I was going to sit this thread out but I'm curious about Chris' source for Jack Cohen's statement. I'm challenging that Jack might have said something like that, I just want to know the source.
-Mike Palij New York University m...@nyu.edu --------------- Original Message ---------------- On Tue, 28 Jan 2014 14:28:21 -0800, Christopher Green wrote: Here's a more recent clip of Feynman talking about "social science." http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IaO69CF5mbY&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DIaO69CF5mbY He has a point, but he also seems to come from the Ernest Rutherford school of what counts as science ("All science is physics, or it is stamp collecting."). The problem is (as I have debated many times on this forum) there is no set definition of science. Each science has its own standards of theory and evidence. For physics, the theory has to be mathematical and the measurements have to be very precise. In psychology, the theories are almost never mathematical (in part because the measurements are rarely very precise). The statistician Jacob Cohen once said (à propos of null hypothesis testing) that you're never going to get Newton's laws out of experiments that only predict, "if I stretch it, it will get longer." He's right. On the other hand, you can't fault a science for doing the best it can with the intellectual tools that it currently has available. It is one thing to complain that we don't have theories that make point-estimate predictions. It is another thing entirely to produce such theories. Putting all this together into a coherent answer about whether (which part of?) psychology is a "science" s a very difficult thing. It is not as highly developed a science as physics, to be sure. Perhaps physics is the wrong model, though. Perhaps evolutionary science is the right model instead (William James and John Dewey thought so). Perhaps we are barking up the wrong tree by modelling ourselves after other sciences. Perhaps there is another approach to science -- to the natures of theory and evidence, and the relations between them -- that will result in markedly better psychological understanding than we currently have. For over a century we have thought that we were only a decade or so from that new understanding. We haven't gotten there yet. --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: arch...@jab.org. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=33624 or send a blank email to leave-33624-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
