[Booktrope]

So, for all the many things in the world that cannot be defined in "a reasonably concrete and provable way" or where a statement cannot be "falsified", no study is worthwhile.

More or less this position: nothing worthwhile from Wittgenstein beyond the Tractatus and specifically, forget about the Philosophical Investigations.

It's not an indictment of a field that the subject matter is not susceptible to description in terms that are definitely falsifiable. Of course, definite terminology can be very helpful where it does apply, but it can also be used to oversimplify complex questions in a way that obfuscates them. But there's no law that nature must always be subject to description in a "concrete and provable way", especially not by human languages. By not taking seriously anything but disciplines that can be boiled down to true-false propositions, we'd miss huge amounts of knowledge that are useful and helpful.

Especially fields like psychology where so many important observations simply cannot be broken down into concrete statements or provable propositions in the way you seem to mean those words.

On the other hand, it's also very important to be careful of misuse of terms such as "true" and "false", for example, they can have very different meanings when we're talking about logic or observation, answers to examination questions, romance or religion. In this particular exchange, by true do we mean scientifically true or logically true?

Or, how indeed would anyone stand up and say whether something is "definitely not damning" or "definitely not unintentional" actually?

[zwkrt]

There’s a reason that traditionally in America psychology is taught in a research oriented way. This has the upside of at least ideally causing psychologist and psychiatrist to have a curious attitude toward their patients. In a field that is dealing with something so complicated as people’s brains and their social interactions and their self perceptions and their bodily health, it’s pretty much a necessary condition to begin from a standpoint of assuming that you don’t understand everything. I think it also has the unfortunate downside of producing a lot of questionable research though.

The problem is that in a research paper you do have to have operational definitions, P values, etc. it’s not that these things are bad but they are not particularly well-suited to such an ambiguous problem as attempting to explore the human condition.

To bring the point back to Wittgenstein, we are forcing students to talk about “the unspeakable” in scientific terminology. Bringing in his viewpoint from the investigations, it feels to me like in the mental health field we need to be playing a different game than the scientific research game. Professionals on-the-ground are doing this, but how to bring that back into the academic sphere, I don’t know what the best solution is.