Homeopathy is (very strongly) antipredicted by science as we understand it, not just not-predicted.
Also, how many psychological techniques or informal theories are actively predicted to work by mainstream scientific theory? How much of folk psychology or social common sense is? (This isn’t to say that there’s no epistemic difference between eg Focusing and folk psychology, obviously one has much more unscientific validation, but that “this doesn’t follow from science as we understand it” doesn’t match usage or practice.)
(I care about this discussion but feel a little bad about having it near the top of the comments section of an unrelated post.)
Homeopathy is (very strongly) antipredicted by science as we understand it, not just not-predicted.
Yeah, you’re right. Though I think I’ve also heard people reference the evidence against the effectiveness of introspection as a reason to be skeptical about Focusing. Now if you look at the studies in question in detail, they don’t actually contradict it—the studies are testing the reliability of introspection that doesn’t use Focusing—but that easily sounds like special pleading to someone who doesn’t have a reason to think that there’s anything worth looking at there.
It doesn’t help that the kinds of benefits that Focusing gives, like getting a better understand of why you’re upset with someone, are hard to test empirically. Gendlin’s original study said that people who do something like Focusing are more likely to benefit from therapy, but that could be explained by something else than Focusing being epistemically accurate.
Homeopathy is (very strongly) antipredicted by science as we understand it, not just not-predicted.
Also, how many psychological techniques or informal theories are actively predicted to work by mainstream scientific theory? How much of folk psychology or social common sense is? (This isn’t to say that there’s no epistemic difference between eg Focusing and folk psychology, obviously one has much more unscientific validation, but that “this doesn’t follow from science as we understand it” doesn’t match usage or practice.)
(I care about this discussion but feel a little bad about having it near the top of the comments section of an unrelated post.)
Yeah, you’re right. Though I think I’ve also heard people reference the evidence against the effectiveness of introspection as a reason to be skeptical about Focusing. Now if you look at the studies in question in detail, they don’t actually contradict it—the studies are testing the reliability of introspection that doesn’t use Focusing—but that easily sounds like special pleading to someone who doesn’t have a reason to think that there’s anything worth looking at there.
It doesn’t help that the kinds of benefits that Focusing gives, like getting a better understand of why you’re upset with someone, are hard to test empirically. Gendlin’s original study said that people who do something like Focusing are more likely to benefit from therapy, but that could be explained by something else than Focusing being epistemically accurate.