This brings us to a couple of additional reasons why Freud-bashing, or tarring Freud as irrational, could be unfair. Maybe he was a necessary step along the road to scientific psychology. Maybe it’s an unfair double standard to bash Freud while ignoring the wrongnesses of (e.g.) Galileo & Newton.
I personally disagree with the first reason. True or not, I don’t see it as justifying the wilful shoddiness from which a big chunk of Freud’s work apparently suffers. I see no reason why a counterfactual Freud couldn’t have come up with basically the same ideas without engaging in PR campaigns, unforced errors, and lies.
I’m more open to the second argument, but I’d want evidence that Galileo & Newton not only had “plenty of wrong ideas”, but tried to further those wrong ideas by bullshitting & fabricating as much as Freud did to further his wrong ideas. Otherwise there’s no real double standard.
As it happens, both Galileo & Newton have been accused of scientific misconduct. I don’t really know the details about Galileo’s case, but I know some for the case against Newton. In short, Newton used fudge factors to shift various estimates of physical quantities in his Principia. However, reading the rap sheet more closely, it sounds like Newton was quite explicit about making his adjustments, in which case he wasn’t engaging in misconduct. I’d guess there’s some similar subtlety in Galileo’s case which people miss, but as ever I could be wrong.
There may be other similarly famous scientists who were crowned geniuses and really did use misconduct to defend substantially wrong beliefs. Mendel, Kepler, Ptolemy, Pasteur, Robert Millikan, and even Einstein are promising candidates, having all been accused of scientific misconduct.
I know little about the Einstein, Kepler, or Ptolemy accusations. As for the others, my lay understanding is that scientists still argue over whether the close match between Mendel’s data and Mendel’s theory is suspicious (and indeed whether it can be explained by unconscious bias rather than conscious fiddling); that Pasteur suppressed the results of experiments which seemed to contradict germ theory, and didn’t cooperate with other scientists who wanted to run such experiments; and that Millikan lied about excluding his least plausible data points in his reports on his oil-drop experiments. So Pasteur & Millikan both lied about which results they were presenting, but the results themselves were all genuine, and both researchers were defending theories which were basically correct, not incorrect. Mendel, meanwhile, may not have committed misconduct at all! So I’ve yet to find a true parallel to Freud in the STEM pantheon.
tl;dr Galileo went beyond the data he had to justify the Copernican model—his argument about tides was incorrect (he neglected the role of the moon) and his argument via the motion of sunspots was explicable within the Tychonic model.
Politically, he had just about the best hand dealt to him from the start and proceeded to play it stupidly. He had many close friends in the Church (including the Pope himself!) but his bullishness and lack of tact led him to alienate them one by one. By the standards of the time he got off with a slap on the wrist.
Of course, none of this is to say that his opponents didn’t do and say similarly stupid things, but it wasn’t a simple Brave Rational Iconoclast David vs Decrepit Reactionary Goliath Institution narrative.
tl;dr Galileo went beyond the data he had to justify the Copernican model—his argument about tides was incorrect (he neglected the role of the moon) and his argument via the motion of sunspots was explicable within the Tychonic model.
Thanks for the summary. In itself that doesn’t sound much like misconduct, as it’s quite possible to go beyond the data and make incorrect/superfluous arguments without being negligent or deceptive.
(I could read the series you link, plus its references, to try to discern whether negligence or deception actually was involved, but after flicking through the first three parts — 14,000 words or so — and not spotting big smoking guns, I put the remaining posts on my mental when-I-get-round-to-it-on-a-rainy-day list.)
This brings us to a couple of additional reasons why Freud-bashing, or tarring Freud as irrational, could be unfair. Maybe he was a necessary step along the road to scientific psychology. Maybe it’s an unfair double standard to bash Freud while ignoring the wrongnesses of (e.g.) Galileo & Newton.
I personally disagree with the first reason. True or not, I don’t see it as justifying the wilful shoddiness from which a big chunk of Freud’s work apparently suffers. I see no reason why a counterfactual Freud couldn’t have come up with basically the same ideas without engaging in PR campaigns, unforced errors, and lies.
I’m more open to the second argument, but I’d want evidence that Galileo & Newton not only had “plenty of wrong ideas”, but tried to further those wrong ideas by bullshitting & fabricating as much as Freud did to further his wrong ideas. Otherwise there’s no real double standard.
As it happens, both Galileo & Newton have been accused of scientific misconduct. I don’t really know the details about Galileo’s case, but I know some for the case against Newton. In short, Newton used fudge factors to shift various estimates of physical quantities in his Principia. However, reading the rap sheet more closely, it sounds like Newton was quite explicit about making his adjustments, in which case he wasn’t engaging in misconduct. I’d guess there’s some similar subtlety in Galileo’s case which people miss, but as ever I could be wrong.
There may be other similarly famous scientists who were crowned geniuses and really did use misconduct to defend substantially wrong beliefs. Mendel, Kepler, Ptolemy, Pasteur, Robert Millikan, and even Einstein are promising candidates, having all been accused of scientific misconduct.
I know little about the Einstein, Kepler, or Ptolemy accusations. As for the others, my lay understanding is that scientists still argue over whether the close match between Mendel’s data and Mendel’s theory is suspicious (and indeed whether it can be explained by unconscious bias rather than conscious fiddling); that Pasteur suppressed the results of experiments which seemed to contradict germ theory, and didn’t cooperate with other scientists who wanted to run such experiments; and that Millikan lied about excluding his least plausible data points in his reports on his oil-drop experiments. So Pasteur & Millikan both lied about which results they were presenting, but the results themselves were all genuine, and both researchers were defending theories which were basically correct, not incorrect. Mendel, meanwhile, may not have committed misconduct at all! So I’ve yet to find a true parallel to Freud in the STEM pantheon.
[Edited 31⁄08 to fix “Einsten”.]
Here’s a series of articles about the history and background of the Galileo controversy
http://tofspot.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/the-great-ptolemaic-smackdown.html
tl;dr Galileo went beyond the data he had to justify the Copernican model—his argument about tides was incorrect (he neglected the role of the moon) and his argument via the motion of sunspots was explicable within the Tychonic model.
Politically, he had just about the best hand dealt to him from the start and proceeded to play it stupidly. He had many close friends in the Church (including the Pope himself!) but his bullishness and lack of tact led him to alienate them one by one. By the standards of the time he got off with a slap on the wrist.
Of course, none of this is to say that his opponents didn’t do and say similarly stupid things, but it wasn’t a simple Brave Rational Iconoclast David vs Decrepit Reactionary Goliath Institution narrative.
Thanks for the summary. In itself that doesn’t sound much like misconduct, as it’s quite possible to go beyond the data and make incorrect/superfluous arguments without being negligent or deceptive.
(I could read the series you link, plus its references, to try to discern whether negligence or deception actually was involved, but after flicking through the first three parts — 14,000 words or so — and not spotting big smoking guns, I put the remaining posts on my mental when-I-get-round-to-it-on-a-rainy-day list.)