>"Psychology is not a science, as demonstrated by examples like repressed memory."
The "repressed memory" was an embarrassing controversy, but does not negate the scientific validity of psychology as a whole. Firstly, its acceptance among psychological researchers was quite limited compared to its popularity among certain therapists and clinicians, and among "expert witnesses" in legal contexts. You attribute the dropping of repressed memory theory to external forces, but internal to the field of psychology, it was never a dominant paradigm, which indeed did not hold up to empirical scrutiny. Memory researchers like Elizabeth Loftus, a leading figure in the study of human memory, argued that memory is not a perfect recording of past events and that memories are highly malleable, subject to suggestion, and reconstruction over time. Loftus and others conducted research showing how false memories could be created, particularly through suggestive therapy techniques. For example, in controlled experiments, Loftus demonstrated that people could be made to "remember" events that never occurred, simply through suggestive questioning. Loftus's work was phenomenal[3]. Repressed memory was popular among Freudian psychoanalysts, which dominated the therapy field...but that's like blaming chemists for alchemists spreading bullshit. Again, Fuck Freud.
>"Psychology isn't a science, as shown by fads like 'refrigerator mothers' and prefrontal lobotomy."
There has been a lot that has been done wrong. These particular theories and practices were not empirically based and did not stand up to scientific scrutiny. In general the clinical psychology/psychiatry has lagged most in terms of scientific rigor, in part because they spend so much time working as a clinician and personally, I think they need to feel like they are helping their patients, and thus are prone to bias. However the autism research field is increasingly sophisticated employing neuroscientific and psychological methods. Moreover, and importantly, it is rapidly incorporating concepts of neurodiversity to temper purely medical-oriented ideology that tends to pathologize everything about autism.
>"Asperger's syndrome was abandoned because it became a popular fad, not based in science."
Look. I am a developmental psychologist at a major University who conducts autism research. I am telling you now: Asperger's syndrome was not abandoned because it was a "fad." Instead, it was reclassified under the umbrella of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in the DSM-5 to better reflect the continuum of autism-related symptoms. The decision to merge these diagnoses came after extensive scientific debate and empirical research, which demonstrated that Asperger's syndrome and other autism-related diagnoses share overlapping characteristics. This reflects the refinement of psychological diagnostic criteria based on ongoing research, rather than an outright abandonment due to a lack of scientific basis.
>"Psychology has real-world consequences because it is not a science."
Psychology indeed has real-world consequences, as do all sciences.
> The "repressed memory" was an embarrassing controversy
It was not an "embarrassing controversy". Innocent people were thrown in jail based on the imaginary claims of witnesses -- then jurors, then judges -- who wrongly thought psychology -- and repressed memory therapy -- have the status of science. They do not.
After any number of cases, for example involving virgins reporting imaginary rapes, the legal system finally realized they were being played and the innocent were freed.
The problem was that people still granted psychology the status of science, as late as the mid-1990s, including the legal system. Not any more.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repressed_memory) : "Repressed memory is a controversial, and largely scientifically discredited, psychiatric phenomenon which involves an inability to recall autobiographical information, usually of a traumatic or stressful nature." [ ... ] "Subsequent accusations based on such "recovered memories" led to substantial harm of individuals implicated as perpetrators, sometimes resulting in false convictions and years of incarceration."
So, according to you, these were actually years of "embarrassing" incarceration of innocents. Suit yourself.
> Look. I am a developmental psychologist at a major University ...
> Asperger's syndrome was not abandoned because it was a "fad."
That is exactly what happened. In a nutshell:
* Hans Asperger identified it in 1944.
* Psychologists later identified Isaac Newton, Thomas Jefferson, Albert Einstein and Bill Gates (among others) as suffering from it.
* This roster of famous "sufferers" made the diagnosis popular among young people (sometimes also their parents), many of whom sought the diagnosis for themselves.
* Overdiagnosis resulted in what is now described as an epidemic (https://time.com/archive/6641066/the-end-of-an-epidemic/) of Asperger's diagnoses involving people with a modicum of acting ability and a desire to have the same mental illness as Albert Einstein and Bill Gates.
* In response, psychologists folded the diagnosis into a larger category with a much less desirable name, with the very desirable effect of dramatically reducing the rate of diagnosis. This happened due to public perceptions -- not science, not clinical presentation, but public perceptions.
>>"Psychology has real-world consequences because it is not a science."
> Psychology indeed has real-world consequences, as do all sciences.
With one critical distinction -- psychology is not a science. This is true because it lacks a foundation in testable, falsifiable theories. Astrology has theories, the theories fail any reasonable test, so Astrology is a failed science. Psychology has no such theories, so it can't be undermined by falsifiable tests of its claims.
