Karl Popper's philosophy and psychological theories

Philosophy is often associated with a world of speculation without any connection to science, but the truth is that this is not the case. This discipline is not only the mother of all sciences from a historical perspective; it is also the one that allows defending the robustness or weakness of scientific theories.

In fact, since the first half of the 20th century, with the emergence of a group of thinkers known as the Vienna Circle, there is even a branch of philosophy that is responsible for supervising not only scientific knowledge, but what is understood by science.

It is the philosophy of science, and one of its earliest representatives, Karl Popper did much to examine the question of the extent to which psychology generates scientifically supported knowledge. In fact, her confrontation with the psychoanalysis It was one of the main causes of the entry into crisis of this current.

Who was Karl Popper?

Karl Popper was born in Vienna during the summer of 19002, when psychoanalysis was gaining traction in Europe. In that same city he studied philosophy, a discipline to which he dedicated himself until his death in 1994.

Popper was one of the most influential philosophers of science of the generation of the Vienna Circle, and his early works were highly considered when it came to develop a demarcation criterion, that is, when defining a way to demarcate what it is that distinguishes scientific knowledge from that which does not it is.

Thus, the problem of demarcation is a subject to which Karl Popper tried to answer by devising ways in which you can tell which kinds of statements are scientific and which are not..

This is an unknown that runs through the entire philosophy of science, regardless of whether it applies to relatively objects of study. well-defined (such as chemistry) or others in which the phenomena to be investigated are more open to interpretation (such as paleontology). And, of course, psychology, being on a bridge between neurology and the social sciences, is very affected depending on whether one criterion of demarcation or another is applied to it.

So Popper devoted much of his work as a philosopher to devising a way to separate scientific knowledge from metaphysics and simple groundless speculation. This led him to reach a series of conclusions that left much of what was considered to be psychology in his time and that emphasized the importance of falsification in scientific research.

Falsificationism

Although the philosophy of science was born in the twentieth century with the appearance of the Vienna Circle, the main attempts to know how to access the knowledge (in general, not specifically "scientific knowledge") and to what extent this is true appeared many centuries ago, with the birth of the epistemology.

Auguste Comte and inductive reasoning

Positivism, or the philosophical doctrine according to which the only valid knowledge is scientific, was one of the consequences of the development of this branch of philosophy. It appeared at the beginning of the 19th century from the hand of the French thinker Auguste Comte and, of course, it generated many problems; so many that, in fact, no one could act in a way that was slightly consistent with her.

First, the idea that the conclusions we make through experience outside of science are irrelevant and do not deserve to be taken into account is devastating for anyone who intends to get out of bed and make relevant decisions in their day to day.

The truth is everyday life requires us to make hundreds of inferences quickly without having to go through something like the kind of empirical tests needed to do science, and the fruit of this process continues to be knowledge, more or less accurate, that makes us act in one sense or in other. In fact, we don't even bother to make all our decisions based on logical thinking: we constantly take mental shortcuts.

Second, positivism put the problem of demarcation at the center of the philosophical debate, which is already very difficult to solve. In what way was it understood from Comte's positivism that true knowledge should be accessed? By accumulating simple observations based on observable and measurable facts. Namely, is primarily based on induction.

For example, if after making several observations about the behavior of lions we see that whenever they need food and resort to hunting other animals, we will conclude that lions are carnivores; from individual facts we will reach a broad conclusion that encompasses many other unobserved cases.

However, it is one thing to recognize that inductive reasoning can be useful, and another to argue that by itself it allows one to arrive at true knowledge about how reality is structured. It is at this point that Karl Popper enters the scene, his principle of falsifiability and his rejection of positivist principles.

Popper, Hume and falsificationism

The cornerstone of the demarcation criterion that Karl Popper developed is called falsificationism. The falsificationism is an epistemological current according to which scientific knowledge should not be based so much on the accumulation of empirical evidence as in attempts to refute ideas and theories to find evidence of their robustness.

This idea takes certain elements from the philosophy of David Hume, according to which it is impossible to demonstrate a necessary connection between a fact and a consequence that follows from it. There is no reason for us to say with certainty that an explanation of reality that works today will work tomorrow. Although lions eat meat very frequently, perhaps at some time it will be discovered that in situations exceptional some of them are able to survive for a long time eating a special variety of plant.

Furthermore, one of the implications of Karl Popper's falsificationism is that it is impossible to definitively prove that a scientific theory is true and accurately describes reality. Scientific knowledge will be defined by how well it works to explain things at a given time and context, not to the degree that it reflects reality as it is, since knowing the latter is impossible.

Karl Popper and psychoanalysis

Although Popper had certain run-ins with behaviorism (specifically, with the idea that learning is based on repetitions through conditioning, although this is not a fundamental premise of this psychological approach) the school of psychology he most vehemently attacked was that of Freudian psychoanalysis, which during the first half of the 20th century had a lot of influence in Europe.

Fundamentally, what Popper criticized about psychoanalysis was its inability to adhere to explanations that could be falsified, something that he considered to be cheating. A theory that cannot be falsified is capable of contorting itself and adopting all possible forms in order not to show that reality does not fit with its proposals, which means that it is not useful to explain phenomena and, therefore, it is not science.

For the Austrian philosopher, the only merit of the theories of Sigmund Freud was that they had a good capacity to perpetuate themselves, taking advantage of their own ambiguities to fit into any explanatory framework and to adapt to all unforeseen events without being compromised. The effectiveness of psychoanalysis had to do not with the degree to which they served to explain things, but with the ways he found ways to justify himself.

For example, the theory of the Oedipus complex need not suffer if, after having identified the father as a source of hostility during childhood, it is He discovers that in fact the relationship with the father was very good and that he never had contact with the mother beyond the day of the birth: he simply identifies as paternal and maternal figures to other people, since as psychoanalysis is based on the symbolic, it does not have to fit with "natural" categories such as parents biological.

Blind faith and circular reasoning

In short, Karl Popper did not believe that psychoanalysis was not a science because it did not serve to explain well what happens, but because of something even more basic: because it was not possible to even consider the possibility that these theories are false.

Unlike Comte, who assumed that it was possible to unravel faithful and definitive knowledge about what is real, Karl Popper took into account the influence that biases and different observers have starting points in what they study, and that is why he understood that certain theories were more of a historical construction than a useful tool for the science.

Psychoanalysis, according to Popper, was a kind of mixture of argument ad ignorantiam and the begging the question: always ask to accept in advance some premises to show below that, as there is no evidence to the contrary, they must be true. That is why he understood that psychoanalysis was comparable to religions: both were They self-confirmed and were based on circular reasoning to get out of any confrontation with the facts.