Dialectic can never be a science, you can't apply the same methodology. Even when it's material.
However it is philosophy, and if your searching for some material reality then it's ontology.
Science too is a product of ontology, it's a methodology created for this exact purpose and wich can be studied in this field.
Saying physical properties are social abstractions sounds to me like social constructivism, which is epistemology, again philosophy.
Social sciences can be soft science precisely when they are not dialectic and rely on the methodology of science.
And to be clear, soft science is just a science that is based on a hard science, in which we don't have enough work done to explain every emergent properties using fundamental properties of matter.
Psychoanalysis is an outdated philosophical theory, so indeed just a scam now.
The Perverts Guide to Cinema is my favorite scam film.
I went on a tear at one point trying to really understand, rigorously (I'm a computer and maths person by trade and training), what dialectics are and how, specifically, the material dialectic (the foundation of Marxist thought!) should work.
I was a bit dissapointed to understand that they can't really be "rigorous" in that fashion and that they're really more of a philosophical and rhetorical tool. I do still get a lot of use from them, and in discussions with other people the framework of the dialectic ("Ok, what if we took these two ideas and put them on opposite ends of a spectrum, how does that look?") is very useful for explaining and expounding upon ideas.
Its usefulness never made me disappointed despite this drawback.
I'm a physicist at heart, which might explains it... To me the use in philosophy is just as important, especially in philosophy of science and metaphysics.
Simply put I couldn't imagine studying how reality works without ever wandering what it is and how to best study it.
Is this dialectics?
Definitely
Honestly, a mistake right off the bat to let him get away with slandering Marxist analysis by tying it to a word as poisoned in the popular imagination as 'economics'
I think I get it, so social science is like theoretical physics?
In Marxism, the base (material/economic conditions) is what the superstructure (social/cultural/political conditions) is generated by. Societies organise themselves around the resources available and the division of labour required to utilise them. Marxism's social observations are all rooted in that mediation of the material environment.
Just to add onto this for completeness's sake: the superstructure is created by the base and also the remaining superstructure left over from the previous base. And don't forget the dialectic between base and superstructure!
Why is psychoanalysis bullshit? I've seen people talking about it before but I don't really remember the reasons.
It’s not really very evidence-based from what I remember. Freuds ideas rested on a lot of untested assumptions about the way human psychology works
Psychology student hère.
In short, our professor explained to us that there are two approaches as to how subconscious thoughts and emotions work. The first one is that sometimes thought processes are subconscious, but they can be "brought to light" relatively easily; this perspective has been well-validated and compatible with modern psychology. The second approach is the psychoanalytic one - that some thoughts and emotions are forcefully kept away from the consciousness in order to self-regulate. This position has been debunked and doesn't seem to have empirical basis.
That's why classical psychoanalysis today, where you dig deep into thoughts and feelings in order to go beyond the "defensive forces" of the mind (in German also called Abwehr), is seen as outdated.
Im with handlebar head on this one
