Psychology is a form of magic, not a science -- its fundamental models of the human mind are not falsifiable.
Saturday, November 17, 2007
MORE IGNORANCE
In an otherwise fairly interesting discussion of PTSD, Grim at Blackfive writes this howler:
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Let's take radical behaviorism as an example. (If you'd prefer a different example, feel free to suggest it.) How would you design a test that could disprove its fundamental assumption -- i.e., that there is only a brain and no mind or soul -- even in theory?
For that matter, how could you disprove the opposite contention: that there is in fact a mind beyond the brain?
It's not enough to make reference to Occam's razor. It can't tell you what is true, but only what is most likely. "I can explain all mental phenomenon with only the brain, so I don't need the mind" doesn't prove or disprove the existence of a mind. It doesn't, in fact, test the existence of the mind. Your ability to explain all mental phenomena with only the brain does imply that a mind is less likely to exist than not, if you can really do it; but it isn't proof, just odds on a proposition bet.
Psychology is certainly empirical. That's not the same thing as it being scientific. If you can't apply the null hypothesis to the fundamental assumptions of the models, the models are not scientific theories.
That doesn't make them bad; they could be very useful models with a relatively high predictive value. They're just not science.
When I say that psychology is a form of magic, it's because I've been trying to find an example of a similar approach of an empirical-but-finally-unscientific model, into which generations of study have been poured by careful minds. The closest example, I think, is Chinese astrology. Many generations of scholars, the best minds of their age, devoted their lives to it. It was likewise empirical: they studied and recorded and analyzed with tremendous care and attention. They wrote libraries full of books on the subject.
We do that now with psychology. Well, what of it?
"'Because we have no lab test, the only way we can test if someone is psychotic is, we use ourselves as the measure,' said Michael Smith, a psychiatrist at the University of California at Los Angeles who studies the effects of culture and ethnicity on psychiatry. 'If it sounds unusual to us, we call it psychotic.'"
That's not science. It may sometimes be useful, or not. Either way, it's not science. As the man rightly says, there's no lab test for this stuff.
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