Quite a Mouthful, Today's Topic --- Yes?

Yep, no two ways about it . . . fingers even sore from typing all the words into the subject-title.

Still, prof bug set out these three paths and alternative industrializing courses of action --- along with the political fall-out historically, since the industrial revolution of the late 18th century --- in ways that should be fairly easy to follow.    There are some related issues in the buggy commentary, found at Economist View, as well . . . these added comments, hopefully, interesting enough to hold your attention. Click here for the bug-stuff.

Today's Buggy Topic

The title above captures it faithfully enough, including the reference to a sequel of some earlier buggy posts left at Economist View --- only this time the subject-matter has changed, no longer about Freud or psychoanalysis, you see.  Rather, in a switch, to the topic of fascism. 

The Sequel Itself Then?

Simply said, due to the iterative return, like the imbecilic shrieks on a non-stop rap-record, of the same smug, pigheaded numskull who appeared in the earlier thread and in it --- as in the new thread --- spewed more of her manic fatuities and assaults on others.  A strikingly rabid head-case, this compulsively chronic poster . . . a kind of wrong-way Corrigan of the Internet, full of unintended wacko-city humor.  Read her buffoonish stuff, and scout's honor, you can't but laugh.

An exaggeration?

Well, see for yourself.  See if you don't agree with prof bug. 

When you get down to it, only a walled-in ideologue of rigidly self-righteous, solipsistic bent --- or, alternatively, a catatonic brain-numbed obsessive thriving on psycho-ward meds  --- seems capable of splattering such crazed, thoroughly hilarious attacks and a recurringly obdurate torture of the English language.

Anyway . . .

Lots of fun for prof bug, still guffawing delightfully in disbelief even after his sustained effort, in the new thread,  to explain to her and others what fascism means historically and ideologically . . .the buggy analysis, note quickly, full of copious quotes from mass-murdering specialists like Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.  No matter.  Did no good.  The perverse bughouse-cadet dismissed these fascist leaders own brutal, self-revealing dogmas  as irrelevant to her own arbitrary usage of fascism, followed by her predictable motor-mouth rejoinders that leave you full of laughing-out-loud wonder. 

Which usage, surprise! surprise! is purely pejorative . . . a fixture of her screwloose, high-coiled vocabulary for smearing those who disagree with her brainwave ramblings.

Come on --- no way not to be mirthfully diverted by such bullheaded obtuseness, is there?    Prof bug still cackling.  Can't help it!  Buffoonish humor of this caliber is priceless.  And to top it off, our blustering stand-up swaggerer went on and added a half dozen or so very long, totally irrelevant posts full of quoted newsreports about the Honduras political crisis.  

Wow!  That takes an aberrant gift of unusual psychic thrust, no?  Lewis Carroll, where are you when we need you?

And So, Buggy Connoisseurs ---

Click here for all the madcap stuff, along with some invigorating quotes from George Orwell and Humpty-Dumpty and Jerry Seinfeld: plus--- let us not forget --- prof bug's own semi-academic analysis. 

Today's Buggy Topic Is

. . . found, as usual, in a lengthy prof bug post left at Economist View, the admirable economic blog run by Professor Mark Thoma of the University of Oregon.  This new post appears, please observe, in the same thread that the previous buggy one left here on September 17, 2009, did.  

Hilarious Wacko-City Indignation

Those earlier  buggy posts, as some of you might recall,  set out a couple of long comments on Freud and psychoanalysis, even though the subject matter of the thread was supposed to be about economic conflicts over macroeconomics.  

No matter.  Can't be helped.  Depends on what fickle posters, all convinced that strong convictions validate all their views about the world, decide on a whim to brainstorm about.  And, as it happened in that thread,  not just brainstorm without much knowledge about Freud and his followers over the decades; but, as it also happened, with more and more fury and misleading claims back and forth.

Enter, On That Freudian Topic, Prof Bug's Comments

As always, they ignored the hilarious fury.  Tried, instead, to set out an evidence-backed analysis --- at a fast, fairly top-skimming pace; no alternative to it in even a lengthy post, you see --- of the nature of Freudian psychoanalysis, and its variants after Freud's death, and what the biggest division that now exists between those variants.  And tried, too, in the end, to explore the reasons behind the decline of psychoanalysis of all sorts since the 1970s . . .  above all, the growing influence and popularity of alternative psychotherapies, especially those inspired by cognitive and cognitive-behavioral approaches.  And that was that --- or so the buggy guy thought.  

Yep, ignorance slain.  A pedagogue's work done, right?

Ha! Ha!  Boy, how wrong can you get?

A couple of days passed, you see, and when prof bug returned to the same thread at Economist View, did he find that the exchanges now reflected less rage and more civility and enlightenment? Ha! Ha!  Who am I kidding?  If there were any changes, they were impossible to spot.   Worse yet, the furiosos' subject-matter had shifted again . . . and for equally puzzling reasons.

