why are Freud's theories considered unscientific that is if you talk to any student today of psychology or some professor in Psychology probably one of the first things they'll dismiss about Freud is let's say that his theories were unscientific if we're going to think a little bit more deeply about what a science is because we say that Freud isn't scientific I wanted to cover five modern ingredients that we consider for science or what the community of scientists and psychology may be put together and say are important elements of it empiricist philosophers argued that all our knowledge is derived from sensory experience that reason takes a back seat when we want to acquire knowledge about the world deductive reasoning that is starting with a theory or broad premise is actually the less preferred method of inquiry for empiricists instead they argue that you make observations first and then you draw conclusions from all those scientific observations BF Skinner was a big advocate of this approach he didn't think that we should have any theories so again all knowledge colleges derived from sensory experience and deductive reasoning is not preferred and that we make observations first then we draw conclusions and this is actually what inductive reasoning is so you're going to make a lot of observations first then draw conclusions and again I'll just say that about Skinner he didn't think that theories were very useful in the mid 20th century when he was doing research he thought psychology just hadn't collected enough observations yet to be able to make deductions and explanations about what they were observing the second ingredient that makes up a science and a science of psychology is materialism the doctrine of materialism states that all the facts of the universe can be described in physical terms and explained by the nature and physical properties of matter and energy even human consciousness can be understood this way according to materialists by looking at the anatomical and the physiological structures of the brain interestingly Freud thought of himself as a materialist believe it or not because what he was actually doing is that he was talking about forces like the death Instinct versus the life Instinct that he thought were opposing forces that followed the same laws of physics and that there was an energy associated with each of these forces and they cannot be destroyed it could only be transformed to something else that maybe is an abnormal behavior just because he didn't actually have the physiological structures mapped out doesn't mean that they didn't exist according to Freud who would have said for instance the tools Weren't There Yet couldn't do any brain Imaging and whatever but he believed that there was nothing more than materialism here behind all of these forces that he was talking about a third important ingredient is positivism and during the early 19th century that's when positivism emerged and it's usually associated with this person that you see here was commemorated on a French stamp and that's how geese this positivism that he talked about was taken as an Article of Faith by the behaviorist Conte was a philosopher who was raised as a Catholic and he was educated in Paris he started giving public lectures on what he called positive philosophy in 1826 and he later published a six-volume Opus called course of positive philosophy now this has nothing to do with what we call positive psychology today and its focus on happiness and well-being now in positivism the idea here is that positive knowledge is the result of objective observations using systematic methods of Science by unbiased observers so he's saying that everything that we learn should come from publicly observable events that are grounded in our sensory experiences and positive knowledge was said to be the result of objective observations using these systematic methods of Science and these are to be made by unbiased observers truth then would amount to the agreement among The Observers so sure some observers might measure things differently but when they get together and they share their observations this shared observations would get us to the truth metaphysical speculation on the other hand was considered it was worthless because it's not grounded in our experiences so psychology comes from these observations metaphysics is really just people speculating about things that they can't actually observe so this is worthless according to the positivist because these speculations could never be verified objectively now for him and his followers they also put a lot of value on practical knowledge believing that there was this intimate connection between understanding nature and controlling it in fact compt argued that the ability to control nature was evidence that it was understood which creates an effective steam engine for instance because if you can have a steam engine that showed that you actually understood the principles of physics his faith in science even led him to recommend the deliberate redesign of society a theme that you'll see in Skinner's Walden 2 which is basically a description of an ideal Community Based on principles of Behavioral control even John Watson had prescriptions about child rearing that would all fall under this whole idea that once we understand a lot about child rearing we can make prediction and we control our children and so this is a whole idea that science can be used to exert control over nature a very positive practical application final thing is just to mention you might notice that this is such a strong level of belief here and it's like saying it should replace all metaphysical explanations and so on by the late 1840s Compton many of his other followers started to argue for what they called scientism which they believed was the idea that science should be the new Global religion that would require