3 ms·

Phlogiston was actually disproved by applying the lower level principle of weight to the supposed phlogiston reaction. The idea was that phlogiston was release

Phlogiston was actually disproved by applying the lower level principle of weight to the supposed phlogiston reaction. The idea was that phlogiston was released when things burned. This was disproved when it was observed that some things gained weight when burned. Either the concept of weight was wrong, or the concept of phlogiston was wrong. The scientific method requires you to reduce your reasoning into the lowest-level possible discrete arguments. In this case, scientists were forced to abandon phlogiston as it worked on a very high level, but did not integrate with lower level observations. My gripe boils down to a desire of psychologists to provide sweeping high-level conclusions without even being able to describe possible lower-level phenomena.

canjobear 9y ago
Sometimes you don't need knowledge of the lower-level phenomena. Darwin's arguments for evolution by natural selection were persuasive even though neither he nor contemporaries could conceive of what the chemical basis of gene transmission would look like.
- colemannugent 9y ago
  But they did know that genes were transferred. Modern psychology feels to me like researchers all want to be the one who gets to the big revelation first and so they abandon the typical scientific pursuit of building a standard model. Newton came up with classical mechanics by simply observing mechanical systems. Darwin and friends came up with the idea of gene transmission by observing the offspring of plants and animals. The difference between them and modern psychologists is that psychologists make very little attempt to explain the underlying phenomena. Without any explanations, modern psychology is little more than a series of observations. Science is a process, and I feel like that you can't claim real knowledge of things if you can't explain them.

canjobear 9y ago

Sometimes you don't need knowledge of the lower-level phenomena. Darwin's arguments for evolution by natural selection were persuasive even though neither he nor contemporaries could conceive of what the chemical basis of gene transmission would look like.

colemannugent 9y ago
But they did know that genes were transferred. Modern psychology feels to me like researchers all want to be the one who gets to the big revelation first and so they abandon the typical scientific pursuit of building a standard model. Newton came up with classical mechanics by simply observing mechanical systems. Darwin and friends came up with the idea of gene transmission by observing the offspring of plants and animals. The difference between them and modern psychologists is that psychologists make very little attempt to explain the underlying phenomena. Without any explanations, modern psychology is little more than a series of observations. Science is a process, and I feel like that you can't claim real knowledge of things if you can't explain them.