Psychology
The scientific study of the psyche, undertaken by people who generally do not believe that the psyche exists.
"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness
I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Do you have in mind white-labcoat psychologists or clinical psychologists or both?
ReplyDeleteBoth.
DeleteDo clinical psychologists not believe in the soul? I suppose they have a scientistic bias carried over from the late 19th century (with additional zeal due to a feeling of insecurity). But they do believe in the psychodynamic unconscious, which strikes me as close enough for government work.
Delete"Psyche" is the Greek word for soul, by the way.
ReplyDelete