In the context of the debate about what standards should be used to assess the discipline of psychoanalysis, Nash reviews and examines the contributions of Grünbaum and the hermeneuticists, Ricoeur and Habermas. In their arguments both sides fault Freud's self-understanding in his claim that psychoanalysis is a natural science. Nash examines what Freud meant by natural science and states that for Freud, it was "an elastic category," which included "any disciplined, scholarly pursuit." Therefore, the "arguments from Freud's self-understanding are problematic and not particularly fruitful in helping us to assess the scientific nature of his theory."