Comments on “Why Freud's Research Methodology was Unscientific” by Von Eckhardt

Von Eckhardt's (1982) article belongs to a philosophic tradition that came to a standstill fifteen to twenty years ago, logical empiricism or logical positivism. By 1965 or so this philosophy had accumulated so many internal difficulties that the new ideas, including those of Popper and late Wittgenstein, were nearly all coming from other traditions. I make an exception for Wesley Salmon's work (1971). The survivors of this tradition now call themselves by a different name, analytic philosophers, though the ideas are the same. Among the internal difficulties are the following: Hempel's paradoxes, which assert that any piece of evidence is logically relevant to testing any hypothesis; Goodman's paradox, which asserts that any evidence that confirms one hypothesis logically also confirms an infinite number of alternative hypotheses; Quine's argument that the distinction between empirical and analytic sentences cannot be clearly drawn for actual, changing scientific languages; and the recognition