The passage is actually, "when you pull on it, it gets longer," and the comparison was to Hooke's Law, not explicitly to Newton. It does appear in Cohen's "The Earth is Round (p<.05)” (p. 1001, first column), but Cohen was actually quoting a 1969 American Psychologist article by John Tukey. http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~maccoun/PP279_Cohen1.pdf
Best, 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 8:42 PM, "Mike Palij" <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > > > > > > > > I was going to sit this thread out but I'm curious about Chris' > source for Jack Cohen's statement. I'm challenging that Jack > might have said something like that, I just want to know the > source. > > -Mike Palij > New York University > [email protected] > > > --------------- Original Message ---------------- > On Tue, 28 Jan 2014 14:28:21 -0800, Christopher Green wrote: > 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. > > --- > > You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. > > To unsubscribe click here: > http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=430248.781165b5ef80a3cd2b14721caf62bd92&n=T&l=tips&o=33624 > > (It may be necessary to cut and paste the above URL if the line is broken) > > or send a blank email to > leave-33624-430248.781165b5ef80a3cd2b14721caf62b...@fsulist.frostburg.edu > > > > > > --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=33639 or send a blank email to leave-33639-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
