Response to “Scientific thinking styles”

Dear Editor,

Kaluzeviciute and Willemsen’s recent article on “Scientific thinking styles” (IJP volume 101, issue 5, 2020) courageously engages the challenge of how to think about psychoanalysis as a scientific discipline. But they do not cite at least three major contributions to thinking scientifically – that is, in a manner that advances the discipline – Ricoeur’s “The Question of Proof in Freud’s Psychoanalytic Writings” (1977), the second Kuhn book, which Kuhn considered a necessary correction to his famous “paradigm” book (Kuhn 1977) The Essential Tension, and Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge (1958). Further, an article on thinking styles should reference Richards’ recent study of thinking styles and collectives in psychoanalysis (Richards 2016).

In addition, I suggest a conceptual correction: when they cite six thinking styles and add a seventh, they do not continue that these styles necessarily may be interactive, not exclusive. That is, as Freeman Dyson taught (2015), Einstein and early twentieth-century theoretical physicists may have invented the thought experiment, but, and this is a critical “but”, they did thought experiments in the expectation that empirical researchers would confirm or disprove these.

Let’s start with examples of the latter: thought experience that lead to empirical experiments. Many scientists accepted Copernicus’ heliocentric view of the solar system despite the lack of empirical proof, because it was more elegant (Dyson). It took some two hundred years for Foucault to demonstrate that Copernicus was correct. This view of the process of physics was outlined by Kuhn in his second book and by Polanyi in Personal Knowledge (1958): that there are at least eight criteria that hard scientists use to judge the validity of a theory, empirical verification being one of the eight. A further example is Einstein’s theorization of black holes, which were empirically proven only recently. Polanyi, trained in “hard sciences”, emphasizes the aesthetic as