Hi
Just to pick up on a few points in this thread. Of course we know as psychologists that few concepts have nice, tidy definitions (i.e., necessary and sufficient conditions) and that prototypical models of concepts like "science" (and "dog" and "chair" and ...) are the norm. But that doesn't mean we cannot distinguish science from non-science or pseudoscience, just as we generally do not go around sitting on dogs and taking chairs for walks, or at least not until our later years. Feynman's allusion to "love" is misguided since many concepts studied now by scientists in very precise ways were once only vaguely defined ... think "temperature." Were the early researchers studying temperature, crudely defined (that feels "hotter" than it did before we ...), not doing science? I think psychology (or at least certain areas within psychology) does fairly well on certain aspects of science, notably with respect to testing hypotheses against observation, with careful attention to threats to the validity of our observations and inferences. I think we do less well in many areas with respect to specifying mechanistic models for our hypotheses and theoretical models. As we grow better at this aspect of science, psychology will become better able to see similarities and differences between macro-theories and in the process more of a unified discipline. And just to be clear, mechanistic models can be in terms of psychological constructs, not necessarily brain processes, although it should be somewhat clear that they might ultimately be realized in a biological system. Take care Jim Jim Clark Professor & Chair of Psychology U Winnipeg Room 4L41A 204-786-9757 204-774-4134 Fax ________________________________ From: Christopher Green [[email protected]] Sent: January-28-14 4:28 PM To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS) Subject: Re: [tips] Feynman on Psychology 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]<mailto:[email protected]> http://www.yorku.ca/christo On Jan 28, 2014, at 4:37 PM, Michael Britt <[email protected]<mailto:[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]<mailto:[email protected]> http://www.ThePsychFiles.com Twitter: @mbritt On Jan 28, 2014, at 4:11 PM, Rick Stevens <[email protected]<mailto:[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]<mailto:[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]<mailto:[email protected]> http://www.ThePsychFiles.com<http://www.thepsychfiles.com/> Twitter: @mbritt --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13526.d532f8e870faf8a0d8f6433b7952f38d&n=T&l=tips&o=33615 or send a blank email to leave-33615-13526.d532f8e870faf8a0d8f6433b7952f...@fsulist.frostburg.edu<mailto:leave-33615-13526.d532f8e870faf8a0d8f6433b7952f...@fsulist.frostburg.edu> --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>. 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