PART 1
>> The mind is not part of nature?
>Nope. It's a theoretical construct with no empirically measurable properties. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind%E2%80%93body_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind%E2%80%93body_problem : "The mind–body problem is a philosophical problem concerning the relationship between thought and consciousness in the human mind and body."
This is a problem because there's no obvious connection between the mind and everyday reality.
Now, I finally understand where you are coming from, but I believe it is misconceived. While the mind is indeed a complex construct, cognitive psychology does not treat it as separate from empirical reality. Modern cognitive science and psychology link the mind's activities to physical processes in the brain, measurable through tools like neuroimaging (fMRI, PET scans), electroencephalograms (EEGs), and other methods that correlate mental states with brain activity. These techniques allow researchers to observe brain regions involved in memory, perception, and decision-making, offering empirical support for the study of mental processes. While the "mind-body problem" is a philosophical issue, cognitive psychology and neuroscience work from a materialist perspective that views the mind as arising from brain activity, making it empirically approachable.
I agree that early psychology was not scientific. Psychological research has evolved significantly since René Descartes' dualism separated the mind and body as distinct entities. Yes, this view dominated early thought, yes, Fuck Freud. Freud was not a scientist. The beginning of empirical psychology actually started in the early 20th century with 'Behaviorism', led by figures like John B. Watson and B.F. Skinner, focusing strictly on observable behaviors and rejecting the study of the mind, rooted in the desire to make psychology as rigorous and objective as the natural sciences. Behaviorists argued that psychology should limit itself to measurable, external actions, drawing on the idea that only behaviors that can be observed and quantified objectively should and can be studied scientifically. They argued that the mind could not be directly observed, and thus would lead to subjective and unscientific conclusions.
For Watson and Skinner, all behavior was the result of conditioning by the environment, either treating the mind as a black box that transforms inputs and outputs, or by denying a mind at all. But by the mid-20th century the limitations of behaviorism became extremely clear. For example, although Skinner tried to explain how children learn language through reinforcement, famously Chomsky showed that theory to the door [1]. Other fields also began to highlight the inadequacies of behaviorism. The rise of computers in the 1950s and 1960s offered a powerful analogy for human cognition. Scientists began to view the mind as an information-processing system, much like a computer, capable of storing, retrieving, and manipulating information. This shift led to the emergence of cognitive psychology, which treated the mind as a complex system with its own internal rules and processes, much of which could be scientifically studied through indirect methods like reaction times, error rates, and neuroimaging. For instance, studies in memory and perception revealed that people often reconstruct memories or interpret stimuli based on prior knowledge, something behaviorism could not explain since it denied the role of internal representations. Furthermore, cognitive psychologists like George Miller and Ulric Neisser demonstrated that mental processes could be objectively studied. Miller's work on the capacity of short-term memory (his famous "7±2" paper) and Neisser's Cognitive Psychology (1967), which consolidated the field, showed that cognition involved quantifiable processes like attention, memory, and problem-solving. Another example: While most cognitive psychology of memory (for example) based theorizing on objective measures of memory (hits misses, false alarms and correct rejections under different experimental conditions, others began probing subjective reports of their memory experience along with responding yes or no when asked if they seen a stimuli before in a memory experiment, asking questions like, "How sure are you on a Likert scale", or "how visual was the memory?". These kinds of questions rely on subjective reports, but contained information with empirical external validity, like objective memory accuracy, objective increases in BOLD response within regions which from lesion studies in rats and non-human primates (and in humans with damage to those regions. Indeed the brain of infamous amnesic HM was in the freezer behind my lab a decade ago.
>> As to Popper, there is no singular definition of science ...
>This is not true. Falsifiability and empirical evidence are part of the universally accepted definition of science. This is why mathematics, as important as it is to science, is not itself accepted as a science -- like psychology, it doesn't address empirical reality.
>Carl Sagan, quoted from "The baloney detection kit" (https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/01/03/baloney-detection- https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/01/03/baloney-detection-...): "Always ask whether the hypothesis can be, at least in principle, falsified. Propositions that are untestable, unfalsifiable, are not worth much. Consider the grand idea that our Universe and everything in it is just an elementary particle—an electron, say—in a much bigger Cosmos. But if we can never acquire information from outside our Universe, is not the idea incapable of disproof? You must be able to check assertions out. Inveterate skeptics must be given the chance to follow your reasoning, to duplicate your experiments and see if they get the same result."
