1 Quote Tagged: adlerian

The difficulties connected with my criterion of demarcation (D) are important, but must not be exaggerated. It is vague, since it is a methodological rule, and since the demarcation between science and nonscience is vague. But it is more than sharp enough to make a distinction between many physical theories on the one hand, and metaphysical theories, such as psychoanalysis, or Marxism (in its present form), on the other. This is, of course, one of my main theses; and nobody who has not understood it can be said to have understood my theory.

The situation with Marxism is, incidentally, very different from that with psychoanalysis. Marxism was once a scientific theory: it predicted that capitalism would lead to increasing misery and, through a more or less mild revolution, to socialism; it predicted that this would happen first in the technically highest developed countries; and it predicted that the technical evolution of the 'means of production' would lead to social, political, and ideological developments, rather than the other way round.

But the (so-called) socialist revolution came first in one of the technically backward countries. And instead of the means of production producing a new ideology, it was Lenin's and Stalin's ideology that Russia must push forward with its industrialization ('Socialism is dictatorship of the proletariat plus electrification') which promoted the new development of the means of production.

Thus one might say that Marxism was once a science, but one which was refuted by some of the facts which happened to clash with its predictions (I have here mentioned just a few of these facts).

However, Marxism is no longer a science; for it broke the methodological rule that we must accept falsification, and it immunized itself against the most blatant refutations of its predictions. Ever since then, it can be described only as nonscience — as a metaphysical dream, if you like, married to a cruel reality.

Psychoanalysis is a very different
Karl Popper, Austrian-British philosopher of science and social and política e falsificationism and for criticism of Plato, Hegel and Marx as totalitarian opponents of open society (1902-1994)
karl-marx-marx-marxism science vague marxism adler infinite psychoanalysis point cruel clarity revolution rule difficulty freud sigmund-freud socialism psychology reality treatment scientific-theory possibility adlerian alfred-adler alfred-w-adler demarcation falsifiable freudian karl-heinrich-marx
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