Sigmund Freud was once asked about the psychoanalytic significance of his smoking a cigar, to which he replied that a good cigar was merely a smoke. This of course repeats Plato's claim, the accuracy of which the author challenges anyone to disprove.
Which of course is exactly the point.
Smoking a cigar because it tastes good is easy to prove, but smoking a cigar because of some narcissistic, libininal, or other impulse is not. The 'tastes good' hypothesis is easy to demonstrate, takes little space and time, and makes sense. However, the 'because I have an innate need to blow smoke rings' hypothesis however is not easy to demonstrate, and takes a lot of time and effort to demonstrate, if indeed that's at all possible.However, time and effort translate into a lot of debate, numerous journal articles, and podium time for psychologists, which is a good thing for psychology careers. Unprovable hypotheses are compelling things to psychologists because they can multiple like bunnies, and keep social scientists scribbling away for eons as they try to demonstrate the modern equivalent of the age-old conundrum of how many angels (or impulses) can dance on the edge of a pin. Provable arguments on the other hand are easily resolved, and often involve simple explanations that don't get much airtime or library space. Thus, unprovable ideas seem to be much better things for thinkers who aspire to be great, as if greatness is denominated in the ability to generate lots of hot air and blow logical smoke. But there have been spoil sports who would rain on this endless parade of great thinking. One of them was the distinguished philosopher of science Karl Popper.
Popper recognized the value of the unfalsifiable hypothesis to be nonsense early on, and rightly claimed that if you don't have the means to prove a hypothesis false, then your hypothesis ain't science. The problem though it who is to say your hypothesis isn't provable? Take such elusive things as gravity waves and unicorns. Gravity waves are awfully difficult to detect, and require super expensive equipment and a lot of patience. Unicorns also are awfully difficult to detect, and likely may require super expensive equipment and a lot of patience. Of course, for all its observational difficulty, gravity waves do fit Popper's criteria, and unicorns do not. And the reason is simply that gravity waves and the mathematics that describe them derive from disprovable mathematical descriptions (namely Einstein's theory of relativity) of nature, whereas unicorns come from fairy tales. Fairy tales occur when we are simply imagining things, but unfortunately for psychology, a lot of reasons for our behavior occur because we are imagining things. And that's the problem with psychology. Human nature has historically been a maddeningly difficult thing to understand because we don't have tools at the ready like microscopes and telescopes that can delineate in detail how minds actually work. Thus, although we note behavior and the contexts that shape behavior, the actual workings of our cerebral noggins has been up to now hidden from view. From the beginning of philosophy up to the present day, the solution has been to hypothesize metaphorical mental modules that account for the idiosyncracies of behavior. Thus we have such things as virtue, will power, desire, etc. that act like linguistic gizmos that hook up stimulus to response. Lately, evolutionary psychologists have muddied things up even more by supplementing metaphorical literary gizmos with metaphorical computational gizmos that represent action tendencies that are physically imprinted in the brain. This has caused psychology to become an even greater mess than before, as now we have computer metaphors mixing it up with our poetic ones.
Meanwhile, in the shadows hard-nosed and provable explanations of behavior rustle about like prehistoric mammals scurrying under the legs of the brontosauri of academic schools of thought. Thus simple explanations bide their time as the sauro-pods of humanists, cognitive scientists, and evolutionary psychologists fight it out for dominance in the jungles of academia.
As we now know, it took a meteor to clean out the ecosystem, aand allow truly intelligent mammalian life to evolve and flourish. Luckily, a conceptual meteor is already zeroing in on the planet academe, and will also soon clear away the jungle of psychobabble. This meteor is called behavioral neuro-science or bio-behaviorism, which is merely a fancy way of describing how brains actually work, and how working brains (and the bodies they are connected to) cause behavior. Conceptual metaphors have occurred often in science, and follow the introduction of new instruments that allow us to see how things really work. Galileo's telescope and Pasteur's microscope are two examples of instruments that opened the door to level headed and falsifiable explanations that kept verbiage laden philosophers of the day gainfully employed. With the prospective introduction of new and simple explanations for behavior, evolutionary, humanistic, and cognitive psychologists will have to look for a new line of work, to which this author suggests a career in politics.
Oh yes, and my entire site drmezmer.com is dedicated to disprovable explanations as a replacement for the unprovable ideas the populate our intellectual landscape like cow chips, to which I invite the reader to please, please, prove me wrong.
