Here's a more recent clip of Feynman talking about "social science."
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IaO69CF5mbY&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DIaO69CF5mbY
He has a point, but he also seems to come from the Ernest Rutherford school of
what counts as science ("All science is physics, or it is stamp collecting.").
The problem is (as I have debated many times on this forum) there is no set
definition of science. Each science has its own standards of theory and
evidence. For physics, the theory has to be mathematical and the measurements
have to be very precise. In psychology, the theories are almost never
mathematical (in part because the measurements are rarely very precise).
The statistician Jacob Cohen once said (à propos of null hypothesis testing)
that you're never going to get Newton's laws out of experiments that only
predict, "if I stretch it, it will get longer." He's right. On the other hand,
you can't fault a science for doing the best it can with the intellectual tools
that it currently has available. It is one thing to complain that we don't have
theories that make point-estimate predictions. It is another thing entirely to
produce such theories.
Putting all this together into a coherent answer about whether (which part of?)
psychology is a "science" s a very difficult thing. It is not as highly
developed a science as physics, to be sure. Perhaps physics is the wrong model,
though. Perhaps evolutionary science is the right model instead (William James
and John Dewey thought so). Perhaps we are barking up the wrong tree by
modelling ourselves after other sciences. Perhaps there is another approach to
science -- to the natures of theory and evidence, and the relations between
them -- that will result in markedly better psychological understanding than we
currently have. For over a century we have thought that we were only a decade
or so from that new understanding. We haven't gotten there yet.
Chris
.......
Christopher D Green
Department of Psychology
York University
Toronto, ON M6C 1G4
[email protected]
http://www.yorku.ca/christo
> On Jan 28, 2014, at 4:37 PM, Michael Britt <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Yes, he did appear to be deliberately jabbing Freudian theory, which is
> understandable, but I can see someone watching this section of the video and
> concluding from it that because we can't quantify "love", psychology is "ipso
> facto" not a science.
>
> How would we defend psychology to Feynman (if he were still alive of course)?
> We could have acquainted him with behavioral methods of studying humans,
> which does allow for quantification, but how would we justify to him that we
> can study emotions?
>
>
> Michael
>
> Michael A. Britt, Ph.D.
> [email protected]
> http://www.ThePsychFiles.com
> Twitter: @mbritt
>
>> On Jan 28, 2014, at 4:11 PM, Rick Stevens <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> It kind of sounded like he was criticizing Freudian theories rather than
>> psychological research.
>>
>> Rick Stevens
>> School of Behavioral and Social Sciences
>> University of Louisiana at Monroe
>>
>>
>>
>>> On Tue, Jan 28, 2014 at 1:43 PM, Michael Britt <[email protected]>
>>> wrote:
>>> Here's a clip from a video showing physicist Richard Feynman talking about
>>> the scientific method. In this 55 sec clip from the video he alludes to
>>> psychology and says essentially, "you can't have a prediction be shown to
>>> be right no matter which way it comes out." Which is of course a good
>>> point. He then goes on to be a bit more dismissive of psychology because
>>> since it's hard to measure a concept like "love" then you can't claim to
>>> know anything about it.
>>>
>>> http://reelsurfer.com/watch/share/40721
>>>
>>> Thoughts?
>>>
>>> Michael
>>>
>>> Michael A. Britt, Ph.D.
>>> [email protected]
>>> http://www.ThePsychFiles.com
>>> Twitter: @mbritt
>>>
>>>
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