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> you have to ask the brain to tell you what is going on in English and then make guesses about the circuitry inside of this complex system that you have no way

> you have to ask the brain to tell you what is going on in English and then make guesses about the circuitry inside of this complex system that you have no way of verifying Ah, but this is where neurology steps in (when possible), no? There are ways of objectively observing the physical phenomena that are associated with such abstract actions after all, we just don't quite know what they mean or how exactly they fit together yet -- but that shouldn't matter because everything will still be just as correct, since we're speaking in terms of macro-level abstractions. Not knowing about atoms didn't hinder our development of insight into classical mechanics after all. > psychology is valuable without being science... It's our society's insistence that science is the only valid way of understanding the world that is the problem. See, this is odd. I think it would help a lot of people if you explained your definition of "science" a bit instead of just giving us your conclusions, because to me it feels like we're speaking different languages right now. As far as I've understood it, Science is a process (adhering to the Scientific Method), and I recognize that there exists good science and poor science, and that results can be qualitative or quantitative, but your definition of "science" seems to convolute all these different concepts into a set of arbitrarily rigid conditions. Science can be of totally bad quality + with no quantitative measurements and still be "Science". But your definition of "Science" seems to be based around the exclusion of such endeavors (hence getting reactions that link it to a negative connotation). I'm confused. I think it would be beneficial to see an elaboration on what you mean here.

foobarbazqux 13y ago
Science is the simply the process of stating testable hypotheses and testing them. "Memorizing a long number makes people want to eat cake" is a testable hypothesis, but the concluding hypothesis "we have the same pool of resources allocated to cognitive processing and willpower" is not, because we have no way to measure those things. Yes, advances in neurology might make such claims testable, at which point they'll become falsifiable, but until then the brain essentially remains a black box for which much of the speculation about its workings is outside the realm of science. As our experimental techniques get better, the number of things that we can include under the umbrella of science grows. In the end, science literally means objective (i.e. agreed upon) knowledge, and at this point we are unable to generate much objective knowledge about the inside of our heads. Subjective, experiential, and personal inquiry, via psychology, into the workings of our minds is however tremendously valuable, and it yields a different and complementary kind of knowledge. It will be interesting to see the extent to which neuroscience bridges the gap in our lifetimes.
richardjordan 13y ago
An interesting question here is the direct connection between neurology and psychology which is very weakly understood and while we all feel comfortable assuming more than just a correlation but an actual causal relationship between the two, we don't know this to anything like the degree we do with the laws of Physics. At to defining science, there is a long history of defining what is and isn't science. This isn't arbitrary. When something is dismissed as not science it's not just bias, it's because people see it as failing to meet certain criteria. That's too long to go into here, but a good starting point in your reading there would be Karl Popper. His description of scientific theories requiring the property of falsifiability, revolutionary as it was at the time, is fairly well accepted at the heart of what is thought of as science today.

foobarbazqux 13y ago

Science is the simply the process of stating testable hypotheses and testing them. "Memorizing a long number makes people want to eat cake" is a testable hypothesis, but the concluding hypothesis "we have the same pool of resources allocated to cognitive processing and willpower" is not, because we have no way to measure those things. Yes, advances in neurology might make such claims testable, at which point they'll become falsifiable, but until then the brain essentially remains a black box for which much of the speculation about its workings is outside the realm of science. As our experimental techniques get better, the number of things that we can include under the umbrella of science grows. In the end, science literally means objective (i.e. agreed upon) knowledge, and at this point we are unable to generate much objective knowledge about the inside of our heads. Subjective, experiential, and personal inquiry, via psychology, into the workings of our minds is however tremendously valuable, and it yields a different and complementary kind of knowledge. It will be interesting to see the extent to which neuroscience bridges the gap in our lifetimes.

richardjordan 13y ago

An interesting question here is the direct connection between neurology and psychology which is very weakly understood and while we all feel comfortable assuming more than just a correlation but an actual causal relationship between the two, we don't know this to anything like the degree we do with the laws of Physics. At to defining science, there is a long history of defining what is and isn't science. This isn't arbitrary. When something is dismissed as not science it's not just bias, it's because people see it as failing to meet certain criteria. That's too long to go into here, but a good starting point in your reading there would be Karl Popper. His description of scientific theories requiring the property of falsifiability, revolutionary as it was at the time, is fairly well accepted at the heart of what is thought of as science today.