What the hell? Here, kitty kitty!
Empirical sciences: hard sciences and natural sciences
These require formal logic.
Non-empirical sciences: soft sciences and human sciences
These require informal logic.
Judging from your claims over the last few days, you seemed to have assumed that:
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Not only is psychology not a natural science, it is not even a human science. (You did say that psychology is not a science.)
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All science is of the first variety.
Unwashed, professional credentials are not required to be a musician. You are considered to be a professional musician if you can make some money using your musical talents. Most folks just want for their musicians to sound good, stay somewhat sober and show up on time. If you hit a sour note, we may wince, but it is not life-threatening.
Professional credentials are required in other areas because mistakes can cause BIG problems. Medicine, education, law, natural sciences, real estate and many others as I’m sure you know. The purpose is to protect the public.
If you’ve got an axe and can play it, we don’t need government protection. (I play keyboards and hire out to do driveby concertina solos to annoy the unsuspecting.) 
BTW, yes. I know who you are.
Don’t use the Pit as a substitute forum. I’ll tolerate some debate in threads here, but this is NOT meant to be GD2.
Lynn
For the Straight Dope
Fine. What was your training? Where was your training? Either answer these questions or DON’T post on the topic of psychology in any forum of this message board.
Lynn
For the Straight Dope
I apologize, Lynn. In order to be certain that I do not run afoul of your rule, I will not debate in the Pit.
Yes, but because I have a degree in Mathematics and Economic, I also call myself a Mathematician or an Economist where and when it suits. I work as a computer programmer – I am a computer programmer, but I also said this when it wasn’t my profession. If I had a degree in Psychology I’d probably be comfortable calling myself a Psychologist, it would only be a lie if I was to say I was a Psychotherapist.
Eek! Was this directed at me?
No. I will not give out personal information on these or any other boards. I shouldn’t even have brought up my credentials, since they are irrelevant to whether the statements I make are accurate.
I have never claimed that I could offer a diagnosis, that I was a physican of any kind (practicing or otherwise), or that I could tell when a given person has or does not have any condition or diagnosis justificably. (Not that most professionials would do that over the Net in the first place.) My claims about the nature of the available evidence are not clinical in nature, and there is more than enough analysis about the practice and theory of therapy and the problems thereof for a non-professional to gain a good understanding of them.
I would guess that the majority of the people posting on these boards discuss fields in which they are not professionally accredited. Unless you intend to ban everyone who discusses philosophy without being a professionial philosopher, your request is not a reasonable one.
I know perfectly well that I’ve never represented myself as a medical professional or that my statements can be taken as medical advice. I have specifically claimed to know more about the theoretical problems of psychiatry and clinical psychology than most clinicians, and that’s not much of a claim, since in my experience the majority of general practitioners aren’t even aware of the flaws in the claim that antidepressants are much better than placebos.
If some posters (who don’t have two digits in their IQ to rub together) can’t divest themselves of the idea that a cognitive psychologist is some kind of medical doctor, that really isn’t my problem.
As far as I can tell, my discussions of psychology have never violated the rules of any of these forums. (My tendency to insult and belittle posters has multiple times, for which I’ve been warned repeatedly.) You have the authority and power to ban me, but not the right, unless you ban me for rudeness (which you can probably make a good case for).
And yet, you brought them up whenever you had the chance…
Lynn, you rock.
Oh lordie, I don’t think you quite understand for a second how full of shit this makes you sound.
Look, if you really are as you claimed before “trained as a cognitive psychologist” why not email details of the training to Lynn Bodoni. That way you preserve whatever need you have for anonymity (sic?), whilst still backing up your claims.
Please believe me on this, as I have a Doctorate in Absolute Knowledge, though for reasons of modesty I don’t want to give any details on it.
Zoe, I am not sure if you are proposing these distinctions between sciences based on empiricism, or suggesting that others are. However, they are not accurate. Empirical simply means that you are using observations or experience as your data. An empirical science presents theories that can be falsified. Put most simply, empirical simply means “show me, don’t tell me.”
Clinical psychology is very much a science that employs empiricism. We propose theories that involve relationships between constructs. We generate hypotheses about these relationships and test them, allowing for support or falsification of our theories. The assertion that clinical psychology is not a science is absolutely moronic. As an example, since we have been talking about the work of Irving Kirsch (a clinical psychologist) on placebos, if not for the science of clinical psychology we would not have the studies he has produced to suggest the strength of the placebo effect. Spurred in part by Julian Rotter’s social learning theory (not to be confused with Albert Bandura’s work), Kirsch proposed a theory regarding response expectancies. He has developed hypotheses about how response expectancies would operate, and has conducted many tests of these hypotheses. He uses empirical data (e.g. people’s self-report of pain, people’s accuracy of predicting their success rate at a task) to see if these support or refute the hypotheses and thus the theory. He has no biological markers of response expectancy, no neurophysiological evidence. This latter point, however, is irrelevant to whether his work is scientific or not. I suppose that if one wished to invalidate clinical psychology as a science, one would have to regard its products as invalid, and thus have to get rid of most of the work that has been done exploring the placebo effect.