unaltering faith and adherence to positivism and this would be something that you could practice the proper ways of doing positivism and this would be the way that we could figure out what truth was Freud himself considered himself a positivist so Freud for instance talked about so much about how science was the the Supreme way to get to the truth that he also said that it was unfortunate and not good for society to keep having religion and he talked about this in 1933 for example in this quote where he says it's not permissible to declare that science is one field of human mental activity and that religion and philosophy are others at least equal in value and that science has no business to interfere with the other two that they all have equal claim to be true and that everyone is at Liberty to choose from which He will draw his convictions and in which he will place his belief a view of this kind is regarded as particularly Superior tolerant broad-minded and free from Liberal prejudices unfortunately it's not tenable it is simply a fact that the truth cannot be tolerant that it emits no compromise or limitations that research regards every sphere of human activity is belonging to it and it must be relentlessly critical if any other power tries to take over any part of it so you can see he's arguing for the supremacy of science that science is what gives us the truth and you can't put it on the same level of choice as religion and philosophy so you can already see here we've got three things that Freud identified with we have this including positivism here that he thinks that he is a scientist and so he's proceeding among this scientific method and is part of the scientific community that leads us to our fourth sort of modern ingredient here of Science and what's the science of psychology and that's logical positivism so this is how positivism developed into the 1920s and this is best reflected by a group of physicists logicians and mathematicians in Vienna in the 1920s and 1930s who call themselves The Vienna Circle their goal was to formulate general principles for Gathering knowledge particularly by taking lessons from successful Sciences like chemistry and physics so they wanted to study what is it about chemistry and physics that have been so successful and what can we learn from that to apply to other fields that might not be as developed yet including psychology he also had a goal of a unified science one in which the language of science would rest a lot on the use of symbols to eliminate the problems that arise from natural language they said that science can be characterized as having these two features one that it's empiricist and positivist right so that makes sense with the things we've already talked about and two it uses logical analysis or Reason so that goes contrary to the original and Pierce tradition which didn't really put much faith in reason or logical analysis but what makes logical positivism what it is is that you're going to combine the empirical methods and the positivism with the use of logical analysis or Reason logical analysis can show that there are two different kinds of statements about our experiences one kind includes statements that are reducible to simpler statements about the empirical experience that we're having so you can make statements about something that is that's experienced that's measured or that as the empirist would say comes through your sensory experience and you can further reduce that to something simpler you might be able to talk about the smell and then maybe talk about the neurons that light up in your brain when you smell and so the idea is that you can keep reducing these to simpler and simpler statements statements that cannot be reduced about the experience and are therefore devoid of meaning so that's the other kind of statement and these would be metaphysical explanations so when you get to something where you can't further explain why this is and you have to call into questions something like you have a spirit or that there's some force that we don't understand that would be a metaphase physical explanation and therefore that's not science that's not a logical analysis or reason that kind of statement cannot be included in what they consider science so they're meaningless one person who is associated with this group although he never actually was part of it just probably because he was moving in other parts of the world at that time was Carl popper who lived from 1902 to 1994. he was born and raised in Vienna in fact his parents were good friends with one of Freud's sisters so he was given that same social set he was a student at the University of Vienna and he attended their lectures in mathematics physics philosophy psychology and the history of Music he even worked for a time in one of Alfred Adler's clinics for children so remember Adler is one of those people who broke away from Freud and 11. in 1928 popper earned a doctorate in Psychology because he and his wife were Jewish they felt they had to flee Vienna in 1934 because of possible persecution so they first went to the UK a but then they ended up at Canterbury University in Christchurch New Zealand in 1936. I happened to go there a couple years ago and I remember seeing a plaque about popper being in this particular building when he was there as part of the department so he was there until after the war and in 1946 he moved to the UK and ended up being at the London School of economics and at the University of London now he didn't think theories had much value in science he thought that theories were too conjectural or hypothetical he thought no number of positive outcomes at the level of experimental testing can confirm a scientific theory but a single counter example is logically decisive right so he's saying it's really hard to prove a theory it doesn't matter how many times you run a study there's