TriPolar, I realize we aren’t totally disagreeing here, but these are important things to address, IMHO.
Even if that were true, and to be honest I’m not convinced it is, that doesn’t mean psychology isn’t a science. Historically speaking we are not that far past the time when most people who claimed to be investigating matters of biology were completely full of shit, which doesn’t mean biology is not a science.
But, again, I’m not convinced it’s true, and wonder what your understanding of psychology is based on; have you walked into an actual psychology department of a real school and seen what the scientists there are working on? They aren’t sitting around on couches bullshitting each other.
It certainly comes as a truly amazing revelation to me that we don’t know anything about the underlying mechanisms of the brain.
We might not know EVERYTHING about how the brain works, but then we also don’t understand everything about how subatomic particles work. We still assign the existence of mass to a particle that has not been demonstrated to exist, we still don’t full understand why gravity works, dark matter and energy have still not been satisfactorily demonstrated to exist but we assume they do just to make the current equations work… I mean, there’s a hell of a lot about physics that are based on “hypotheses that can only be considered analysis of the data.” There is a fairly good chance that our underlying assumptions about one of things I’ve mentioned will turn out to be amazingly wrong, the sort of thing people will laugh at in a hundred years the way we find “luminiferous ether” quaint and funny. But physics is science, and it was science even when every physicist in the world believed in luminiferous ether. The Michelson-Morley experiment did not suddenly turn a quackery into a science; it was an example of what science does.
Science is not what you know; science is how you investigate what you do not know.
Id add sociology in there, but with a higher degree of quackery.
I’m not saying it isn’t science, just that it is open to more interpretation than I would like. The science of it is easy to do wrong and even easier to misinterpret.
Science is not meant to be objectively true. It’s meant to get you as close as you possibly can. It’s supposed to change over time.
It’s an inherently problem in epistemology. We never know when we’re “done” or when we’ve arrived at the full picture. Science just gets us closer and closer to the best explanations that most accurately and fully explain how everything works. The only underlying assumption is that the universe exists and can be described in terms of frameworks and laws, and so we aim to uncover those rules.
Psychology is a soft science because there are tons of unknown variables we don’t/can’t account for just yet. That’s why you see a lot of quackery – people coming to premature conclusions based on shoddy argumentation. Statistics is a really tough, counterintuitive subject and it’s really easy to perform bad statistics, especially when you’re falling victim to countless cognitive biases.
This…a million times this. Why is it that people think that science has to have all the answers today? Why can’t we discover stuff tomorrow, or next week, or next year, or next millennium?
Why does not knowing something now scare people so much?
Also, this.
Most knowledge cannot be boiled down to 2-3 easy-to-understand sentences in a news article.
Just because the average person doesn’t understand something doesn’t mean it isn’t true. Some people spend a lifetime studying only one or two things and never reach the end of the knowledge to be found about it. Why do people think they have to be able to understand that same thing in 2 minutes, and if they can’t, it’s obviously wrong?
Because people want to know things now, and not knowing can be unnerving. That’s one of the things religion has going for it. It already has the answers, and in the case of the older ones, they’ve had the answers for millennia. There’s not that much to worry about and there’s a sense of permanance. The truths are eternal and comfortable, and new things are met with suspicion. So people who are used to thinking this way expect science to work the same way. They also tend to treat science as if it were revealed rather than discovered.
We aren’t that far apart, and I’m not saying psychology isn’t a science. I like what FixMyIgnorance says above. The thing about some areas is that we do know how far we are from a ‘hard’ explanation, and those are the fields where scientists must be more cautious about forming conclusions, and perhaps more critical of their peers than in the hard sciences. Once an defective conclusion is reached in these fields, it becomes increasingly difficult to disprove because there aren’t simple countering experiments.
Without pointing at any field… actually pointing at all fields of science, bad science is more dangerous than the anti-science crowd. They can be easily proven wrong with their own irrational words, bad science has a terrible way of lingering, and recruiting new anti-science nuts.
It’s almost worth a separate thread, but are anti-science nuts recruited through bad science, or dishonest science?
I mean, to use a really immediate and pertinent example, anti-vax nuttery didn’t start with poor science; it started with outright fraud. My uncle John believes every antiscientific flim-flam that comes down the pike, and to be honest I don’t think it’s that he’s been misled by well-meaning but unskilled scientists. I don’t think he’s read real science in his entire life. The crap he sends me is all fraudulent scammery.
You can’t really engage in science without getting stuff wrong - scientists in the 19th century went happily along believing in luminiferous ether and thinking the Earth couldn’t be very old (because the Sun couldn’t burn for 4 billion years, you see; they didn’t understand that the Sun is not really burning, since nobody knew about nuclear fusion) but surely we had to go through that process to get to where we are now?
I guess what I’m challenging is the implicit assumption that the soft sciences are full of quacks, which you’ve asserted is the case with psychology; I see no evidence this is the case. Why should I believe that the world’s psychology departments are full of quacks? It seems a rather arresting accusation indeed.
I see what you mean and get where you’re coming from, but I think at this point a distinction should be drawn between bad science and solid albeit wrong science. Wrong science would be your Sun example: they made an hypothesis that incorporated the facts as they were currently known and understood. Turns out the facts not currently known invalidated it. Oh well, back to the drawing board, I’ll put the kettle on.
To me, bad science is stuff like massaging your experimental results so that they better match your postulate, ignoring contrary or plain odd results that simply must have been flukes or experimental artefacts or statistical aberrations or solar flares or god knows what else because the only thing to be sure of is that your theory’s rock solid as evidenced by everything except for the stuff you’ve swept under the rug. Or asserting stuff based on flimsy (or worse, absent) evidence and no testing against whatsoever.
That’s quackery. That’s *doing *it wrong. Getting it wrong is just the noise science makes as it marches on.
Culture is very well defined and explained in the ancient myths and legends and is as valid today as it was back then. I know books attest to this, and my own experience also bears this out as well.
Back then we did not have science, yet culture was arguably better defined then today and didn’t require a advanced degree to practice.
So to the OP, culture and the ability to analyze it superseded science by a great deal.
Therefore science is not required for something to exist.
Of course science isn’t required for something to exist.
Existence occurs without human input, understanding, or analysis.
However, science is the best method of understanding the mechanisms of existence.
Don’t you agree?
Both - but selective and preliminary science also play a role.
Woo advocates have a love-hate affair with science. They denounce it regularly as cold and mechanistic, or inapplicable to their brand of woo. Yet they recognize the cachet involved if their woo seems to have a scientific basis. So you get “dialogue” that goes something like this:
Wooist: My woo is scientifically proven! Lookit this study!
Skeptic: That’s a preliminary report on cells in a test tube. No human trials have been done, so you can’t claim the treatment works.
Wooist: There are no trials because Big Pharma suppressed them! Science is Bad and Corrupt!!! My brother-in-law had a tumor on his nose the size of a pumpkin but it went away when he rubbed this goo on it. We don’t need your steenking science!!