Because my qualifications as a cognitive psychologist have absolutely nothing to do with my knowledge about or critiques of clinical psychology/psychiatry! They’re two completely different fields!
Now, if I had made claims about clinical psych. and said “I have degrees in clinical psych.” or “I’m a practicing therapist, so I know what I’m talking about”, that would be an argument from authority: my claims are valid because I’m identified as an expert. My claims are made with the complete opposite justification: I know what I’m talking about because my claims are true.
Are you people confusing cognitive psychology with cognitive-behavioral therapy? Do you think that a cognitive psychologist has anything to do with treating people or giving diagnoses?
Damn few of them set themselves up as an authority on their chosen subjects, though. And when they do, we have been known to tell them to put up or shut up, just as I’m telling you.
But you’ve mentioned them to bolster your argument. Meaning you made them an issue. And again, you claim qualifications here…
My credentials as a cognitive psychologist have nothing to do with any authority I have on matters of psychiatry or clinical psychology, no more than my credentials as a car mechanic or astronomer or chemist have something to do with it.
Ban me for insulting people. Ban me for ignoring a moderator. But you have absolutely no reason to ban me for making statements about psychiatry while withholding credentials from a distinct field. I have already said I am not formerly trained in psychiatry and that much of my knowledge in the field was acquired informally.
Now, when I make claims about what studies of response tasks can tell us about how the brain assigns cognitive resources to simultaneous competing tasks, then you can ask for my qualifications in cognitive science.
No, I mentioned them when people demanded that I produce qualifications for my claims. As I told them, I am not a professional in clinical psychology or psychiatry.
I do know more about the research and the controversies surrounding it than most clinicians. Most of them don’t even realize that the “chemical imbalance” bromide was disproven decades ago.
As a very recent psych graduate I have been following the discussion on this thread and similar with interest.
But I have to say this admonition left me reeling.
Psychology is not freemasonry, or a royal enclosure immune from the critiques of non-psychologists, junior psychologists, or psychologists from a different field or persuasion. A cat can look at a king, an agricultural labourer can question a philosopher, and a cognitive psychologist can challenge a psychiatrist, a clinical psychologist or a psychoanalyst.
To say that you are “trained in cognitive psychology” is not necessarily a grandiose one - it could mean you have a first degree in cog psych, or it could mean you’re a professor of cognitive science. It certainly does not imply that you are laying claim to clinical experience or therapeutic/medical certification.
And why does it matter to anyone here? I was not aware that one needed a qualification in anything to engage in debates (or pittings). I thought the SDMB was a forum where (open-minded) road-sweepers could debate with professors. That’s what attracted me here in the first place.
Apologies for criticising a mod, but I’m genuinely angry for the first time here.
I cannot find evidence for this claim, so I retract it. Sorry.
Wrong. What’s crucial is what the observations and experience are about – empirical fields examine their subjects directly, taking data straight from the phenomena they study.
** Not a very long while ago, Hentor posted a particular study as evidence for one of his claims. In it, the researchers talked about how the DSM criteria were based on clinical theories of what mental disorders were – no one had actually verified that patterns of symptoms in clinical populations matched the associations the DSM took for granted. Their study was one of the first, if not the first, to compare psychometric results with the criteria.
How is clinical psychology an empirical science if its fruits have never been empirically verified?!?!
(By the way, the researchers failed to demonstrate that the DSM criteria matched the population’s symptom distribution to a mathematically significant degree. Chew on that for a while.)
The placebo effect is an aspect of clinical psych., but it’s studied in a lot of other fields. If every clinical psychologist died suddenly, research into the nature and consequences of the placebo effect would continue. I call shenanigans!
Interpretation: I took some classes, maybe got into a graduate program, dropped out cause my professors found out I was full of shit and I had to choose between my ego and having to put up or shut up.
I did read the part where TVAA overtly stated both that he is not a psychologist, and that his opinions are not that of a professional. Fair enough in my book, he’s stated he’s not an expert.
I don’t for a second buy that shit about the ethics though. That’s just ego saving talk for “I got kicked out” or “I couldn’t deal with being told I was wrong by professors.” OR “I’m delusional and to remain in the program would have caused me some serious stress.”
I want to know more about this ethical problem of yours.