RE: When will psychology finally be recognized as a pseudoscience?
May 16, 2021 at 5:19 am
(This post was last modified: May 16, 2021 at 5:40 am by Belacqua.)
(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.
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.
