alex3619
Senior Member
- Messages
- 13,810
- Location
- Logan, Queensland, Australia
I must object to this choice of words. Empiricism simply means observation of reality and is pretty important when it comes to deciding whether a hypothesis is correct or not. In the context of CFS/ME, psychiatry is failing to observe the reality of CFS/ME properly. Their view of CFS/ME fails the reality check but they're unable to admit it.
Empiricism is a discredited 19th century school of scientific philosophy. That's its formal name. It later combined to form Verificationism, yet another discredited philosophy of science from circa 1920.
Empiricism and empirical are not the same.
Apparently Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile directly deals with empiricism in modern medical research and practice, but I have yet to read it. Empiricism is anti-science. Testing is not important, data gathering is what matters. So much bad science is based more on empiricism than critical rationalism (the current scientific philosophy which I think needs an update). Its why there is so much debate on climate science - some of it is too empirical and not testable, or at least some put forward explanations along those lines.
I am putting together a reading list.
In the context of empiricism, and verificationism, the psychiatrists are doing a great job with respect to M.E. and CFS. With respect to critical rationalism, and pan-critical rationalism, they are doing nonscience i.e. pseudoscience. Empiricism and verificationism were discredited for good reasons (look up the history of scientific philosophy) but many medical researchers are still stuck in the 1920s and even 19th century scientific processes. Critical rationalism also has empirical roots, but it emphasizes that hypotheses must be testable, and that contrary data can disprove an hypothesis.
There IS NO reality check in empiricism, at least not usually. The struggle to reconcile it to the real world led to critical rationalism. The struggle to reconcile critical rationalism with messy and ill-defined reality, and untestable aspects of reality, led to pancritical rationalism.
Last edited: