The Fashionable Armchair

Can someone sit in an armchair, smoke a cigar, and come up with grand insights into the workings of the mind?  Sigmund Freud thought so.  He assumed that mere thought alone could produce a science of the mind.  He didn't collect data on his patients, nor did he conduct trials to see if his diagnoses or treatment recommendations had merit.  He simply knew the answers because he was so insightful.  But is this science?  Well, no.  Science involves designing experiments, performing those experiments, and collecting data.  The armchair part comes in once the data are collected.  That's where the fun begins.  Sure, one can argue about the results of the experiment, but this should then pave the way for more experiments to tease out which initial interpretations were correct.

Related to this of course is the entire field of literary criticism.  Deconstruction is supposed to allow us to gain insight into some truth about the mind, social trends, or economic policy.  And all of this without data.  The postmodernists tell us that science is just another belief system inevitably usurped by the powerful elites to justify their own ends. 

This is nonsense. 

Sure, people with wealth and power are often going to act in ways to preserve and increase their wealth and power.  They will even advance policies and social structures to these ends.  The postmodernists treat this as some kind of new insight.  Every culture has understood this for thousands of years.  Big deal. 


link:    Fashionable Nonsense

link:    Why I Am a Naturalist

Some of my favorite blogs



KevinMD             from Kevin Pho

Neurologicablog   from Steven Novella

Science Musings   from Chet Raymo

Book of Joe         from Joe 'World's most popular blogging anesthesiologist'