Psychoanalysis is non - falsifiable---prefer social science because it can explain patterns between causal factors

Can the master theorists in our critical theory consensus make the same claim? All scientific assertions are potentially falsifiable through the use of the scientific method, but what experiments or logics would the master theorists accept as a basis for the falsifiability of their ideas? Looking at the theorists featured in Critical Theory and Performance, one might say that they represent a range of approaches that admit of greater or lesser degrees of falsifiability. At one end of the continuum, the theories of Bourdieu, Habermas, Gramsci, and Williams generally work within the falsifiability protocols of social science, which (though open to dispute) have been fairly well established for fifty years. When Raymond Williams's version of Gramsci's hegemony theory was gaining a curious audience among historians, its potential falsifiability was widely discussed.46 While social scientists, including historians, cannot apply falsifiability to their work with the same rigor as scientists who work with nonhuman subjects, their standards concerning evidence, economy, and consistency are high.47¶ Somewhere in the middle of the continuum of falsifiability, perhaps, are the psychoanalytic theories of Freud, their synthesis with semiotics in Lacan, and the many theorists who build their own ideas on some version of a psychoanalytic base. Their advocates often claim scientific validity for these theories. Most psychologists, however, have rejected psychoanalysis and its spin-offs as unfalsifiable. In her Psychoanalysis and Cognitive Science, for example, Wilma Bucci concludes that Freud's meta-psychology has not "been subject to the empirical evaluation and theory development that is necessary for a scientific field." Specifically, the type of systematic inference that is applied in cognitive science and in all modern science requires explicit definitions that limit the meaning of the concepts, correspondence rules mapping hypothetical constructs and intervening variables onto observable events, and means of assessing reliability of observation. Each of the indicators that analysts rely on to make inferences about the conscious and unconscious states of other persons (as [End Page 571] about one's own conscious states) must itself be independently validated as having the implications that are assumed.48¶ In defense, Freudians and Lacanians often claim that their theories are consonant with good science because their concepts have been scientifically validated in therapeutic sessions.49 But clinical success, however it is measured, is not the same as empirical verification. Just because "the talking cure" has been effective in some cases does not mean that Freud's or Lacan's explanation for why it worked is valid. Humans have had many explanations for fire over the centuries, but understanding why and how combustion really works must rely on recent physics and chemistry.¶ At the other end of the continuum are theorists such as Baudrillard, Derrida, Féral, and other poststructuralists, whose radical skepticism challenges the ability of science or any other discourse to provide a valid standard of falsifiability. The relativism of poststructuralism, including its challenges to empirical verification, defies any protocols that might stabilize knowledge based on the slippery signifiers provided by language. Despite what they take to be the inherent contradictions of textual assertions, poststructuralists from Lyotard to Derrida rely chiefly on logic and argumentation rather than scientific or historical evidence. Within the assumptions of poststructuralism, Derrida's gnomic remark, "There is nothing beyond the text," is simply unfalsifiable. The critic who wishes to rely on what Derrida might have meant in that statement, however, will have to ignore a great deal of good science in linguistics and evolutionary psychology to be able to assess the probable truth of Derrida's assertion.50¶ Brian Vickers challenges the weak scientific credentials of several of the master theorists that many humanist academics have embraced. As he points out with acerbity:¶ Freud's work is notoriously speculative, a vast theoretical edifice elaborated with a mere pretense of corroboration, citing "clinical observations" which turn out to be false, with contrary evidence suppressed, data manipulated, building up over a forty-year period a self-obscuring, self-protective mythology. The system of Derrida, although disavowing systematicity, is based on several unproven theses about the nature of language which are supported by a vast expanding web of idiosyncratic terminology. . . . Lacan's system, even more vastly elaborated . . . is a series of devices for evading accountability. . . . Foucault places himself above criticism.51¶ Whether all of Vickers's charges are valid may be less important than his general point: he presents suggestive evidence that these master theorists tried to place their ideas beyond the protocols of falsifiability.