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Commentary on "Psychoanalysis, Science, and Commonsense"

everyday. To a psychoanalyst this is new stuff. We scratch our heads about how scientific we are. We wonder if GrÃ1⁄4nbaum is right after all. We are familiar with the debate on the scientificity of psychoanalysis. We have heard that, instead, we may be engaged on an hermeneutic exercise, not science at all. We despair of making subjectivity as transparent as (so-called) objective data. Gardner's argument that psychoanalysis stands or falls by whether it sounds right to the common ear is refreshing. Psychoanalysis emerges as neither science nor hermeneutics. As a commonsense psychology, it is conceptually and epistemologically distinct from both. But, besides these reactions, there is a gathering unease that philosophers may not quite know what I, in fact, do spend my time doing. Rather as scientists were amazed at Popper's abstracted paradigm of what they did, so I think we might be a little cautious about a philosopher's categorical statements about what psychoanalysis is. And maybe, as scientists embraced Kuhn, Lakatos, and others who started, in contrast to Popper, with the question: wnat do scientists actually do in practice?Â—so it encourages the urge to start with a similar question: What do psychoanalysts actually do? I shall make a few remarks about what psychoanalysts do, but I shall approach through a route that takes up some of Gardner's interesting points. Gardner's account of commonsense psychology (and its extension, psychoanalysis) makes a distinction between the rational and the irrational. Commonsense psychology operates by giving a rational explanation for people's experi-