Because Now, Believe It Or Not, The Testy Empty-Headed Exchanges Were About Violence and Warfare in Primitive Societies

All these fickle swerves, remember, in a thread that was supposed to be about macroeconomics.  Oh well, it's only a blog; not Professor Thoma's fault.  And all too predictably, these new exchanges on primitive societies were crammed with the same bare-knuckled incompetence and personality tics that marred the earlier fracas-frazzled posts about Freud. 

All very amusing stuff, mind you.  Can't complain about that . . . particularly if you read the exchanges for how they reflect certain chronic posters' psychic aberrations.  Still, however diverting, the stuff also stubbornly superficial and misleading. 

And So Once Again, a Pedagogical Rescue Was Required, Right? 

Or at least as prof bug, a hopelessly quixotic romantic, thought. 

In particular, hopping onto his academic hobby-horse once more, he sighed, he reflected, he fantasized about beautiful women, and then finally--- a few inspired ideas bursting inwardly at long last  --- he galloped headlong onto the thread again, scattered his views and the evidence for them, linked here and there to numerous specialist studies, and managed in the end to make it back safely to his study . . . the ranks of the ignorant beserkers surely broken forever, or so he fantasized again.  The new buggy stuff, after all, setting out clearly, with evidence, what recent studies over the last 15 years by archaeologists, anthropologists, ethnologists, evolutionary psychologists, and political scientists have found out about the rife violence and warfare in these primitive societies.  

The term meaning? 

Surprise!  Surprise!  no one else had bothered in the 108 earlier posts to clarify it, so prof bug started out with a careful definition --- followed by the substantive analysis. Did it work, this new bugged-out rescue?  Hard to say; but whether it did or not . . .

In the Process, Lots of Fun Anyway

And for you too, prof bug hopes . . . at any rate, if you click here.

Today's Buggy Topic

It's found in a thread at Economist View, where exchanges between four or five posters got suddenly hot and full of name-calling . . . the original culprit, and by far the worst, a raging egomaniac who attacks almost everyone with different views from her own ---- however ignorant and self-righteous --- as liars, haters, and scummy sleazeball idiots. 

Unfortunately, none of the others seemed to know much more about Freud than she does  --- anyway, with at most one or two minor exceptions --- and so the buggy prof, who has written extensively on psychotherapies (including here at this web site), left two lengthy posts that sought to clarify the strengths and weakness of Freud's original ideas, psychoanalysis, its evolution and contemporary condition, and the decline of psychoanalysis compared to cognitive and cognitive-behavioral alternatives. 

Along with, come to think of it, far more flexible insight-oriented therapy that shares the Freudian view of a personality structure, rooted in infancy and later childhood development, that causes the here-and-now problems of the suffering psychotherapeutic client. Click here for the thread.

Previous Buggy Articles at This Web Site Here

Starting in March and into April and May, 2008, the buggy prof commented extensively at our site on psychoanalysis and alternative therapies --- the lengthy articles prompted by his views of the remarkable HBO series In Treatment  . . . a 42 installment-drama, 5 days a week, about the life and therapeutic practice of a psychoanalyst, Paul Weston, played with remarkable talent by Gabriel Byrnes.  His own life, as it happened, was boiling over at the time ---- with himself, with his wife, and with a female patient he fell in love with.  He himself, then, had to return to therapy with his own psychoanalyst, Gina, played with equal flair and insight by Diana West.  The whole cast was uncommonly gifted; the story was full of surprises and remarkable characters; and the views on display of psychoanalysis --- not least, the conflict in approaches (highly personalized) between Weston and Gina --- were an endless source of intellectual stimulus.

You can find the first installment here

You'll See, If You Continue Through March and Into April and May 2008 . . .

... how prof bug's lengthy commentaries here were spawned by posts that he left in the numerous threads on In Treatment at the relevant HBO online blog. 

Several of the other posters ---- full of  projected fantasies onto Gabriel Byrne, which transformed him into a fictive GB of sexually charged transferences that had little, or nothing, to do with Byrne himself or the program ---- got more and more testy with the buggy guy, much to his amusement and jibing replies . . . along with fairly solid substantive analysis of the series and its main characters: the two psychoanalysts, Weston's wife and children, and his patients, one of whom he fell in love with.

Warning: if you are under 11 years of age, you shouldn't read some of the jibing posts aimed at middle-aged women and gay guys who saw themselves as females, all full of lecherous impulses of an hilarious sort directed at the fictive, created out-of-whole-cloth projective fantasies about Byrne: those buggy posts, you see, can get pretty racy. 

If, inversely, racy stuff of a rollicking sort is your preference, you find also try this buggy post too.

