Didclosures and refutations: clinical psychoanalysis as a logic of enquiry

摘要

The author argues that the empirical status of psychoanalysis has been distorted by the controversy surrounding Aristotelian and Galiean-Newtonian schemes of science, whose core ideas, respectively, are scientific concepts or forms and scientific laws. Bound by the euclidian axiomatic tradition, Newtonian-style 'laws' do not obtain in the social sci- ences, and in biology they apply only at near-molecular levels, not at the level of mind. Continuing the traditional Aristotelian reliance on 'exemplars', neither Freud's nor Dar- Win's work fits the deductivist, infallibilistic scientific criteria used by philosophers such As Tarski, Popper or Grunbaum.