Karl Popper’s Philosophy And Psychological Theories
It is common to associate philosophy with a world of speculation without any connection with science, but the truth is that this is not the case. This discipline is not only the mother of all sciences from a historical perspective; It is also what allows us to defend the robustness or weakness of scientific theories.
In fact, since the first half of the 20th century, with the emergence of a group of thinkers known as the Vienna Circle, there is even a branch of philosophy that is responsible for overseeing not only scientific knowledge, but what is understood by science.
It is the philosophy of science, and one of its earliest representatives, Karl Popper did much to examine the question of the extent to which psychology generates scientifically supported knowledge In fact, his confrontation with psychoanalysis was one of the main causes of the crisis of this current.
Karl Popper was born in Vienna during the summer of 19002, when psychoanalysis was gaining strength in Europe. In that same city he studied philosophy, a discipline to which he dedicated himself until his death in 1994.
Popper was one of the most influential philosophers of science of the Vienna Circle generation, and his early works were taken into account when developing a demarcation criterion, that is, when delimiting a way of demarcating What is it that distinguishes scientific knowledge from that which is not?
Thus, the problem of demarcation is an issue to which Karl Popper tried to respond by devising ways in which we can know which kinds of statements are scientific and which are not
This is an unknown that runs through the entire philosophy of science, regardless of whether it is applied to relatively well-defined objects of study (such as chemistry) or others in which the phenomena to be investigated are more open to interpretation (such as paleontology). And, of course, psychology, being a bridge between neurology and the social sciences, is greatly affected depending on whether one demarcation criterion or another is applied.
Thus, Popper dedicated much of his work as a philosopher to devising a way to separate scientific knowledge from metaphysics and simple unfounded speculation. This led him to reach a series of conclusions that left a good part of what was considered psychology in his time and that They emphasized the importance of falsification in scientific research.
Although the philosophy of science was born in the 20th century with the appearance of the Vienna Circle, the main attempts to know how knowledge (in general, not specifically “scientific knowledge”) can be accessed and to what extent it is true appeared ago. many centuries, with the birth of epistemology.
Auguste Comte and inductive reasoning
Positivism, or the philosophical doctrine according to which the only valid knowledge is scientific, was one of the consequences of the development of this branch of philosophy. It appeared at the beginning of the 19th century by the French thinker Auguste Comte and, of course, generated many problems ; So many, in fact, that no one could act in a way that was even slightly consistent with it.
First of all, the idea that the conclusions we reach through experience outside of science are irrelevant and do not deserve to be taken into account is devastating for anyone who tries to get out of bed and make relevant decisions. in your day to day life.
The truth is Everyday life requires us to make hundreds of inferences quickly without having to go through something similar to the kind of empirical tests necessary to do science, and the fruit of this process continues to be knowledge, more or less accurate, that makes us act in one sense or another. In fact, we don’t even bother to base all our decisions on logical thinking: we constantly take mental shortcuts.
Secondly, positivism placed the problem of demarcation at the center of the philosophical debate, which in itself is very complicated to solve. How was it understood from Comte’s positivism that true knowledge should be accessed? Through the accumulation of simple observations based on observable and measurable facts. That is to say, It is fundamentally based on induction
For example, if after making several observations on the behavior of lions we see that whenever they need food they resort to hunting other animals, we will come to the conclusion that lions are carnivores; From individual facts we will reach a broad conclusion that covers many other unobserved cases
However, it is one thing to recognize that inductive reasoning can be useful, and another to maintain that by itself it allows us to achieve true knowledge about how reality is structured. It is at this point that Karl Popper, his principle of falsifiability and his rejection of positivist principles, enters the scene.
Popper, Hume and falsificationism
The cornerstone of the demarcation criterion that Karl Popper developed is called falsificationism. Falsificationism is an epistemological current according to which scientific knowledge should not be based so much on the accumulation of empirical evidence as on attempts to refute ideas and theories to find samples of their robustness.
This idea takes certain elements from the philosophy of David Hume, according to which it is impossible to demonstrate a necessary connection between a fact and a consequence that follows from it. There is no reason that allows us to say with certainty that an explanation of reality that works today will work tomorrow. Although lions eat meat very frequently, perhaps over time it will be discovered that in exceptional situations some of them are able to survive for a long time eating a special variety of plant.
Furthermore, one of the implications of Karl Popper’s falsificationism is that it is impossible to definitively prove that a scientific theory is true and faithfully describes reality. Scientific knowledge will be defined by how well it works to explain things at a given time and context, not to the degree to which it reflects reality as it is, since knowing the latter is impossible
Karl Popper and psychoanalysis
Although Popper had certain run-ins with behaviorism (specifically, with the idea that learning is based on repetitions through conditioning, although this is not a fundamental premise of this psychological approach) The school of psychology that he attacked most vehemently was Freudian psychoanalysis which during the first half of the 20th century had a lot of influence in Europe.
Fundamentally, what Popper criticized about psychoanalysis was its inability to stick to explanations that could be falsified, something he considered to be cheating. A theory that cannot be falsified He is capable of contorting himself and adopting all possible shapes in order not to show that reality does not fit his proposals which means that it is not useful in explaining phenomena and, therefore, it is not science.
For the Austrian philosopher, the only merit of Sigmund Freud’s theories was that they had a good capacity to perpetuate themselves, taking advantage of their own ambiguities to fit into any explanatory framework and to adapt to all unforeseen events without being called into question. The effectiveness of psychoanalysis had not to do with the degree to which they served to explain things, but with the ways he found ways to justify himself
For example, the theory of the Oedipus complex does not have to suffer if, after having identified the father as a source of hostility during childhood, it is discovered that in fact the relationship with the father was very good and that there was never any contact with the mother beyond the day of birth: simply, other people are identified as paternal and maternal figures, since as psychoanalysis is based on the symbolic, it does not have to fit with “natural” categories such as biological parents.
Blind faith and circular reasoning
In short, Karl Popper did not believe that psychoanalysis was not a science because it did not serve to explain well what happens, but because of something even more basic: because it was not possible to even consider the possibility that these theories are false
Unlike Comte, who assumed that it was possible to unravel faithful and definitive knowledge about what is real, Karl Popper took into account the influence that the biases and starting points of different observers have on what they study, and therefore He understood that certain theories were more of a historical construction than a useful tool for science.
Psychoanalysis, according to Popper, was a kind of mixture of the argument ad ignorantiam and the fallacy of begging the question: it always asks you to accept some premises in advance to then demonstrate that, Since there is no evidence to the contrary, they must be true That is why he understood that psychoanalysis was comparable to religions: both were self-confirming and based on circular reasoning to emerge successfully from any confrontation with facts.
