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Can we just label Psychology in general as pseudoscience? Pretty much all the “findings” that have been popularized recently have all failed replication.

denton-scratch 3y ago
No, we can't. Most of psychology deals with the stimuli and responses, which are empirically observable; if it's done properly, that's science. Consciousness is problematic for science, because it's intrinsically private, and not observable. Each of us knows it's there, and can observe it; but we can't share our observations, and "science" depends on sharing observations. Perhaps we need a new definition of "science", that can accomodate the private experience that each of us has, but can't share.
- edgyquant 3y ago
  or perhaps we stop trying to label every system of thought we want to claim is legitimate as science and leave it only for one’s we are able to apply the scientific method to
tgv 3y ago
Psychology has many bad practices, and does have a certain amount of pseudo-science in its subdomains, but as a whole it isn't. The subject exists, and there are ways of (indirectly) measuring aspects of it. > Pretty much all the “findings” that have been popularized recently have all failed replication. That's partially due to bad practices, partially to the fact that psychology is harder than physics, and partially to perverse funding mechanisms.
mistermann 3y ago
> Can we just label Psychology in general as pseudoscience? You sure can, and it has the nice bonus of giving psychologists a phenomenon to study: human's drive to attach pseudo-objective labels to subjective phenomena. > Pretty much all the “findings” that have been popularized recently have all failed replication. "Pretty much" is a nice ambiguous term, might that be a consequence of the underlying methodology you used to determine that fact? What was your methodology anyways?

denton-scratch 3y ago

No, we can't. Most of psychology deals with the stimuli and responses, which are empirically observable; if it's done properly, that's science. Consciousness is problematic for science, because it's intrinsically private, and not observable. Each of us knows it's there, and can observe it; but we can't share our observations, and "science" depends on sharing observations. Perhaps we need a new definition of "science", that can accomodate the private experience that each of us has, but can't share.

edgyquant 3y ago
or perhaps we stop trying to label every system of thought we want to claim is legitimate as science and leave it only for one’s we are able to apply the scientific method to

tgv 3y ago

Psychology has many bad practices, and does have a certain amount of pseudo-science in its subdomains, but as a whole it isn't. The subject exists, and there are ways of (indirectly) measuring aspects of it. > Pretty much all the “findings” that have been popularized recently have all failed replication. That's partially due to bad practices, partially to the fact that psychology is harder than physics, and partially to perverse funding mechanisms.

mistermann 3y ago

> Can we just label Psychology in general as pseudoscience? You sure can, and it has the nice bonus of giving psychologists a phenomenon to study: human's drive to attach pseudo-objective labels to subjective phenomena. > Pretty much all the “findings” that have been popularized recently have all failed replication. "Pretty much" is a nice ambiguous term, might that be a consequence of the underlying methodology you used to determine that fact? What was your methodology anyways?