ABSTRACT
The concepts that the terms represent can hardly be understood in isolation from the system of propositions which makes up the total theory —except, perhaps, through the furnishing of intuitive models for the theory. But such models are largely heuristic; and the theory applies to the world only to the degree that some set of semantic rules relates these crucial terms to experience in some way which will effect a confirming relationship between sentences in the theory and sentences whose truth is decided by direct test and experiment. It is hardly damaging any longer, therefore, to accuse psychoanalysis of being unscientific by virtue of its trafficking in unobservables. Providing that the theoretical terms function in psychoanalytical theories the way they do in physical theories, and providing that psychoanalytical theories come up to the mark on syntactical grounds, the two could hardly be contrasted invidiously.
