LEARNING FROM DEBUNKING
by Juan Carlos Garelli

The popular impression that disproof represents a negative side of science arises from a common, but erroneous, view of history. As Karl Popper (1937, 1963, 1972) has taught us, knowledge grows by bumps and drops; the idea of unilinear progress lies behind racial rankings propounded by socially questionable prejudice on the one hand , and a false concept of how science works and develops. In this view, any science begin in the nothingness of ignorance and move towards truth by gathering more and more information, constructing theories as facts accumulate. In such a world, debunking would be primarily negative, for it would only shuck some rotten apples from the barrel of accumulating knowledge. But the barrel of theory is always full; sciences work with elaborate contexts for explaining facts right from the outset. Science advances primarily by replacement, not by addition. If the barrel is always full, the the rotten apples must be discarded before better ones can be added.

Scientists do not debunk only to cleanse and purge. They refute older ideas in the light of a different view about the nature of things. (Gould, 1981).

If it is to have any enduring value, sound debunking must do more than replace one mistaken theory, usually associated to a social or intellectual prejudice, with another. It must use more adequate psychology and biology to drive out fallacious ideas, such as attachment measures.

We reject theories based on retrospection because they invariably beg the question and explain nothing. We reject questionnaires or short interviews to probe into the intricacies of human mind, but also for its lack of humaneness, and its contradictory double-bind message. How can you try to understand a fellow human  being by coldly asking him to answer a pre-set questionnaire? a contradiction in terms, and an attack to the very foundations of human psychology.

Last but by no means least, theories that cannot be tested, that is, theories than cannot be debunked or disproved are mere speculation. What is the empirical difference between Shaver and Hazan's procedures and Skinner's methods, or for that matter between those and Freud's highly speculative assertions about the heritability of the OEdipus complex? None.

Debunking, then, proves a cornerstone in the history of ideas and science. Recent history is full of examples. When American eugeneticists attributed diseased of poverty to the inferior genetic construction of poor people, they could propose no systematic remedy other than sterilization. When Joseph Goldberger proved that pellagra was not a genetic disorder, but a result of vitamin deficiency among the poor, he could cure it.

Disproving, old obsolete, backward views about the complex human socio-emotional development such as Freud's, Melanie Klein's, Jacques Lacan's or others's, and adopting a multidisciplinary stance where ethology plays a major role, we are both able to diagnose attachment disorders at the moment they are developing as well as treat them then and thereafter.

REFERENCES

Popper, Karl, (1937-1959) The Logic of Scientific Discovery. London: Routledge.

Popper, Karl, (1963) Conjectures and Refutations. London: Routledge.

Popper, Karl, (1972) Objective Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press.