Response to Commentaries

We must admit that we were a bit overwhelmed when we received sixty-eight manuscript pages of critical commentary by four different authors on our twenty-seven page paper. Rather heavy hitting!

The issues debated here have been the subject of continued dialogue between Hoffman and us over several years—in print, in person, and via e-mail. Before publication of our critique of Hoffman's 2009 paper (Eagle and Wolinsky 2011), we sent a copy of it to him and communicated with him in a series of e-mail exchanges. In addition, the discussion was going to be continued at the annual meeting of the Rapaport-Klein Study Group. As one of us (Eagle) recalls, in our exchange Hoffman agreed that it would be useful and constructive if the participants at the June 2011 Rapaport-Klein meeting (which included Warren and Walls) could approach the debate with an attitude of trying to find common ground rather than winning arguments. In our paper, one expression of the attempt to find common ground was to note that systematic empirical research and case studies address different questions and are entitled to epistemic privilege in different domains. For example, if one wants to know about group results, one turns to systematic empirical research; if one wants to understand a particular individual, one turns to case studies.

Warren, however, will have none of this. “Such apparent evenhandedness,” he writes, “glosses over significant differences in these perspectives, and areas of philosophical and practical incompatibility” (p.). The remainder of his commentary attempts to identify and elucidate the nature of these incompatibilities and the inappropriateness of “natural scientific method,” “positivism,” “objectivism,” “measurement,” “the medical model,” “Cartesianism,” etc. to psychoanalysis.

We do not want to spend too much time on endless and perhaps futile debates on these issues. These debates go far back to a discussion of the differences between Geisteswissenschaften and Naturwi