Thirdly, i've just become motivated enough to right a book on the philosophy of science. It will likely be out the next year. So i will say no more here. But i'll share this easy before ending my contribution on this thread:
Ludwig von Wittgenstein has justly been regarded as one of the major philosophers of the twentieth century, especially for his writings on the philosophy of language and logic. His work on psychoanalysis and criticism of his fellow Viennese, Sigmund Freud have however been generally overlooked.
Wittgenstein is both highly critical of and at the same time greatly admiring of Freud’s work. Perhaps it would be fairer to say that he is not critical so much of psychoanalysis as of Freud’s claim for it. For Freud, it was essential that his work be regarded as science: that he had developed a new branch of medicine based on scientific principles, having established causal relationships between behaviour in childhood and that in adulthood. Wittgenstein, while accepting the usefulness of Freud’s methods, disputes that these relationships are causal, therefore denying Freud’s theories scientific validity.
In causal relationships we can at least imagine contradictory cases. For example, I can imagine placing a pan of water on a hot stone and the water freezing (of course I do not expect t to happen, and would be very surprised if it did). With Freud’s theory, however, this is not the case. One of the central planks of this theory is the pursuit of hidden meanings in such things as dreams work of art, even language (the famous ‘ Freudian slip’). Take the examples of dreams. For Freud these are all sexual wish-fulfilments. While it is clear that some are, clearly some at least appear not to be. Freud, however, will not accept any contradiction to his theory, and argues that in these cases the sexual element is camouflaged, or even repressed. This is a strange notion, for how can a dream fulfil a wish if the desire is so disguised that the dreamer does not even recognize it? More importantly if under no circumstances will Freud allow his hypothesis to be contradicted, how can we verify it? It therefore behoves us to recognize that, despite his assertions Freud’s theories are not casual hypotheses, and thus not scientific.
One might ask, given this analysis hoe Freud came to make this mistake, or rather why he believed than his explanations were casual. It is a confusion between what we might call the ‘depth-grammar’ and the ‘surface-grammar’ of certain sentences. If we say ‘the window broke because the stone hit it’ we are outlining a casual relationship between the stone hitting the window and the window breaking this being designed by the world ‘because performs the same function, this is not the case. The similarity lies only on the surface; if we look at the depth-grammar we see that in the first sentence ‘because’ denotes a casual relationship, whereas in the second we are rather talking in terms of motivations reasons and other non-casual terms. Freud’s mistake therefore is to believe that both types of sentence are similar: he confuses the surface-grammar.
Despite all this confusion, I have stated that Wittgenstein was highly appreciative of Freud’s work, and this because he essentially reformulates what Freud was trying to do. Freud believed that he was explaining people’s behaviour, while Wittgenstein suggests that he is redescribing it. To him, Freud is providing a ‘picture’ of human behaviour which may enable us to make certain connections that other ways of looking would not reveal, and by showing these patterns and connections the method may well have therapeutic value. In this case, although the “picture’ described by Freud’s method is not a true one (for by Wittgenstein’s arguments it cannot be), nevertheless it is unique, enabling the patient to have insights into their problem that no other method could provide.