Your thoughts on this article about psychology.

[Monitor16807]

http://www.arachnoid.com/psychology/index.html

I was just wondering what people here thought about this article.

 

[zoobyshoe]

Right off the bat, I found the author to be a sketchy thinker:

In order to consider whether psychology is a science, we must first define our terms. It is not overarching to say that science is what separates human beings from animals, and, as time goes by and we learn more about our animal neighbors here on Earth, it becomes increasingly clear that science is all that separates humans from animals. We are learning that animals have feelings, passions, and certain rights. What animals do not have is the ability to reason, to rise above feeling.

Defining science as 'what separates humans from animals' is a very odd, and unrigorous way to define it. Even if it's true, it is at best an observation about humans vs animals, not a definition of science.

The whole that follows suffers from being an editorial rather than an essay.

 

[Number Nine]

The author doesn't seem to have anything more than a vague familiarity with the kind of research psychologists actually do; if anything, I'd say that the full extent of his familiarity amounts to pop-psychology. The author, along with several of the links at the end of the article, seem to treat "psychology" as being synonymous with "psychiatry" and "psychoanalysis", which is bizarre. He seems to have penned an entire series of articles in which he dismisses all of psychology and psychiatry as pseudoscience, and denies the existence of mental illness altogether (he actually goes on to dismiss all of psychology, sociology, economics, and anthropology).

For reasons summarized elsewhere in this article, psychology isn't guided by a coherent, falsifiable system of theories

This is strange to me. I'm a part of a lab that is conducting research on reinforcement learning, and the direction of all of our work is guided by the mechanism by which said learning is implemented by the brain, which is extremely well understood. In what way does generating extremely precise predictions based on models describing the underlying physical phenomenon not qualify as "coherent and falsifiable"?

Does research honor the null hypothesis?..

The author here devotes an entire paragraph to elevating an extremely controversial statistical practice to philosophical significance. Even if null-hypothesis testing were some sort of benchmark for scientific practice (I'm a fan of model comparison myself; to hell with the null hypothesis), the overwhelming majority of psychological research takes a null-hypothesis approach anyway, so...

Does research have the potential to change how the field is practiced?

Another few paragraphs in which the author treats "psychology" as synonymous with "clinical psychology" and "psychoanalysis". I would offer as a counter-example to the author's thesis the discovery that dopaminergic neurons in the midbrain behave like the error term in the temporal difference learning algorithm, which completely revolutionized the study of reinforcement learning in psychology, and led to the falsification of a number of extremely (at the time) popular theories of said learning.

Let's compare the foregoing to physics, a field that perfectly exemplifies the interplay of scientific research and practice. When I use a GPS receiver to find my way across the landscape, every aspect of the experience is governed by rigorously tested physical theory. The semiconductor technology responsible for the receiver's integrated circuits obeys quantum theory and materials science. The mathematics used to reduce satellite radio signals to a terrestrial position honors Einstein's relativity theories...

Good for physics. I can build you a mathematical model of decision making and reinforcement learning in the basal ganglia and frontal cortex that will accurately predict the deficits resulting from orbito-frontal injury. Is psychology a science yet?

 

[Ryan_m_b]

This link is not to a credible peer-reviewed source. This site doesn't exist as a platform to respond to anyone's personal musings, it is for the teaching of peer-reviewed science.