I suppose it all comes down to what a science can entail. Obviously, certain things lend themselves well to being sciences, while other things do not. Poetry, no matter how well studied, will likely never be a science. Physics, on the other hand, is clearly a science, and well defined.
I think that psychology is a science, though much more difficult to study because there are too many variables. While it is easy to be able to understand one person through a certain psychological lens, it is not necessarily true that you can see all people through that lens. Psychology being a young science though, I suspect that this will begin to disappear in another 100 years or so, and will really hit its heyday in a few hundred years when the fields of information system, psychology, and neurology all interweave.
When I said that it was 'arguably not a science' I wasn't taking sides.
If you want my personal opinion then I think that some elements of psychology (neuro-psychology being the obvious example) are scientific (ie they are based on experiment/observation and form hypotheses which can be tested), whilst other areas of psychology (Freudian, Jungian etc) are NOT scientific in that they make no testable predictions. Now I am well aware that modern psychology would claim to have moved away from Freudian analysis and 'introspective proofs' but a great number of psychologist still use basic Freudian analysis in their clinical work.....
Some sub groups of psychology are science where as some are not
Hm, i'm going to have to say that i disagree with most of the posts here. Psychology is a science, no ifs, ands or buts. Don't confuse clinical psychology with psychology. Clinical psychology is about application, not study. The relationship between clinical psychology and psychology is the same as the relationship between engineering and science. You would never call engineering "science" (and i'm an engineer). Engineering uses science... very much so... but it also uses other fields like economics and sociology, and, to be honest, quite often, a fair bit of black magic (back-of-the-envelope calculations, guesstimation, and other less-than-technical methodologies). Same goes with clinical psychology. Clinical psychologists use psychology, but they also use a fair bit of black magic like therapist intuition and pseudopsychology like Freudian (not really anymore, actually) and "emotional freedom" techniques. It's just unfortunate that the field "clinical psychology" actually has the word "psychology" in it - it would be better to call it "psychotherapy" to make it clear that while it is related to psychology it is not actually psychology, but psychotherapy already refers to a specific kind of clinical psychological technique.
But yes, psychology - modern psychology, Freud has as much relevance now as phlogiston - is very scientific, so much so that most people don't even have a clue how scientific it is because it's so far removed from the mainstream.
The description quoted in the opening post is way off, on many levels. For example, even physics is not black-or-white, neutrino detected or not. Noise exists in physics, too - a great deal of noise in many cases, in fact. You should see what real physics experimental data looks like: i've stood with physicists showing me their results, holding what looks to me like a snapshot of a television screen tuned to a dead channel and pointing to specific blurs saying, "see there? that's an atom. that's another atom. see the crystalline structure? oh, just ignore those spots, that's just receiver noise." Half the time i think they're just ****** with me.
Not to mention that the quote lumps psychology in with the social sciences. Sorry, not so. Psychology is not a social science. Yes, misused statistics are epidemic in social sciences, but not in psychology - it doesn't work like that.
i'm going to try and give you a taste of what a modern psychological theory looks like. One of the cutting edge theories of the mind holds that most of our brain is simply a bunch of transformation matrices. Recall from high school math that a matrix can transform a set of coordinates - for example, there are matrices that do rotations, others that do reflections, others that change Cartesian coordinates into polar coordinates, and so on. So, as a simple example, in your brain, there is a matrix that transforms a set of x,y,z coordinates into shoulder,elbow,wrist angles. Your eyes see a cup. A matrix in your brain transforms the visual picture of the cup into x,y,z coordinates of where the cup is. Another matrix transforms those x,y,z coordinates into arm angles... and you reach out and grab the cup. These matrices are not in "software" - we don't consciously think of how to do this action - they are in the "hardware": the neurons are arranged to do these matrix calculations very quickly, in parallel (for computer buffs, this is like the difference between doing graphics in normal CPU time, versus having a dedicated graphics processor... the latter is much faster). The upshot is that it explains why our brain seems to be so damn powerful for simplistic tasks like pattern recognition and movement: there are transform matrices for these things built into hardware. And we can test this theory in a number of ways, by timing reaction times between seeing an object and moving for it, or by using neuroimaging techniques.
That's what modern psychology looks like. Even less mathematical theories are just as rigorous (i highly recommend a book called Moral Minds by Dr. Marc Hauser, where he spends an entire book building an evidence-based case for a theory of how the mind processes moral questions). Don't confuse psychology with clinical psychology, and don't confuse psychology with sociology.
As Indi said, many aspects of psychology are scientific, in that there are testable hypotheses. Sciences have long been divided into "soft" and "hard" based upon the quality of the experimental results and the theoretical models. While modern psychology has elements that are precise, I contend that the nature of the subject will cause much of psychology to remain in the "soft" category.
Most subjects that are worthy of study can be divided into three categories of knowledge:
Science -- The portion that deals with fundamental theories about how and why things work.
Technology -- The carefully researched methods for applying the subject to human problems.
Art -- The part that can only be described somewhat vaguely, but is necessary to produce or use the products of the study.
"soft" sciences are sometimes considered nearer to voodoo than theoretically sound. While psychology has advanced far beyond the level where it can be sneered at, the self-referential nature of it, the fact that we are limited in types of experiments we can ethically do, and the fact that behavior changes dramatically when a person is conscious of being observed insure that much of the material will remain soft. In addition, applying psychology usefully will always require a substantial amount of "art" that cannot be clearly described.
It is in the genes
It is in the age old debate on nature vs nurture
Lets us assume that there is a gene for alcoholism or wife ( husband ) beating
what where they ( the genes ) doing when neither alcohol or wifes and husbands were there
ie in prehistory?
Last edited by yagnyavalkya on Sun Jul 19, 2009 1:04 pm; edited 1 time in total
Psychology is not an exact scienceis a bunch of theories and on the other hand clinical Psychology is a closer to science
May it is a science afterall
I guess ppl have lost interest in this post
I think there had bean lot of discussion s in the is subject and nobody seems to have any interest in ti now
but patterns of behaviours...
