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The Psychiatrist in Search of a Science

II. Developments in the Logic and the Sociology of Science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2018

Elliot Slater
Elliot Slater*
Affiliation:
Institute of Psychiatry, De Crespigny Park, London, SE5 8AF
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Extract

If, at this distance in time, neither Mapother's nominalism nor Golla's vitalism-holism are at all satisfying, this is because so much has happened to the philosophy of science in the interval. The writings of Sir Karl Popper have had a revolutionary influence; and the important work he has done over thirty years or so is readily available in The Logic of Scientific Discovery (LSD, 1968) and Conjectures and Refutations (CR, 1969). Popper starts from the position that no logical basis for the accumulation of knowledge can be laid on inductive processes (and he also maintains that this is not the way the mind of the scientist works). From observing crows, and seeing that one after another they are all black, one cannot conclude that all crows are black. In general terms, it is not possible to proceed logically from single existential (‘there are …’) statements to universal statements; and an epistemological process that based itself on induction would be rocky at its very foundations. How is it then that science progresses, making mistakes from time to time, but recovering from them, providing for itself a firmer foundation for further work, anchoring it more deeply and extending it more widely? This could only be if the basic logical processes were not, in fact, inductive, as the nineteenth century scientist supposed. The search for an acceptable basic principle came down to finding a criterion of demarcation which would distinguish the empirical sciences from other branches of learning. Popper found it in the principle of refutability.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal of Psychiatry , Volume 122 , Issue 571 , June 1973 , pp. 625 - 636
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1973 

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