That's true of the horse-shit self help manual understanding that most people here have about psychology.

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Psychology is filled with statisitcal analysis, T-tests, Non parametrics, isolation of causal variables, experiments repeated with counter-balanced repeated measures and indepedant groups, longnitudinal case studies, naturalist experiments, lab experiments, cross-studies and pilot schemes.

Nothin like the kind of un-qualified conjectures made here.

OT slightly I know but regardless - Psychology isnt a real science in the sense that say Physics is, since it is based on retrospective observation not hard fact (issue of ethics aside) that can be refuted by peers. In Psychology you argue and debate a point it cant be proved or disproved, it's one of the reasons why you can get different Psychologists to refute or disagree over what the correct course of actions are in say a court of law, since it is entirely conjecture and opinion. This can be a somewhat bitter pill for Psychologists and those studying it to swallow, and it's by no means an opinion in order to belittle the profession, but it is a home truth none the less.

And I do concede the field is starting to make an effort to ground their theories these days(albiet with much resistance from it's members) but it's not close to the cold(unethical?) and clinical approach to data and proof that the sciences put results through.

Before we get into any further back and forth have a look at this link, which is even being used in some universities degrees as essential course material/reading: http://www.arachnoid.com/psychology/index.html

Whats rather interesting is the 'responses' - unsuccessful attempts by students, practitioners and faculty members at multiple universities to refute the point being put forward, great reading which ever way you swing!

Yay off topic!

This article isn't saying "Take psychology and bin it, it's all based on mindless assumptions!". It's a warning to the way psychology is interpretted and used for justification, the fact is psychology is in an early state of science where no common construct has been developed, this is what the peice is warning of.

Differing opinions are based on differing interpretations of empirical research and cross studying. The same reason you get differing opinions in biology, physics, chemistry and medicine.

The reason we see psychology as "less" of a sience, is because of its tendancy to be whored by idiots trying to make claims integral to their worldview, think of all the "evolutionary psychologists" here justifying chauvinism.

Have you ever considered that ALL of scientific induction is retrospective, its not something unique to psychology?
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No psychology has yet to attain the established paradigms seen in the classical sciences, but to say it is just a belief system with various shouting theories which contain no evidence. Is a gross mis-understanding of how psychology works AND of how science works.

I agree Fin. In fact my current opinion is that all science (including the analytical approach to psychology) is a big well elaborated set of collective limiting beliefs of our humankind ) Of coarse I say this half jokingly (as science, viewed from the other perspective, has contributed greatly to the society and humankind).

Note that I used to be a scientist and have a PhD in a concrete science.

Ivan

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The major difference, between psychology and the sciences is that in physics or maths or chemistry or whatever you have to put forward data that proves and explains a theory, which can then be disproved. In psychology you currently cannot (I hope neuroscience might do some day) do this, you can only observe an describe, you cannot currently specifically say X and Y cause Z to happen, there is no solid proof only circumstantial data, collecting it does not make it scientific... If I said to you I can predict the future, I recorded 20 coin tosses I correctly guessed, it's not science is it, it is infact very shakey data to be basing a theory on.

You will notice there are very very very few negative 'research' papers brought out that dispute current opinion in psychology, again a key factor that an opinion/theory cannot be disproved or proved, you certainly cant argue that every theory put forward in the field can be correct!

In science if an area is up for debate it is for example when a new area is trying to be understood and differing or multiple theories are put forward each with a reasonable or comparable founding in data/equations that explains the basic concepts, if a theory is published which cant currently be disproved then that is used, it's not up for debate or arguement, it is either true or false. In psychology currently you have only opinion which is up for debate as studies cannot be proved or disproved but alternative opinions (not facts) can be offered, a good example of this would be freewill vs determinism.

But anyway from what you posted it seems you are agreeing with me that psychology in it's current form isnt scientific in the standard sense, but also state that some day it should/may be? I can agree with that since that is what I wish too, since I also agree with some of the statements you made, again I must reiterate my first reply that just because psychology in it's current form is not a science does not mean it's pointless or should be binned.