Popper’s criterion of falsifiability has been a cornerstone of scientific philosophy and it is important because it helps distinguish science from pseudoscience. Popper's take down of Freud makes him legend in my book. As I said earlier, Fuck Freud. However, it is important to also recognize the falsifiability is not always straightforward. Complex systems like those in biology do not easily lend themselves to clean falsification, theories are often probabilistic and deal with multifactorial causes rather than strict one to one cause-and-effect relationships. Consider a theory about how stress affects memory: testing such a theory might involve controlled experiments, but it’s often difficult to fully falsify because human and animal behavior is influenced by many variables. Yet, the predictive accuracy of models can be assessed through statistical analysis, allowing for refinement and testing of these theories without outright falsification in a Popperian sense. Moreover, science is also about confirmation within paradigms [2], and Popper's notion of falsification is often idealized beyond what is actually achievable. Broader Definitions of Science today includes concepts like cumulative evidence and refinement, explanatory power and predictive utility.
Mathematics is indeed abstract, often dealing with logical structures rather than empirical data, but psychology, especially in its modern form, does address empirical reality. Unlike mathematics, psychology relies heavily on empirical evidence to validate or falsify its hypotheses. Psychology uses behavioral proxies and neurobiological measures to ground mental processes in the physical world.
Some valid empirical questions are not testable in the Popperian sense. Theories of evolution are not, for example, at least in any useful way. Instead, a model based conception of science is required.
> Some valid empirical questions are not testable in the Popperian sense.
If by "valid" you mean "scientific", no, not true. As long as such questions cannot be tested and potentially falsified, they aren't science.
> Instead, a model based conception of science is required.
Einstein had a model for General Relativity in 1915, but the scientific world reserved judgment until it could be tested and potentially falsified. In 1919 an opportunity for a falsifiable test appeared -- an eclipse of the sun that would show the effect of space-time curvature and either validate or falsify Einstein's theory. (https://eclipse2017.nasa.gov/testing-general-relativity https://eclipse2017.nasa.gov/testing-general-relativity)
Einstein's model was interesting, but until a falsifiable test could be carried out, it was philosophical speculation. This is how science works.
I've been having this same conversation for decades -- psychologists want the status of science without the discipline of science. But that would require science to be redefined, which would dismantle the Enlightenment. Not happening.
part 2
>"Psychology is not a science, as demonstrated by examples like repressed memory."
The "repressed memory" was an embarrassing controversy, but does not negate the scientific validity of psychology as a whole. Firstly, its acceptance among psychological researchers was quite limited compared to its popularity among certain therapists and clinicians, and among "expert witnesses" in legal contexts. You attribute the dropping of repressed memory theory to external forces, but internal to the field of psychology, it was never a dominant paradigm, which indeed did not hold up to empirical scrutiny. Memory researchers like Elizabeth Loftus, a leading figure in the study of human memory, argued that memory is not a perfect recording of past events and that memories are highly malleable, subject to suggestion, and reconstruction over time. Loftus and others conducted research showing how false memories could be created, particularly through suggestive therapy techniques. For example, in controlled experiments, Loftus demonstrated that people could be made to "remember" events that never occurred, simply through suggestive questioning. Loftus's work was phenomenal[3]. Repressed memory was popular among Freudian psychoanalysts, which dominated the therapy field...but that's like blaming chemists for alchemists spreading bullshit. Again, Fuck Freud.
>"Psychology isn't a science, as shown by fads like 'refrigerator mothers' and prefrontal lobotomy."
There has been a lot that has been done wrong. These particular theories and practices were not empirically based and did not stand up to scientific scrutiny. In general the clinical psychology/psychiatry has lagged most in terms of scientific rigor, in part because they spend so much time working as a clinician and personally, I think they need to feel like they are helping their patients, and thus are prone to bias. However the autism research field is increasingly sophisticated employing neuroscientific and psychological methods. Moreover, and importantly, it is rapidly incorporating concepts of neurodiversity to temper purely medical-oriented ideology that tends to pathologize everything about autism.
>"Asperger's syndrome was abandoned because it became a popular fad, not based in science."
Look. I am a developmental psychologist at a major University who conducts autism research. I am telling you now: Asperger's syndrome was not abandoned because it was a "fad." Instead, it was reclassified under the umbrella of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in the DSM-5 to better reflect the continuum of autism-related symptoms. The decision to merge these diagnoses came after extensive scientific debate and empirical research, which demonstrated that Asperger's syndrome and other autism-related diagnoses share overlapping characteristics. This reflects the refinement of psychological diagnostic criteria based on ongoing research, rather than an outright abandonment due to a lack of scientific basis.
>"Psychology has real-world consequences because it is not a science."
Psychology indeed has real-world consequences, as do all sciences.
[1] https://chomsky.info/1967____/ https://chomsky.info/1967____/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Loftus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Loftus