> Now, I finally understand where you are coming from, but I believe it is misconceived. While the mind is indeed a complex construct, cognitive psychology does not treat it as separate from empirical reality.
It doesn't matter what psychologists believe, it is all about what can be proven scientifically.
The reason for the central role of the mind-body problem in philosophy is because scientists and thinkers know them to be distinct -- the mind and the body lie in separate, non-overlapping domains.
The mind is not a physical organ, it is a philosophical construct, therefore it cannot be studied scientifically. Were this not true, there would be no "mind-body problem." But there is, and it is central to psychology's problems. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind%E2%80%93body_problem : "It is not obvious how the concept of the mind and the concept of the body relate." That's true, and this issue would need to be conclusively resolved to turn psychology into a science.
Every scientifically trained person, from Freud to the present, who has studied human psychology, has reluctantly come to the conclusion that psychology is not a science.
In his book "Entwurf einer Psychologie" (1895), Freud said, “Why I cannot fit it together [the organic and the psychological] I have not even begun to fathom.” Knowing that this book would ruin his relations with therapists, Freud ordered that the book not be published during his life.
The published views of many other scientists are available to you if you were curious, all of whom come to the same conclusion.
Under contract to the APA, Sigmund Koch created a six-volume tome (1963) meant to evaluate psychology's scientific standing. Koch concluded, "The hope of a psychological science became indistinguishable from the fact of psychological science. The entire subsequent history of psychology can be seen as a ritualistic endeavor to emulate the forms of science in order to sustain the delusion that it already is a science. The truth is that psychological statements which describe human behavior or which report results from tested research can be scientific. However, when there is a move from describing human behavior to explaining it there is also a move from science to opinion."
In case that quote was lost to you, Koch is saying that psychological measurements follow scientific standards, until it's time to craft a theory, then things fall apart. This is why so many psychologists think psychology is a science -- its has a superficial similarity to science, until it's time to try to explain, to craft a theory.
In a now-famous lecture (1974), Nobel Prizewinner Richard P. Feynman said, "I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are examples of what I would like to call Cargo Cult Science. In the South Seas there is a Cargo Cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he’s the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. *So I call these things Cargo Cult Science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.*"
Feynman's point is that the appearance of science isn't enough, there must be testable, falsifiable theories, but that is not possible when the thing being studied is not part of nature.
Former APA president Ronald F. Levant (2005) began a campaign to move psychologists toward evidence-based practice, saying, "Some APA members have asked me why I have chosen to sponsor an APA Presidential Initiative on Evidence-Based Practice (EBP) in Psychology, expressing fears that the results might be used against psychologists by managed-care companies and malpractice lawyers." His proposal fell flat on the ground that psychology couldn't possibly adopt EBP -- no scientific evidence, because no science.
Theodore Insel, director of the NIMH for 13 years, regularly exhorted psychologists to adopt science-based standards, finally giving up and resigning in 2015. Insel later wrote an article for Psychology Today in which he explained how 20 billion dollars of science funds were wasted, because ... wait for it ... psychology is not a science. (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/sacramento-street-ps...)
All this information -- and much more -- would be available to you if you were willing to critically test your own views ... like a scientist.
You can't even prove the mind exists. So maybe it doesn't, and the foundation for all of your dualism collapses in on itself.
All you really have is the emergent behavior of all that brain matter, and the fact that such things can be given description at various levels of abstraction.
Popperian science is completely unequipped to deal with the brain, or complex, evolving, particularistic systems generally, including evolution. You need a model based science instead. You are completely incorrect that Popperian science is the universally accepted definition of science. It's not true in the philosophy of science, and its not even true among scientists. It's merely a first pass description of a broad mechanism of knowledge generation that is used in many fields of science.
> You are completely incorrect that Popperian science is the universally accepted definition of science.
Please do some research on this topic -- falsifiability is an essential cornerstone of modern science. Required are testability, empirical evidence, falsifiability -- and falsifiability is the most important.
From Carl Sagan's "Baloney Detection Kit" (https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/01/03/baloney-detection-...) : "Always ask whether the hypothesis can be, at least in principle, falsified. Propositions that are untestable, unfalsifiable are not worth much."
-- Thousands of similar references from the world of science --
This is not a philosophical tea party -- there are the rules of science.
You have not ever specified how a model of memory, for example, cannot be falsified. You just state that it cannot be falsified.
If you are going to suggest "research" to me then provide research grade materials, not pop-sci. Your arguments constantly appeal to authority by either science fiction authors, pop science writers, or to a particular scientists making a declaration (e.g. a physicist) who I doubt know the least thing about modern psychological research. Its weak evidence, and its not in good faith.
