Karl Popper’s philosophy and psychological theories.

One of the referents of the philosophy of science most opposed to psychoanalysis.

It is common to associate philosophy with a world of speculations without any connection to science, but the truth is that this is not so. This discipline is not only the mother of all sciences from a historical perspective; it is also the one that allows us to defend the robustness or weakness of scientific theories.

In fact, since the first half of the twentieth century, with the emergence of a group of thinkers known as the Vienna Circle, there is even a branch of philosophy that is in charge of supervising not only scientific knowledge, but also what is understood by science.

This 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 endorsed knowledge.. In fact, his confrontation with psychoanalysis was one of the main causes of the entry into crisis of this current.

Who was Karl Popper?

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 devoted 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 very much taken into account when developing a criterion of demarcation, that is, when delimiting a way to demarcate what is that which distinguishes scientific knowledge from that which is not.

Thus, the problem of demarcation is an issue to which Karl Popper attempted to respond by devising forms of demarcation. Karl Popper tried to answer by devising ways in which one can know what kinds of statements are scientific and what are not scientific..

This is a question that runs through the whole philosophy of science, regardless of whether it is applied to relatively well delimited 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 on a bridge between neuroscience and the social sciences, is greatly affected depending on whether one demarcation criterion or another is applied to it.

Thus Popper devoted much of his work as a philosopher to devising a way of separating scientific knowledge from metaphysics and mere unfounded speculation. This led him to reach a series of conclusions that left much of what was considered in his day to be psychology in a bad light and that emphasized the importance of falsification in scientific research. in scientific research.

Falsificationism

Although the philosophy of science was born in the 20th century with the emergence 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 many centuries ago, 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 that, in fact, no one has ever been able to understand it.so many that, in fact, 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 not worth taking into account is devastating for anyone who intends to get out of bed and make relevant decisions in their daily lives.

The truth is that the truth is that everyday life requires us to make hundreds of inferences quickly without having to go through anything like the kind of empirical contrasts necessary to do science, and the fruit of this process is still knowledge, more or less accurate, that makes us act in one way or another. In fact, we do not even bother to make all our decisions based on logical thinking: we constantly take mental shortcuts.

Secondly, positivism placed at the center of the philosophical debate the problem of demarcation, which is already very complicated to solve. In what way 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 reach the conclusion that lions are carnivores; from individual facts we will arrive at a broad conclusion that encompasses many other unobserved cases..

However, it is one thing to recognize that inductive reasoning can be useful, and another to hold that by itself it allows us to arrive at 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 come into play.

Popper, Hume and Falsificationism

The cornerstone of the demarcation criterion developed by Karl Popper 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 in order to find evidence of their robustness.

This idea takes certain elements from the philosophy of David Hume, according to whom it is impossible to prove an idea.according to whom 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. Even if lions eat meat very frequently, perhaps in 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 prove definitively that a scientific theory is true and accurately describes reality. Scientific knowledge will be defined by how well it works to explain things at a given time and in a given context, not by the degree to which it reflects reality as it is, since it is impossible to know the latter..

Karl Popper and psychoanalysis

Although Popper had certain clashes with behaviorism (specifically, with the idea that learning is based on repetition through conditioning, although this is not a fundamental premise of this psychological approach), the school of psychology that he attacked was the school of psychoanalysis. the school of psychology that attacked most vehemently was that of Freudian psychoanalysis, which, during the first half of the 20th century, was the first school of psychology that attacked the idea that learning was based on repetition through conditioning.which during the first half of the 20th century was very influential in Europe.

Fundamentally, Popper's criticism of psychoanalysis was its inability to stick to explanations that could be falsified, which he considered to be cheating. A theory that cannot be falsified is capable of contorting itself and adopting all possible forms in order not to show that reality does not fit its propositions, which means that it is not useful.This means that it is not useful to explain 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 to do not with the degree to which it served to explain things, but with the ways in which it found ways to justify itself..

For example, the theory of the Oedipus complex need not suffer if after having identified the father as a source of hostility during childhood one discovers that in fact the relationship with the father was very good and that one never had contact with the mother beyond the day of birth: one simply identifies other people as paternal and maternal figures, since as psychoanalysis is based on the symbolic, it need not 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 that is why he understood that certain theories were more 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 the request of principle: it always asks to accept in advance some premises in order to demonstrate afterwards that, since there is no evidence to the contrary, they must be true.. That is why he understood psychoanalysis to be comparable to religions: both were self-confirming and relied on circular reasoning to get out of any confrontation with the facts.