not going to be some set number of positive outcomes that will actually confirm it but what you can do in just one counter example of an experiment is disconfirm the theory and make it logically decisive then so he thinks then that to have a theory it has to be falsifiable now that doesn't mean that it's false itself it rather means that if the theory was wrong then the theory could be shown to be false either by observation or some experiment so you're saying if you could look at this Theory and figure out a case in which it could be wrong then you have a falsifiable theory or at least that's a good enough theory that can stand up for science his problem with where all those theories that were out there that were not falsifiable they were too General they had such an easy way of explaining any false case or sorry a negative case or a negative experiment that they just weren't any good they weren't like I said falsifiable and so he considered falsifiability of a theory or a science as the demarcation between what is and what is not genuinely scientific and who did he take aim at Freud and Adler these people that he had a connection with back in Vienna he thought Freud's an Adler's theories were not falsifiable that they were too broad and they were easy to make themselves refuting any criticism so he thought that for instance Einstein's theory of relativity in physics was something that could be falsifiable and so he thought it was a kind of a risky Theory and you could make deductions from it but you could also think of experiments that might or evidence from certain experiments that might make it falsifiable but psychoanalytic theories he just thought nah there they have more in common with primitive myths than they do with genuine science so he said that the remarkable strength of these psychoanalytic theory is that they seem to explain everything is actually their weakness psychoanalytic theories were crafted in a way that made them able to refute any criticism and then to give an explanation for every possible form of human behavior and so he thought that this made it impossible for any criticism of the theory to exist or any experiment that could be done then to show them to be false and so that's why he was one of the first to really raise his argument that Freud wasn't scientific from a logical positivist point of view The Fifth Element I I think is also important about modern science of psychology is operationism now one of these logical positives one of these members of the Vienna Circle was Rudolph carnap who wrote specifically about psychology and he recommended that all psychological Concepts should ultimately refer to publicly observable occurrences so that's positivism so he's saying that every time you have a psychological concept it should be linked to something that could be publicly observed otherwise you're talking about metaphysics there was also a physicist associated with this group named Percy Bridgeman who coined the term operationism for this kind of process and he argued that the investigator must be specific about how any concept that's in their model and their theory is to be measured that you have to give it an operational definition so for example intelligence could be defined by the score a person gets on an intelligence test now again psychoanalysis did not hold up well to this when you talk about the ID the Supreme go you talk about repression it's hard to come up with an operational definition of such Concepts and so therefore they wouldn't be in the realm of science according to these philosophers who are arguing for operationism even Skinner criticized Freud on this point he said Freud appears never to have considered the possibility of bringing into Concepts and theories of psychological science into contact with the rest of physical and biological science by the simple expedient of an operational analysis of terms so you see by the time you get to Skinner he is so believing that operationism is part of science he can dismiss psychoanalysis because of this problem of not having operational definitions many other people were also just as critical of psychoanalysis for this reason it wasn't just Skinner the supporters for psychoanalysis in the mid 20th century would argue that their theory was so complex and it would be almost impossible to give an operational analysis of their terms without oversimplifying the whole Theory and they said you just need to work it out longer with time they'll be able to come up with Concepts that could be that could have operational definitions but because of this sort of slowness and responding to a need for operational definitions academic psychology fairly quickly gave up on psychoanalysis and at the same time we get to surprised of behaviorism in America which fits with these new ideas of logical positivism and operationism so what I'm trying to make a point here about is that perhaps you could say that Freud and his theories originally had some of the common elements of scientific theories but the sand that he was standing in was shifting or it was changing such that by the time you get into the 20s and 30s scientists now have a different criteria for what makes up a science that it should have this falsifiability associated with it it should also have operational definitions and so they changed what they said science was from the way that Freud would have thought a science was from his training back in the 1880s and 1890s so I think that's an interesting idea to think about how Freud could go from a place where he thought he was being quite scientific and he was following his Heroes of science including physicists and chemists and other people but then he get into the 20s 30s and 40s in the 20th century and now scientists say no no no it has to have more than that it has to have these operational definitions and falsifiability [Music] foreign [Music]