Explaining is a tough word in science, it's arguable that science cannot explain anything, and I tend to side with this crowd. All scietific theories are simply analogies which describe the world in a way that lends itself to reliable predictions.

Within psychology itself you can isolate variables for instance.

I can say with relative certainty that increasing the number of people stressing a participant logarithmically will increase that participants chances of conforming their opinion.

With the same certainty that a doctor can say Drug X will help cure condition Y. Often these disputes are not a case of "either one theory or the other", people are not going, well either "Hawkins is right or Von Willhelm is right" becuase they have different theories of cosmology.

Similarly, the theory of Social learning and the theory of classical conditioning, are two accounts of learning, but the existance of one of these theories does not negate the other.

I think psychology is a science, It has got problems in its way to "objectivity" but large portions of science face the same issues, science is full of murky disputes and difficult to verify claims.

Psychology is a science.

Many areas of psychology are soft science, typically those which attept to study the "mind" without relation to physiology or behaviour. Assumptions based only on surveys and case studies where we rely on a person's attempted explaination of their own thoughts and actions, I think are largely bullshit; psychologists who use these methods can gather "research" supporting anyhting they want by building the study and displaying the statistics around it. Wikipedia sums this up. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology#Criticism

Science or not, it is captivating stuff. I am looking to study biopsychology in college right now, which would basically be "brain science" rather than "study of the mind"- its interdisciplinary study in psychology, biology, neuroscience, biochemistry and biophysics.

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psychology is just applied biology, which is applied chemistry, which is applied physics, which is applied math

In short, no - it isn't.

The key problem with psychology and even biology is there is too many variables that really screw up results to a point you can't use them.

It would be like doing chemistry where you mix two chemicals together but they have already been mixed with countless other things in different conditions before you have had a chance to experiment with them.

This is why anything you do in psychology is broken before you even start - how people act in different situation is an accumulation of all their previous experiences which are unique to them and therefore trying to get a unified model simply isn't going to work.

There was a paper I was reading not to long ago, talking about the philosophy of science with a particular reference to biology and how different intepretations of DNA's importance lead to different views of biology, and how our current view of DNA is just based on "fashion" as oppossed to any particular argument.

But, Psychology and Biology are not classed as sciences ONLY IF your defintion of science has the objective of giving certainty on predictions or portray a truthful 100% accurate model of the world.

^^ This is the everyman view of science, and its simply not true.

Scientific theories give us anologies that can yield certain probabilistic calculations, given certain assumptions. We've seen such assumptions destroyed again and again, so its not like any scientific theory has ANY claim to certainty or even a meaningful claim to a "likelihood of correctness".

The only thing science really does is create rough models that help us make some human prediciton of the world.

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That's what psychology and biology do succesfuly, day in, day out.
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You think psychology is to murky? Too many assumptions? Not certain in its findings?

....Welcome to scientific inquiry sweet-heart, it only gets worse from here!

I respectfully disagree.

Science is able to be peer reviewed and results replicated reliably. No matter how many times you mix 1 mol of HCl with 1 mol of NaOH you will always get the same results if you control the other factors.

Now don't get me wrong, I also think there are area's of biology I wouldn't class as science but your example of DNA simply isn't true. DNA is very well documented to be the whole reason for variation in life - the discussion comes about how very similar DNA produces very different results (transcription factors etc). But lets not go off topic.

You also mentioned about medicine - again, a lot of medicine is theory rather than hard evidence of something happening and therefore a conclusion being drawn from it. An example may be high blood pressures link to heart attacks and strokes - this theory is from literally thousands of individual pieces of data where their own specific circumstances can be discounted due to a massive overall trend. Again though, its just a "more likely" rather than a "this is" argument - in most conventional science (physics, chemistry) there are no "this increases the chance" - it is all quantitative data.

Sure, there are things in psychology that draw on statistical data to draw conclusions - but nothing to the degree of "real" science simply because the same groups and controlled variables are not extensive enough.

