Reading my comment again, I see I made the mistake of addressing both the philosophy of science and the semantic aspect of the field of study called psychology

Reading my comment again, I see I made the mistake of addressing both the philosophy of science and the semantic aspect of the field of study called psychology in the same thought, and gave neither subject proper elaboration for the full-fledged discussion this thread has turned into. On the first point, I was addressing the fact that some areas of research within psychology are amenable to objective, empirical observation, whereas others are not. I was not defending the philosophical grounds for classifying the entire field of psychology as scientific. I realize that even the "hard" subfields of psychology do not necessarily stand up to certain philosophies of science in the way that physics does. But I am a pragmatist. The scientific method, to me, is systematic observation and reasoning about the world that produces useful results[1]. Psychology would more accurately be called "academic study" of behavior, or something like that, but I feel "science" is a term that can be used in everyday language more loosely than in a strict philosophical argument, which I hadn't intended to be making. Just like when a scientist says "the Higgs Boson exists" when they should really say "evidence suggests at 5-sigma there is a subatomic particle with a mass of approximately 125 GeV." It's semantics, and that's where our disagreement starts. I concede, philosophically, you are correct about what is or isn't science. On the second point, I believe a major problem with "psychology" is that it is too big of an umbrella term. That is why I defend its nuances against criticisms of "psychology is not legitimate science." >That claim is completely falsified by the recovered memory therapy debacle of the 1990s... For you to "completely falsify" the claim that psychological inquiry has increased human well-being because there are examples of people getting something wrong is bullshit, and I think you know that if you give it a second thought. I won't claim implementation of mistaken (due to it's non-scientific nature) psychological understanding never does harm, but on net, our understanding of psychology is absolutely beneficial in many domains, even if you don't want to call it science. [1] I would include, of course, production of knowledge that does not have immediate application.