On Wed, 11 Jun 2003 20:39:21 -0700, andie nachgeborenen wrote: >I'm a little unclear on the point here. You're >expected to use double-blind test in social >scientific research
I'm assuming you mean "medical research" here; I'm entirely unsure how you'd define the concept of a double blind in social sciences research, most of which is not experimental. And even in the medical context, I think that the demand that psychoanalysis use double blind tests would be silly. It's one thing to give someone a placebo pill, but how in the heck do you carry on a placebo version of a talking cure? The only ways of designing such an experiment that I can think of would involve systematically lying to a patient which, aside from being unethical in the extreme, would not even really satisfy the double blind criterion; the "placebo" psychologist would certainly know that he was faking it. And then even if you somehow solve this problem (or more likely ignore it), you're faced with the task of trying to carry out statistical analysis of your results in a context where it is not clear at all that any of the fundamental assumptions necessary for such analysis are satisfied; there is no statistics of individual cases, however much the Austrian economists wished that there were. Now you might want to define "scientific method" as being identical with the use of statistical methods on the results of double-blind experiments, but then it seems pretty clear that if you do this, the charge that psychoanalysis is "unscientific" loses all of its rhetorical force; you've simply reduced the scope of the term "science" until Freud falls outside it, not pushed him out the door. I'm not a Freudian, but nor do I like attempts to create a "quick way" with theories that people don't like in this manner. dd
