RE: When will psychology finally be recognized as a pseudoscience?
May 16, 2021 at 8:31 pm
(This post was last modified: May 16, 2021 at 8:41 pm by polymath257.)
(May 14, 2021 at 10:09 am)John 6IX Breezy Wrote:(May 14, 2021 at 8:17 am)polymath257 Wrote: "Tade-offs in Choice' and 'The Cultural Foundation of Human Memory', and 'The Origins and Psychology of Human Cooperation' are the most likely candidates based on the abstracts. The one you mention seems to be the least alchemic.
My next question would be, what about them seemed pseudoscientific to you? And I suppose we could narrow down on the one Nudger linked to if you want to be specific.
Not so much pseudoscientific, but pre-scientific. There is an important data collecting aspect and the beginnings of theorizing, but it seems like there is little actual testing and rejection of hypotheses based on those tests.
(May 16, 2021 at 5:19 am)Belacqua Wrote:(May 14, 2021 at 10:09 am)John 6IX Breezy Wrote: My next question would be, what about them seemed pseudoscientific to you? And I suppose we could narrow down on the one Nudger linked to if you want to be specific.
I don't think he's going to answer this. The studies may or may not be good ones, but based just on the abstracts there's no reason to call them pseudoscientific. They aren't going to be as quantifiable and as cut-and-dried as some areas of science, but that doesn't mean they're pseudo.
The analogy to alchemy is too simple, and breaks down pretty much immediately. Alchemy is used here just as a symbol for the thing that came before the thing we like. It was supposedly based on bad methods, while the thing we like is based on good methods. That's a caricature.
I don't think we can make any judgement about the papers in that journal until we see the methodologies used. That's what determines whether they're sufficiently scientific or not. Not the abstract or the fact that they seem to be dealing with unquantifiable topics.
And insulting the one about the cultural foundations of human memory is particularly narrow-minded. We all know that memory is extremely unreliable, edited and constructed over time. We can remember things that never happened or forget things that did. And all of this is -- to a large degree -- influenced by what our culture teaches us. So that is a fascinating and probably important field of research. I'm sure the paper doesn't settle anything big about the issue once and for all, but very few scientific papers do that in any field. Perhaps certain purists will insist that until researchers can explain memory completely through chemistry and physics no research about it will be valuable, but I think that's a category error, as well as incurious.
The stage of alchemy was when a LOT of basic methods were developed and new instruments were formed. A tremendous amount of data was collected and even a fair amount of theorizing. But it was ultimately not scientific because it didn't rely on the testing of its hypotheses and using those tests to modify theories as needed.
it isn't just the religious mumbo jumbo that made alchemy pre-scientific.
In regard to the paper on cultural differences in memory, what actual methods were used? What data was collected to test which hypotheses? I can see the *topic* being very interesting, although close to impossible to collect the relevant data. it would also take a team of hopefully multilingual researchers collecting and tabulating the data across several different cultures to a precision that I doubt anyone can yet do in any single culture as yet. Given the scale of the described article, it is NOWHERE close to being able to even start to address the relevant issues *unless* it is picking up from another large scale study that covers that material.
Sort of like trying to do chemistry prior to having good methods for dealing with purity and measurements.