Is Psychology a Science?

[Basil Fawlty]

With your help, Basil, we can bring it right back in style! You'll be the Frances Farmer of the New Millenium.Apparently that was a myth, rather like the claim that psychology is a science.

[Kamandi]

Apparently that was a myth
Much like your claims about the Holocaust, Israel, Jews, your supposed anti-racism, etc.

rather like the claim that psychology is a science.
We apply the scientific method to the study of the human psyche in so far as it admits application; consequently, psychology is a science.

[Basil Fawlty]

Much like your claims about the Holocaust, Israel, Jews, your supposed anti-racism, etc.Anti-racism is an ideological package. Not being a racist does not entail subscription to that package.
We apply the scientific method to the study of the human psyche in so far as it admits application; consequently, psychology is a science.No its not. The psyche is not a material object so how can it be the subject of the scientific method? You could apply the scientific method to the study of poetry, yet it would still not be a science.

I was hoping you might have something substantial, like, say, a response to Donald Davidson's robust challenge to the pretensions of pscyhology qua science.
Davidson's denial of the existence of any strict ‘psycho-physical’ laws follows from his view of the mental as constrained by quite general principles of rationality that do not apply, at least not in the same way, to physical descriptions: normative considerations of overall consistency and coherence, for instance, constrain our own thinking about events as physically described, but they have no purchase on physical events as such. This does not mean, of course, that there are no correlations whatsoever to be discerned between the mental and the physical, but it does mean that the correlations that can be discerned cannot be rendered in the precise, explicit and exceptionless form — in the form, that is, of strict laws — that would be required in order to achieve any reduction of mental to physical descriptions. The lack of strict laws covering events under mental descriptions is thus an insuperable barrier to any attempt to bring the mental within the framework of unified physical science.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/davidson/

[Kamandi]

Answer: 'the psyche' is a model, not a physical thing. It's an abstract construct which describes and categorizes human mental processes on a conceptual basis that experiment has demonstrated to be correlated with brain function.

Of course the scientific method can be applied to it.

[Basil Fawlty]

Answer: 'the psyche' is a model, not a physical thing. It's an abstract construct which describes and categorizes human mental processes on a conceptual basis that experiment has demonstrated to be correlated with brain function.No, see Davidson.
Your defintion of psyche is question-begging.

[Kamandi]

Davidson was a philosopher of mind, not a psychologist.

As anyone who's ever reviewed a MRI scan of the brain during cognition will verify, mental processes do in fact correlate with physical events. Exactly how the causal pathways wind is a different issue, but even Davidson doesn't deny correlation.

It's not a definition of "psyche"; it's a description of the concept of "psyche." The notion of "the psyche" as it relates to psychology is just shorthand for a catalog of mental events and processes. They can be studied scientifically as far as they can be observed and measured.

[Basil Fawlty]

Davidson was a philosopher of mind, not a psychologist.Yes, that's right and such he was investigating the conditions for the possibility of such a correlation, especially in its reductionist claims. You can't circumvent the metaphysical problems here. He pointed out severe problems which you and your colleagues ignore when they carry on with those assumptions.
And anyway, psychology is a branch of philosophy, not a science. :p
As anyone who's ever reviewed a MRI scan of the brain during cognition will verify, mental processes do in fact correlate with physical events. Exactly how the causal pathways wind is a different issue, but even Davidson doesn't deny correlation.It is assumed that mental states can be reduced to physical states.
It's not a definition of "psyche"; it's a description of the concept of "psyche."Is there a concept of body and do I have a body?
The notion of "the psyche" as it relates to psychology is just shorthand for a catalog of mental events and processes. They can be studied as far as they can be observed and measured.This characterisation is also question-begging. Do we conceive of ourselves in this way? Surely not, for these are conceptual descriptions that presuppose what is to be demonstrated here. Its somewhat like worrying about the mind-body problem, you first have to accept the Cartesian premisses that generate the problem in the first place.
I'm also suggesting that the conceptual scheme outlined above is a misdescription of the phenomena.

[Kodos]

Generally not, when based on hard empirical evidence it is.

