I talk about Freud's "ideas." I think that's safe. They're clearly not theories in any contemporary sense.
And although when I teach general psych I use a book that's heavy on empirical data and light on theory (properly construed or not), I use Freud as a way to teach something about why we believe what we believe. I ask students what they think of Freud's ideas about dreams, and nearly all are comfortable with those notions. Then I ask them what they think about Freud's more outlandish psychosexual development stuff, and they are almost uniformly rejecting of it. I then ask, "What's the difference? Why the one and not the other?" and then can launch into why data are really nice.... m ------ "There is no power for change greater than a community discovering what it cares about." -- Margaret Wheatley -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, November 26, 2007 8:18 AM To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS) Subject: [SPAM] - Re: [tips] Re Freud - what is a "theory" - Bayesian Filter detected spam Just a small point in this discussion. Even we, as good scientists, fall into the trap of calling Freud's (and Piaget's for that matter, and a whole host of others) theories, "theories" when in fact, if they cannot be falsified they cannot be legitimately called "theories". As such I think we need a better term: speculation, hypothesis, framework--I like framework for nice bodies of work that are still not large enough (sufficiently integrative?) to be called "theories," such as levels of processing or encoding specificity. Just my early morning thinking on this. Annette Annette Kujawski Taylor, Ph.D. Professor of Psychology University of San Diego 5998 Alcala Park San Diego, CA 92110 619-260-4006 [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- ---
