You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
I have no fundamental disagreement with the general line of Stephen Toulmin's paper. My contribution, therefore, will be to provide recognition, qualifications, and questions rather than details, objections, or alternative solutions.
To start with recognition, I should like to review the conclusions which may be drawn on merely historical grounds from Professor Toulmin's paper.
He demonstrates in a very forceful way that it is only the modern formulation of the mind-body problem which prevents us from unifying psychology and physics in an all-encompassing physical world-picture. More precisely, it is the narrow definitions of matter and movement by Descartes which transform dualism into an epistemological obstacle.
Then comes the very interesting idea that Helmholtz's energeticism, when put against the background of Cartesian mechanism, may appear as a partial liberation which reopens the way to a unified “psychophysics.” As a corollary of this, Freud's “Project” of 1895 may be assessed as a legitimate attack on a worthwhile theoretical task, “an attack whose potentialities have not yet been exhausted.”
Another extremely suggestive remark concerns the correlation between the theory of “complementarity” in the field of theoretical physics and the trend of psychoanalysis in the twenties and thirties toward construing the phenomena of psychic life in exclusively psychic terms. The corollary here is that disputing the complementarity theory also gives rise to a parallel suspicion about the standoff between the intentional and the mechanical in psychoanalytical theory.
But the most impressive historical statement concerns the new emerging energetical model which emphasizes the second law of thermodynamics, specifically centered around the concepts of entropy, order, and information. The corollary is that the main mistake of Freudian metapsychology was not to have looked for an energetical model, but to have concentrated on the wrong parts of thermody