I think the answer to this question is much more difficult than most people think (even people who have a a great number of "telling" quotations to hand), because it depends in large part on whether one takes "scientist" to be a historically contengent term (one that means different things in different times and places) or more of an honorific term (one that grants an individual status within a community of people who identify themselves as "scientists"). Most people do the latter, and it has no more historical merit than, say, faulting Julius Caesar for not having been president of the United States. The modern category didn't exist in the past, though, like Mormons, we sometimes like to confer it retrospectively in order to recruit those whose legacies we love and respect "our side." Once one embarks on the former, more intersting, task, however, one has to engage in on the arduous and often boring task of figuring out what constituted being a "scientist" in a particular place and time.
First, I think Todd's claim of "Freud's disdain for the scientific method, or attempts to scientifically test his theories. Freud treated his ideas and theories as obvious truths that need no verification," is problematic. There is no one "scientific method." What methods "count" as "scientific" have varied widely from era to era, nation to nation, and discipline to discipline. They share a few vague motherhood clauses, but all scientists hardly agree on what counts as "scientific" (if you doubt this, describe the showcase social psychology experiments of the 1970s to a physicist colleague and ask him/her if s/he think they were "scientific"). If all you mean to say is that Freud wouldn't have been counted as scientific had he said the same things and lived today, you are no doubt correct. In medicine, however, especially in the late 19th-century, the clinical case study was a widely accepted method for providing "scientific" evidence for a position (not quite the same as "testing hypotheses" but that has not always been the criterion of science -- Newton claimed not even to "frame" hypotheses, much less test them). Freud wrote in the clinical case study mode. Whether his case studies were "accurate" (viz., any less accurate than the case studies written by other physicians of the time), which Allen hs frequently called into question here and other places, is another matter. So it is doubtful that Freud *generally* considered his claims as being self-evident. He made an attempt, using an accepted scientific practice, to provide evidence for them, at least early in his career. In any case, the example that Todd provides of a single letter (written when? to whom?) hardly makes the general case. (Imagine if someone attempt to dismiss *your* whole career by citing the last time to "brushed off" an annoying stranger who e-mailed their "study" that "proved" wrong something you had been working on your whole adult life. Yes, of course you "should" check each thing on its merits, but there are only so many hours in the day... and how much material of this sort do famous receive? I'm *not* famous and already get a ton of inappropriate e-mail requests.)
Marc Carter's comment that " The crucial thing for me would be the predictive validity of Freudian theory. Einstein's science generated theory that made for many predictions; Freud's, not so much" is similarly problematic. First of all, it uses a vocabulary that is alien to the discipline in that time. In addition, many very respectable scientific theories don't stack up well again the criterion of "predictive validity" even today, most notably e.g., Darwin's evolutionary theory. Marc's comment also seems to proceed from the assumption that one isn't a scientist unless one ultimately comes up with "right" answer. But lots of very conservative, traditional scientists defend sides of contentious questions that, in the end, turn out to be wrong. That doesn't undermine their status as scientists (although it usually prevents them from having been "great" scientists -- though now my point above about using the term "scientist" as an honorific should be even more clear). It doesn't make any sense to determine the answer to the question of who is a scientist retrospectively, dubbing all of those who turned out to be on the "right" side "scientists" and all those who were against it (though the matter wasn't yet decided at the time) non-scientists.
Now before you-know-who jumps all over me, please note that I have not actually defended the idea that Freud was a scientist. Although I would be equally dubious of someone who casually referred to him as a "scientist," that isn't the crowd I'm facing here (and so agreeing with all of you wouldn't nearly as much fun). I think it is a difficult question about a place, time and figure about which I don't have the background to render an expert judgment (nor do I have enough interest in him to acquire at his time). My aim, instead, has been to show that answering such a question about a historical figure is much more difficult than simply attempting to "match up" what one casually knows about the individual in question against what one generally considers, in the modern context, the meaning of the term in question to be. Just like with all good scholarship, one must first do some actual research (something self-declared scientists are often yammering to others about, but strangely forgetful of when it comes to a question outside their field of competence), not only about what the person in question actually said and did, but about the cultural (including scientific) context in which they said or did it.
Regards, -- Christopher D. Green Department of Psychology York University Toronto, ON M3J 1P3 Canada
416-736-5115 ex. 66164 [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.yorku.ca/christo =======================
by others
Todd Nelson wrote:
TIPSters,
I have an interesting question: What classifies one as a "scientist"?
I was listening to an NPR report on the dialogues between Freud and Einstein, and the reporter characterized both as the two "most famous scientists at that time." While no one would question the idea that Einstein was justifiably one of the most famous scientists of his era (and, indeed, ever since), I found myself wincing at the characterization of Freud as a "scientist". My reason for this reaction is Freud's disdain for the scientific method, or attempts to scientifically test his theories. Freud treated his ideas and theories as obvious truths that need no verification by others (e.g. When one scientist sent Freud a report of an experiment that supported Freud's notion of repression, Freud wrote back to the scientist saying (paraphrasing here), "Thank you for your report, but everyone knows that repression exists and to conduct experiments to show it exists is a waste of time.").
What do TIPSters believe makes a scientist? And does Freud meet those
criteria?
Todd
Todd D. Nelson, Ph.D. Gemperle Foundation Distinguished Professor Department of Psychology California State University 801 W. Monte Vista Ave. Turlock, California 95382
(209) 667-3442 (209) 664-7067 (fax) [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.csustan.edu/psych/todd/index.html
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