You say neuroscience does not rely on the mind-problem, but your claim that psychological research does (and cannot escape it) is based on arguments like "its self-evident that the mind exists, therefore", without ever finishing that thought, constantly presuming your conclusion, constantly ignoring my arguments about modern psychological research.
I will try one more time.
The dualist mind body is irrelevant to psychology. Our theories are about behavior. Measurable behavior. We construct hypotheses about how those behaviors might arise via the body and brain, test whether it is a valid model, how much explanatory power it has, and in what situation it fails to explain behavioral data. We then revise our models.
We use measures more than surveys, we use neuroimaging, physiological measures, we record neuron spikes, to build out our understanding of the how cognition occurs. Moreover, there is no real division between neuroscience and psychology today. Psychologists work with individuals who work with neurons on a plate, with rodents, with molecular biologists. You may say that only individuals who work on cells are scientists, but that's bullshit because, for example, when you put a couple hundreds of neurons together in a network, they dynamics become incredibly complicated and emergent, and network level descriptions of the activity become important in understanding how each individual part works. But the whole is more than the sum of its parts. No really. It is. Its been shown over and over using information theory in synthetic networks. And, in any case, cells are incredibly complex, and so their behaviors get described with heuristics, with probabilities.
Moreover, you must consider the work at multiple levels of description together before you make a judgement about whether its science. Science is not what one lab does, but how the whole endeavor works. Psychologists work at a course level of description, but their work has repeatedly informed the work of scientists working at a lower level. There is literally a ton of two-way information flow between those working at a very low level and those working at a high level.
We have a concept that we scientists use in this field: converging evidence. Converging evidence is not one study, but whole bodies of work from across multiple levels of analysis. You may not think that purely behavioral psychologists would be part of this endeavor, but they really really are a huge part of neuroscience progress. We are not separate. Psychologists are neuroscientists, helping knowledge converge on understanding the brain.
You can think of it as forest for trees analogy. Or in gradient descent, how sometimes considering a larger breadth, or lower resolution, helps avoid getting stuck in a local minima. Sometimes the wide perspective helps you make sense of what you are seeing in local data. So please spend some time thinking about how psychology works, not as a separate field but as an integral part of a larger field that together is moving forward on understanding the brain.
Your current view of my field is archaic, confused, and frankly incredibly naive.
> You have not ever specified how a model of memory, for example, cannot be falsified.
Wait ... did I read that right? It's up to psychology's critics to identify unfalsifiable claims, as well as face the classic impossibility of a negative proof, which BTW is a classic logical error? I imagine that psychologists would want to use positive evidence to shore up the foundations of their own field, by for example demonstrating the connection between a memory model and its biological foundation.
On that topic, the recent drosophila study (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/scientists-unveil-...), in which this tiny creature's entire brain was mapped in detail, is likely to be at least as revolutionary as the researchers claim, for the reason that nothing is left out. No guesswork -- memory, function, sensory connections -- simple, yes, but complete.
It's noteworthy that this work relies entirely on biology, with no role for the idea of a mind. Eventually this approach will see psychology wither away, as did alchemy, once more scientific approaches became possible.
In fact, now that I think about it, this neuroscience disregard for drosophila's mind ought to inspire criticism from psychologists on the ground that, according to psychology, the mind is an essential component of any valid study of brain function.
> The dualist mind body is irrelevant to psychology.
Of course it is. Because if this were not so, the field would collapse. The connection between mind and body is an article of faith among psychologists -- faith, not evidence.
> Your current view of my field is archaic, confused, and frankly incredibly naive.
That's quite the argument. Medieval and heartfelt.
Now I have a question. Given the drosophila study -- a complete survey of a small creature's brain in which the function of all the elements is known -- how many years will be required for the nervous system of a larger creature, and eventually a human being, to be mapped and characterized in such a way that a falsifiable, biological basis for behavior is demonstrated, one that does away with the very idea of a mind as a temporary and unnecessary crutch?
Given that inevitability, what will happen to psychology?
I also wonder about this, a question having nothing really to do with our discussion -- will we fully map the human nervous system as to form and function, using increasing amounts of computer power, or will AI take over society beforehand, also relying on increased computer power? Which will happen first? Will we exhibit the wisdom required to curb AI, prevent it from overwhelming our lame biological processors?
This last really is an open question, unlike the abandonment of psychology, which seems a foregone conclusion.
Mutual Information can be decomposed into redundant and synergistic components, where here synergy means there is more information considering two parts together than just summing the information in each part. T
If we cannot agree that the mind is materialistic then there is no way forward for us, except to note that since you earlier stated that you think basic neuroscience has a chance, then the mind body problem is not that important after all.
> If we cannot agree that the mind is materialistic then there is no way forward for us, except to note that since you earlier stated that you think basic neuroscience has a chance, then the mind body problem is not that important after all.
