#demarcationproblem — Public Fediverse posts

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/09/freud-psychoanalysis-theories-brain-science/687957/?gift=1ga2TvL-DbuHDQIcYF7oR8dogJMMXp6vZXpySsUqqIs&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=sh

Freud's place in the history of psychology strikes me as not unlike that of Kepler in the history of astronomy; many beliefs these pioneers considered foundational are in fact false, yet to deny the importance of these men in the development of science is perverse.

>>...we need to go back to Freud’s true aim: to treat the soul, not by ministering to the brain, as modern biological psychiatry does, but “by accepting that the ‘soul’—construed as the experiencing, active, living ‘I’—is a part of nature.” <<

I am not well informed enough to comment on the therapeutic value of psychoanalysis. In fact, I am more interested in Freudian theory as a contribution to a naturalistic but nonreductive understanding of the mind.

With regard to the paragraph mentioning Karl Popper's condemnation of psychoanalysis as a "pseudoscience", we should note that few philosophers of science today accept Popper's claim that "falsifiability" provides a criterion that we can apply to separate the scientific from the pseudoscientific. We need to end the simplistic reliance on this supposed criterion and accept instead the complexity and difficulty of characterizing scientific inquiry and knowledge.

#Psychoanalysis #Freud #MarkSolms #Psychology #Psychiatry #Neuroscience #Science #DemarcationProblem #KarlPopper

#OwenGingerich - What Are the Scope and Limits of #Science?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wL_v57n92Iw

#Philosophy #PhilosophyOfScience #Metaphysics #Prediction #SolarSystem #Gravity #Motion #Newton #Foucault #Evolution #Life #Randomness #Mutation #Design #FineTuning #God #Theism #Teleology #Demarcation #DemarcationProblem #CloserToTruth #RobertKuhn

#Pseudopsychology refers to #pseudoscientific formulations of #psychology. Although psychology has increasingly become associated with cognitive science in recent times, there is still no general unifying theory of psychology. This makes the demarcation problem in the field more difficult to assess. However, there are some schools of thought and erroneous claims that have been widely rejected within the field today. Psychology has also been applied to numerous fields and occupations, leading it to be rampantly used, misused, and abused by a wide variety of professionals and amateurs alike. The proliferation of pop and pseudopsychology has been a concern for psychologists and those in related fields from very early on, as is evidenced by Joseph Jastrow's debunking of psychological pseudoscience published in 1900.

#RationalWiki #demarcationproblem
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Pseudopsychology