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Just because a field sprinkles numbers around doesn't make it a hard science. By that definition, marketing research is a hard science. What is psychology's un

by jquery 14y ago

Just because a field sprinkles numbers around doesn't make it a hard science. By that definition, marketing research is a hard science. What is psychology's unifying theory? Biology has evolution, physics has the standard model. Psychology has, what? Please, do enlighten me.

ajb 14y ago
A unifying theory is not a requirement for something to be a science. Physics was a science before the standard model.
- jquery 14y ago
  You're mixing terms. Nobody is saying psychology doesn't use scientific methods. They are arguing it is not a hard science. The hard science version of psychology is called neuroscience. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_and_soft_science http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_and_soft_science Psychology gave up its efforts to become a hard science when it gave up trying to explain behavior from its roots in the brain, and moved into the realm of observing behavior and reporting correlations.
  - emini_guy 14y ago
    >Psychology gave up its efforts to become a hard science when it gave up trying to explain behavior from its roots in the brain, and moved into the realm of observing behavior and reporting correlations. Well, that's was astronomy was doing all the time before Newton. Does it mean it was not a hard science? Psychology is doing the best it can do. It may simply never be a hard science. It is not now to most people, myself included. I think it is not a hard science because the human nature is too complex to be investigated in a simple manner. Psychologists are aware of it and they refuse to use simplistic models. Neuroscience is much simpler. It studies the brain, not the human personality that can have many layers.
  - tedks 14y ago
    From that article: """ Philosophers and sociologists of science attempting to identify measurable correlates of perceived disciplinary 'hardness' have been unable to account for the distinction using these systematic, theoretical characteristics.[10] I """
- emini_guy 14y ago
  Good point. In fact, the standard model of particle physics is hardly a complete unifying theory. Far from it. What's worse, the more all-encompassing theory of fundamental interactions, M-theory, seems to indicate that we may need to rely on several theories to describe the deeper reality, which is not unlike in psychology where we also don't have a unifying picture, but several pictures of human nature. I say so as a physicist. It's easy to bash psychology, but it's important to be realistic about what you can really expect from it. I don't consider psychology to be a particularly hard science at all, but I don't think it should be dismissed as a non-scientific field.
tedks 14y ago
The closest analogue is probably connectionism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connectionism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connectionism But then, psychology has existed for about a hundred years; physics has existed since the Greeks. "Hard" science is a useless distinction, I think. I've never heard a useful experimental procedure that can distinguish between the two. Yours in particular is very overconstrained; I don't know of a "unifying theory" for astronomy, geology, oceanography, or computer science, all of which are in my university's "college of mathematical and natural sciences," which are all presumably "hard."

by jquery 14y ago

ajb 14y ago

A unifying theory is not a requirement for something to be a science. Physics was a science before the standard model.

jquery 14y ago
You're mixing terms. Nobody is saying psychology doesn't use scientific methods. They are arguing it is not a hard science. The hard science version of psychology is called neuroscience. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_and_soft_science http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_and_soft_science Psychology gave up its efforts to become a hard science when it gave up trying to explain behavior from its roots in the brain, and moved into the realm of observing behavior and reporting correlations.
- emini_guy 14y ago
  >Psychology gave up its efforts to become a hard science when it gave up trying to explain behavior from its roots in the brain, and moved into the realm of observing behavior and reporting correlations. Well, that's was astronomy was doing all the time before Newton. Does it mean it was not a hard science? Psychology is doing the best it can do. It may simply never be a hard science. It is not now to most people, myself included. I think it is not a hard science because the human nature is too complex to be investigated in a simple manner. Psychologists are aware of it and they refuse to use simplistic models. Neuroscience is much simpler. It studies the brain, not the human personality that can have many layers.
- tedks 14y ago
  From that article: """ Philosophers and sociologists of science attempting to identify measurable correlates of perceived disciplinary 'hardness' have been unable to account for the distinction using these systematic, theoretical characteristics.[10] I """
emini_guy 14y ago
Good point. In fact, the standard model of particle physics is hardly a complete unifying theory. Far from it. What's worse, the more all-encompassing theory of fundamental interactions, M-theory, seems to indicate that we may need to rely on several theories to describe the deeper reality, which is not unlike in psychology where we also don't have a unifying picture, but several pictures of human nature. I say so as a physicist. It's easy to bash psychology, but it's important to be realistic about what you can really expect from it. I don't consider psychology to be a particularly hard science at all, but I don't think it should be dismissed as a non-scientific field.

tedks 14y ago

The closest analogue is probably connectionism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connectionism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connectionism But then, psychology has existed for about a hundred years; physics has existed since the Greeks. "Hard" science is a useless distinction, I think. I've never heard a useful experimental procedure that can distinguish between the two. Yours in particular is very overconstrained; I don't know of a "unifying theory" for astronomy, geology, oceanography, or computer science, all of which are in my university's "college of mathematical and natural sciences," which are all presumably "hard."