Don't mistake my argument as psychology is pointless - it still gives theories that are useful but ultimately they are probabilities of things happening rather than facts.

A prime example is if you put £50 on a table and observe who takes it, who leaves it etc. You simply cannot get viable data to make a judgement about what makes people take it - the only thing you can say with any degree of accuracy is the percentage of people who took it was X - but again, you need a very large sample group. The problem I have with the subject is I have seen far to much which seems to draw too much from too little evidence.

A true scientific experiment (which is needed to support a theory to make it at all credible) required you to only have only one factor change. With psychology, there are simply too many factors that influence results for any of the data on anything short of a very large sample group to be near pointless.

Going back to my leaving money to see who takes it - leave £50 on a table at an upper class mansion will get a much different result to leaving it on a table in a third world country. But even then look at all the factors - do the people in the third world country even know what £50 is? do the upper class assume its theirs rather than see it as stealing? The only way to test those factors is to ask the individuals what they thought - and really, using an individuals descriptive ability is hardly credible when you look at the massive amounts of examples where people forget simple things like tie colour of someone talking to them.

To summarise my argument:
Chemistry - 1 mol of X with 1 mol of Y will always make 1 mol of Z
Psychology - it seems more likely that X with Y will make Z but X and Y are always slightly different so its probably right but it could be that X had already been exposed to AB and C where as 20% of the time X just ignored Y.... you get the point.

EDIT: If you say ANYTHING about quantum physics or something like that I will slap you That shit is just weird and nobody has a clue really.

This is the problem with purist "more of the same" induction, your saying "I've done X and gotten Y lots of times in the past so I MUST get it next time!"

Unfortunatly this isn't a gurantee if we see chemical A with property X have Y effect 90x, can we be sure that Chemical B with property X will have effect Y.

No, infact we have no coherent basis to say that just becuase we have observed one thing follow another thing for a long period of time, that it will always be like this in the world!

Further more, "more of the same" reasoning can't get you theory, it can get you equations, but not theory.
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/3833/1/ ... eprint.pdf
The guy who wrote the article also has a history within genetics. The problem isn't DNA not being well documented, its that we've focused on ONE factor within biology, when in fact there are other area's that we can approach it from. Infact since this article was published movements in biology have started exploring these other routes!
Isn't that as true about Medicine as psychology? I'm asking becuase psychological research methods are almost identical to those used in medicince. I don't think human anatomy has any less variables than human psyche.
You wouldn't attempt to say "Why" someone takes it, that experiment is only capable of measuring who takes it, how quickly and possibly in what enviroments and times is it taken more often.


You can get one factor change, in very much the same way you get one factor change in medicine.


I don't think you quite understand how psychology experiments are run, or how theories are formed.. I don't even think you understand what psychological theories seek to achieve!

Care to give a real world example?
Summary in return.
Chemistry- That reasoning doesn't provide theory, only trend spotting, not enough to create any pragmatic "science" from!
Psychology- mirrors medicine, yet we never question medicine as a science.

Edit: Quantam physics is a perfect example of how we can have probabalistic predictions that are remarkably effective, without having a clue how they work!

I should point out, you are far more versed on this topic than I am so I fully accept some of what I say may be complete rubbish

Spotting trends IS science in my opinion. Theory's as to WHY that trend occurs is just speculation and simply a logical guess.

I think that the answer to is psychology a science is really dependant on how you define a science.

Psychology and medicine because of the complex nature of the subjects, have to reduce their predictive power to smaller claims if they want to remain accurate. But these small claims are performed with a scientific rigour that's usually pretty hard to fault in any respect.

And any problems that do face those claims made by subjects like medicine and psychology are problems that face nearly all our scientific claims.

Both psychology, medicine, biology and physics have provided predictive power, and this is the best we can ever gaurantee from science.

Anyone who thinks science is about giving certainty is living in La La land and needs to speak to an actual scientist about the subject!