Deutch and Popper

Jim Farmelant farmelantj at juno.com
Wed Jan 2 05:21:24 PST 2002


On Wed, 2 Jan 2002 04:09:53 -0600 "Daniel Davies" <dsquared at al-islam.com> writes:
> It absolutely amazes me that Popperians like Deutch have no problems
> at all
> talking about the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics
> and other
> things which appear on the face of them to be utterly unfalsifiable,
> but
> have a scunner against astrology, which provides me with twelve
> falsifiable
> predictions free every day with my newspaper.

One might also add that Adolf Grunbaum (http://www.pitt.edu/~grunbaum/) while sharing Popper's disdain for psychoanalysis, rejects Popper's contention that psychoanalysis is unfalsifiable. Grunbaum in *The Foundations of Psychoanalysis* and other writings shows that a great many psychoanalystic hypotheses ARE falsifiale, so that Popper's claim that psychoanlysis is a pseudoscience on the grounds of it not being falsifiable, is itself falsified. Rather, Grunbaum treats psychoanalysis as a research program in Lakatos' sense, and he critiques it by showing it to be a regressive rather than a progressive research program.

Jim Farmelant


>
> cheers & happy new years
>
> dd
>
> Get Your Free Email at http://www.al-islam.com
>
>
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