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