Posted on 07/18/2012 6:34:28 PM PDT by Sir Napsalot
... Increasingly, the respect of science (and scientists) by the public has been dropping and a part of that reason is because the line of what science is has become fuzzy.
(snip) ... It's not to say they ('soft science') don't have value, obviously they do, but engineering also has value. It is not science. Teaching has terrific value. It is not a science. Same for mathematics and economics. Lots of fields have applied benefits and consumer marketing shows that applied psychology is darn rigorous, even though it isn't science. Why are psychologists so touchy if their offices are not in the science buildings?
Wilson seems to confuse surveys and statistics with science. ....
(Snip) Dr. Mark Changizi...replied
"I *have* complained in my writing that, although psychology is filled with lots of brilliant experiments (and, like any field, a bunch of bad ones), the interpretations of them are often ambiguous. ...which is what makes cognitive science / psychology / neuroscience enjoyable -- the furniture is easier to move around. Not because it's not science, but because it's hard -- as in "difficult to conquer" -- science. Theory is much more difficult, because it's so damned complicated."
.... I don't believe it is as cut and dried as Berezow laid out - we just had a Higgs particle discovery that did not have four of those five criteria in 1964 and it's difficult to claim those physicists were not scientists. But claiming the entire science world are 'bullies' if it hurts the feelings of psychologists by lumping them in with the humanities, as Wilson did, is not really very convincing because it appeals to emotion rather than evidence. Which is a very social science thing to do.
(Excerpt) Read more at science20.com ...
(1) Timothy Wilson, professor of psycology at University of Virginia, wrote in LA Times Stop bullying the 'soft' sciences
(2) Alex B. Berezow, a microbiologist, responded in LA Times Why psychology isn't science
the Bible didn’t say that it taught mathematics, geography, astromony, et. al. But it does reveal that it is the authority on the soul of man, which is the intellectual and the emotional qualities thereof.
Therefore I reject psychology.
After all, Whom are you to believe? Freud? Maslov? Pavlov? Jung? Perhaps Skinner? They all disagreed with each other.
psychology is a religion that would cut your head open and lobotomize you. Then they would think they did a good thing.
No Thanks.
Blessings, Bobo
"Most so-called scientists are bottle washers and button sorters."
- Robert Heinlein.
Cooks dream up recipes, test them, pass them off to other kitchens to verify the results. ;)
/johnny
The shrink is wrong.
I didn’t read past the title.
There are two kinds of science, Physics and stamp collecting.
Harvard Law: Under the most rigorously controlled conditions of pressure, temperature, humidity, and other variables, the organism will do as it damn well pleases.
IMHO, sort of covers both psychology and biology...
I still can't get over the [female] MIT biologist that went into a tizzy when then-Harvard president Larry Summers suggested that there just might be a difference between genders.
With "biologists" like that, Berezow has his work cut out for him.
I'm also of the opinion that psychology is more of an art, hence the constant lack of progress in the field.
A cute example of the crap that can be stirred up by a female was illustrated in the DILBERT comic strip in Tuesday’s papers.
Well the psychologist is just a crybaby and needs to apply a little WGAF to what the scientist thinks and my guess is the scientist is a poor scientist who tries to feel better about that by belittling anyone who is not a scientist.
Oh, it’s time for Home Economics Department to move to science section!
If you ever saw Alton Brown’s show, you’d know it belongs there.
Haha... you’re right. But, Good Eats ended a year ago.
We can all pick nits about how much of biology satisfies those criteria, and physics also. Generally, science is about explaining (most of) the world according to natural laws and psychology cannot really do that.
I am confused about what the author meant by 'science'. Is it a set of methods (like in the first paragraph), or is it a set of knowledge associated with a concept of 'natural laws'--whatever he meant by that (like in the second paragraph)?
True ‘nuf. And when we’re left with the likes of Rachael Ray, we’re back to art and not science.
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