Posted by bob on May 29, 2000, at 11:57:24
In reply to Truth vs. Diversion, posted by Ginny on May 27, 2000, at 12:31:08
> > As to whether there is an unconscious or is it all hormones, etc., I don't feel it has to be either/or. One is a way to try to describe how we might experience ourselves in our world. The other explains the mechanisms of how the equipment works to give us those experiences.
>
> I think it is indeed either/or. Either Freud et alia were on to a scientific truth, or they were folklorists. There's nothing per se wrong with folklore, but it should be viewed as that --literature, myth, gorgeous nonense, equivalent to astrology or religion -- and not confused with science. I have no problem with Freud as literature; I have a problem with Freud as science. When I go to a physician, I want medicine, not poetry.But science itself is folklore, by the same standards. Do you really believe that there are probably 6 other "dimensions" out there all collapsed and curled up into tiny "strings" whose energetic wobblings comprise what we know as quarks?
There simply is no such thing as a scientific truth.
That doesn't mean that there is no such thing as Truth out there, but instead that science has no means of determining when it has touched upon the Truth of any matter. Science (with a capital S) has its own set of assumptions and its own vocabulary, just as Freud and Jung and others in the psychodynamic arena have theirs. Perhaps the foremost assumption in Science nowadays is that we work within a paradigm of falsification, not verification. If we could verify, we could find Truth. But it is axiomatic in Scientific practice that one negative instance is a refutation to any claim of truth. In doing Science, you set out to prove yourself wrong and, if you find that you cannot do so PLUS you can argue that you have also ruled out any competing hypotheses that you could think of at the time, then at best you have demonstrated strong support for your own explanation of The Way Things Are.
A fundamental mistake in the philosophy of science for the last 150 years or so has been a convolution of epistemology with ontology. To put it plainly, we think that because we have come to "know" something, that something must actually "be" as we know it. Existence outside of our minds, however you construe that construct to be, is separated from our minds by the rather tremendous gulf of sensation that exists between real-world phenomena and our cognitive processing of those phenomena. Stating that we know something to be "true" from experimental data ignores this gulf and creates a phantom reality that may or may not represent what is on the other side of the gulf.
Since they're only human, some scientists are just as prone to walk the dogma as anyone else from any field of disciplined study.
What we need to keep in mind (HAH!) is that both psychoanalytic theory and cognitive neuroscience are MODELS by which we can gain some insight on mental functioning. Models, by definition, are not the real thing. But when you know the limitations to any specific model AS WELL AS the model's strengths, you will be able to respond to, predict, control, manipulate, whatever, the phenomena described by the model to some degree of success.
Perhaps the worst dogmatic belief about Science is that it reveals more and more of the Truth as it progresses and, therefore, we're getting that much further down the Yellow Brick Road with each advance. But it is also "axiomatic" in Science to recognize that every question answered reveals two new questions that are unanswered.
Go ahead ... do the math.
If that "axiom" is anywhere close to the Truth, then what we "know" is increasing linearly while what we "don't know" is increasing geometrically. The more we come to know, the less we really understand about the whole.
Kinda like Zeno's paradox in reverse.
The bottom line? There's no reason to get your undies bunched over the truth or lack thereof, in your humble opinion, about any of these theories. They are all different perspectives and approaches to the same set of problems. Since we need to deal with the reality of brain disorders and not the theory of why they are or how they come to be, taking a pragmatic approach and using whatever works is going to prove more effective for most people in treating their disorders and the complications they create, no matter how incompatible or incommensurate the "theories" behind your methods are.
my two cents,
bob
poster:bob
thread:34863
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20000526/msgs/35098.html