[Ahknaton]

I remember reading some article a year or two ago that claimed that neuroscientists had discovered a specific mechanism in the brain that was responsible for projection or some other Freudian concept.

I couldn't find it via Google, but here's an article on transference:

http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20070609/bob10.asp

[Kamandi]

In fact, Scientific American promoted claims to that effect based on MRI data in an article titled "The Return Of Freud" around 2001, IIRC.

[Kamandi]

Yes, that's right and such he was investigating the conditions for the possibility of suc h a correlation, especially in its reductionist claims.
He's examining it from an abstract philosophical point of view that psychologists aren't generally interested in as research scientists.

Psychology is essentially about "what" people think; ie, their mental lives on a practical level. They aren't typically concerned with hypothetical questions of "how" thought is possible at all.

You can't circumvent the metaphysical problems here. He pointed out severe problems which you and your colleagues ignore when they carry on with those assumptions.
They're problems for philosophers and not psychologists.

And anyway, psychology is a branch of philosophy, not a science. :p
Psychology hasn't widely been considered a branch of philosophy since William James.

Most research psychologists do nothing but extrapolate conclusions from empirical data derived through experiment. Some theorists like Lacan or Rollo May might be more akin to philosophy, though.

Even those theoreticians, however, usually base their speculations on observation of actual subjects, unlike a philosopher who is only bound by their imagination and powers of logic.

It is assumed that mental states can be reduced to physical states.
It's only presumed that a correlation exists, not necessarily an identy between the two.

Some explanation would have to be given for the measurable phenomenon of, say, pharmaceutical impact on mood or the effect of music on endorphin or adrenaline production.

Whether that entails a purely materialist conception of mind or some kind of parallelism is not usually a issue debated by psychologists, but rather philosophers of mind.

[Felix the Cat]

I'm fairly ignorant of this subject - what (if any ) role does the study of biochemistry play in psychology?

[Kamandi]

Biochemistry is today considered to be most probable physiological basis for psychological phenomena.

[Geist]

I'm not sure. Psychology seems to suffer from a disproportionate inability to stick to its remedies. The number of conflicting reports seems to confuse the general public who are the apparent recipients of the knowledge of this discipline. As for its merits as a science well its an unexamined science in terms of its basic principles; something Husserl was discussing about eighty years ago (psychologism, the enigma of subjectivity). As for mapping the mind...well that is rightly called cognitive science although I'm not sure psychology fits if we are to be honest: the psyche is out of reach: unrepresentable even to machines although we may pinpoint some flux in the mind with emotion etc.

Give them drugs: who will write the history of nutrition (Nietzsche...the psychologists philosopher...).

[Kamandi]

While theoretical approaches like psychoanalysis or gestalt might not fit the narrowest conceptions of "science," I think it's pretty clear that experimental psychology does. It only deals with what can be measured.

[Geist]

Well psychoanalysis is almost certainly not a science. It has no tangible content as far as I can see. Maybe it has vastly progressed from what I know of it through Jung or Freud but both were far out. Jung was bordering on mystic. Fun, but highly unscientific. As for Lacan and his cohorts it just seems too much of an ask.

I'm still concerned about all the unresolved issues at work at the basis of psychology, but there is the practical concern of helping people with mental illness etc.

It is probably a mix: a humanistic science in the old style.

[Felix the Cat]

The problem with psychology (the same is true of economics) is that the subjects of the 'experiments' have an annoying habit of reading psychology (or economics) journals, and modifying their behaviour as a result - 'laws' hold only until the moment they're discovered

[Kamandi]

Psychology is a subjective science. It doesn't admit of deterministic laws like classical mechanics.

The laws of psychology are more like the laws of statistical mechanics.

[1-800]

Yes, research psychology certainly is. It does, however, seem to occasionally suffer from physics envy (as do sociology, biology, etc).

It seems, at least from my layman's perspective, that psychology has also jettisoned much useless junk over the past three decades.

I had a part-time job my freshman year working the phone for the psychology department at my university -- calling people and asking them personal questions. That was fun.