results that at best approximate the mathematical ideals of our theories. Yet we consider the terms of our mathematical theories to have real explanatory force, and do not regard them as mere descriptions of observations. These theories have their own internal deductive logic which, when followed, can lead to predictions of things not yet observed. This has been repeatedly the case in physics for the last century, as theory, for the most part, has been ahead of observation. Sometimes the theory is so firmly established that scientists speak of certain entities (e.g., black holes) as definitely existing even before they have been unequivocally observed. 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