On the contrary, aware of the importance of the mind-body problem, neuroscience disregards the concept of a mind, focusing instead on the brain and the nervous system. This doesn't address the mind-body problem, it ignores it as a pointless digression and a waste of time.
To the extent that neuroscience addresses the idea of a mind, it is as an obstacle to progress. When I first studied neuroscience, as a young student I would sometimes refer to the mind, at which point my professor would reply, "The what? Please explain." His goal was to address and dismiss the mind as soon and as conclusively as possible, so we could move on to more productive topics. You and I have exactly the same problem, for the same reason.
This is not to disparage the productive activities of psychological therapists -- I think I've made that clear in this conversation -- only to say it's not science.
Consider this example -- let's say I perform a study of astrology. I create a reliable survey quantifying the various astrological signs. My article accurately tells the reader how many Geminis and Tauruses there are in the population, with much interviewing and an impressive P-factor, sufficient to assure publication. It's a solid scientific result by any measure.
Now the question -- does my entirely valid, scientific, astrology survey make astrology itself science? The answer is no, because my astrology result doesn't test or potentially falsify astrology's foundational theories.
Astrologers will insist that this valid, fully scientific astrology study means astrology is itself scientific -- never mind that it doesn't test astrology's foundational theories and claims. But this is obviously false -- only successful tests of those foundational theories could raise astrology to the status of science.
Psychology has the same problem as astrology, with the important difference that, unlike astrology, psychology doesn't have testable, falsifiable foundational theories. There are plenty of valid, scientific psychology studies with impressive P-factors ... but they do not, and cannot, address testable, falsifiable foundational psychology theories, because the latter do not exist.
Its easy to show that astrology's basic claims -- that our lives are ruled by the positions of stars and planets -- fail any objective tests, and therefore astrology is pseudoscience. But this is not possible for psychology, only because psychologists know better than to make testable, falsifiable claims about how and why the mind affects the body.
There are any number of studies that show a mind stimulus and a body response -- reliable and repeatable -- but no explanation for the connection between the two. That would require falsifiable, empirical psychological theories that explain how the mind affects the body, and more important, why. Indeed, a psychologist who offered such a theory would be expelled from the profession.
>"Psychology is not a science, as demonstrated by examples like repressed memory."
The "repressed memory" was an embarrassing controversy, but does not negate the scientific validity of psychology as a whole. Firstly, its acceptance among psychological researchers was quite limited compared to its popularity among certain therapists and clinicians, and among "expert witnesses" in legal contexts. You attribute the dropping of repressed memory theory to external forces, but internal to the field of psychology, it was never a dominant paradigm, which indeed did not hold up to empirical scrutiny. Memory researchers like Elizabeth Loftus, a leading figure in the study of human memory, argued that memory is not a perfect recording of past events and that memories are highly malleable, subject to suggestion, and reconstruction over time. Loftus and others conducted research showing how false memories could be created, particularly through suggestive therapy techniques. For example, in controlled experiments, Loftus demonstrated that people could be made to "remember" events that never occurred, simply through suggestive questioning. Loftus's work was phenomenal[3]. Repressed memory was popular among Freudian psychoanalysts, which dominated the therapy field...but that's like blaming chemists for alchemists spreading bullshit. Again, Fuck Freud.
>"Psychology isn't a science, as shown by fads like 'refrigerator mothers' and prefrontal lobotomy."
There has been a lot that has been done wrong. These particular theories and practices were not empirically based and did not stand up to scientific scrutiny. In general the clinical psychology/psychiatry has lagged most in terms of scientific rigor, in part because they spend so much time working as a clinician and personally, I think they need to feel like they are helping their patients, and thus are prone to bias. However the autism research field is increasingly sophisticated employing neuroscientific and psychological methods. Moreover, and importantly, it is rapidly incorporating concepts of neurodiversity to temper purely medical-oriented ideology that tends to pathologize everything about autism.
>"Asperger's syndrome was abandoned because it became a popular fad, not based in science."
Look. I am a developmental psychologist at a major University who conducts autism research. I am telling you now: Asperger's syndrome was not abandoned because it was a "fad." Instead, it was reclassified under the umbrella of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in the DSM-5 to better reflect the continuum of autism-related symptoms. The decision to merge these diagnoses came after extensive scientific debate and empirical research, which demonstrated that Asperger's syndrome and other autism-related diagnoses share overlapping characteristics. This reflects the refinement of psychological diagnostic criteria based on ongoing research, rather than an outright abandonment due to a lack of scientific basis.
>"Psychology has real-world consequences because it is not a science."
Psychology indeed has real-world consequences, as do all sciences.
[1] https://chomsky.info/1967____/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Loftus