Today's Buggy Topic

Over the years, the buggy web-site has commented now and then and at length on various philosophical theories of scientific work . . . in both the natural and social sciences, and whether the latter should or could emulate the former.  The current buggy commentary continues this analysis, with a long post found at Economist View: click here for it.

The Background 

Serious philosophical analysis of scientific theories and testing began early in the last century, prompted by breakthrough work in new or symbolic logic and its foundational-status (tautological) by the German mathematician Godfrey Frege in the late 1800's and in the early 1900's by Bertrand Russell at Cambridge.  Ludwig Wittgenstein, a brilliant young Austrian engineer who became interested in these new trends in philosophy, studied briefly with Frege and was told by him that Russell in Britain would be a better, more advanced teacher.  That's how Wittgenstein ended up as Russell's student there before WWI.  

In WWI, Wittgenstein returned to Austria and volunteered to fight in the ranks.  Simultaneously, he finished his pathbreaking book Tractatus Logico Philosophicus that completed the shift in philosophy --- which began with Russell and others --- away from focusing on psychological data in epistemology and ontology, whether pure reason or sensory observation, and instead to the language in which statements about the world were formulated.  The study of psychological matters, it was said, are the concern of the new sciences of psychology and evolutionary theory, both of which were empirical.  By contrast, the linguistic turn in philosophy to language distinguished a pure philosophical analytical approach --- which is apriori, and not empirical --- from first-order empirical and theoretical work by scientists.

The Outcome: Logical Positivism

The linguistic turn, note quickly, also  occurred in what became called Continental philosophy ---- with roots in Hegelian traditions and later Nietzsche, but specifically inspired in the early 20th century by Edmund Husserl's path-breaking work in phenomenology (and to an extent by his windy student Martin Heidegger . . . a Nazi party member early on who didn't event attend the Jewish Husserl's funeral ceremony in 1938, even though Husserl had been instrumental in having Heidegger appointed to his chair of philosophy at Freiburg University.   Despite all that, logical positivism --- together with earlier British empiricism --- regarded Continental philosophy and almost all of early and modern philosophy as lacking rigor, as beset by confusion between speculation and careful analysis of philosophical and scientific concepts and syntax generally, as further confused about  metaphysical matters because of confusion between the semantics of words and syntax and sound reference to the world, and not least, as unwilling to subject its claims to untrammeled, ongoing exchanges with other philosophers.

The early logical positivists were themselves all German-speaking and mainly Austrian, centered in Vienna in the 1920s and early 1930s until all of them emigrated as the Nazis took over Germany and later Austria to Britain and the United States. 

Even before that emigration, several young British and American philosophers traveled to Vienna and its outposts in Prague and Berlin to study with the logical positivists.   A.J. Ayer was the best-known Briton.  Willard  Van Orman Quine was the best-known American who later repudiated the logical positivists --- in fact, delivered death-blows to its influence, even as he and became the greatest influence in analytical philosophy in the last half of the 20th century.  

Enter Karl Popper

Popper, another Austrian philosopher who ran from the Nazis, took a post in WWII in New Zealand, then went to Britain where he became one of the most influential philosophers of the post-1945 period, was never a member of the Vienna Circle logical positivists.  Like Wittgenstein, though --- another non-member --- he would occasionally show up at their weekly or monthly conferences and enter into the discussions.  In the early 1930s, though, he set out his important and innovative views of science and epistemology generally in his pathbreaking book of 1934, Logik der Forschung (translated 25 years later as The Logic of Scientific Discovery) that severely criticized the logical positivists reliance on inductive logic . . . plus several other topics. 

No need to say more about Popper here.  His criticisms of logical positivism are part of what the buggy commentary at Economist View deals with.   That commentary sets out briefly what the logical positivists tried to do; looks at Popper's criticisms;  notes with a lengthy example drawn from Marxism how Popper's views of science distinguished clearly between genuine science and pseudo-science like Marxism and psychoanalysis; and ends by noting what Quine did to undermine fully the logical positivist and even Popper's falsifiability criterion as the distinguishing feature of sound scientific work.

Final Section 

All of which, as you'll see, leads in the bugged-out stuff to the key question raised by Thomas Kuhn in his famous book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1964) . . . probably the most famous book in philosophy published during the 20th century.    That question?  What are the criteria for choosing between rival scientific theories? . . . at any rate,, given what Quine had established (theories are tested holistically, not by one proposition after another) and what Kuhn, a physicist who turned philosopher, found about the nature of scientific revolutions in his strikingly innovative book. 

Almost 60 years after Quine's devastating repudiation of logical positivism in "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" (1951) and nearly a half century after Kuhn's radical thesis of scientific revolutions, the debate on theory-production and theory-selection continues to rage in philosophy and elsewhere.