is psychology a science essay

is psychology a science essay

The Scientific Status of Psychology: A Comprehensive Analysis

1. Introduction to the Debate: Is Psychology a Science?

The debate over the scientific character of psychology is old and long-standing. Undoubtedly, the statement of the issue itself derives from a variety of sociopolitical and, more generally, philosophical antecedents that are as complex as numerous. Though philosophers of ancient as well as of medieval and Renaissance times discussed ideas and intuitions, which also deal with our matter, it was only in the wake of the scientific revolution that some questions pertinent to the fragile territory at the intersection of common sense understandings of human actions, artificial artifacts, and experienced phenomena became more and more precisely formulated. The scientific conception of the universe, here meaning human knowledge about the world in general, was extended to cover, because of the successes of a certain variety of mathematical and experimental methodologies in the investigation of the physical universe, all areas of knowledge.

In this chapter, we offer a comprehensive analysis of psychology’s scientific status by examining the issue from three methodologically relativistic perspectives, namely, Simple Kuhnian Relativism, the Dual Nature of Methodology Relativism, and Critical Methodology Relativism. Being methodologically relativistic, we do not take sides with any of those four well-known extreme positions – positivism, critical theory, post-modernism, or clinical pragmatism. Rather, far from aiming at confronting those positions, each of these meta-positions – by a sort of “absorbing” the four mentioned “ends” – specifically seeks to mediate between them. This both allows a better understanding of their presuppositions and foundations and allows for the integration of their most problematic aspects as it tries to further the settling down of the “science war” in such a field of knowledge as psychology. It is our contention that having again a ‘reasonable’ position on these matters might benefit both teachers and students of the very diverse areas of psychology.

2. Key Characteristics of Science and Their Application to Psychology

Interest in the characteristics of scientific inquiry in general, regardless of the subject matter of the inquiry, has long been a concern of philosophers and historians. Some discussions focus on the problem, “How does scientific change occur, and how should a community best manage it?” Others are limited to a particular population – for example, the hard or soft sciences; the natural, biological, or medical disciplines. A subset of the latter population examines the science of some specific discipline, like psychology. Many of these narrower analyses pertain to the philosophy, methodology, history, and sociology of psychology. How scientific is cognitive science, and in particular psychology?

Scientific claims of all sorts have been augmented by examination of scientific characteristics of activities typically considered scientific. Most criteria suggested to date for being “scientific” or having the characteristics of science have proved to be valid only for some specialized activities encapsulated within the broader descriptor “scientific.” Most psychologists believe that psychology is a science, yet there are many competing conceptions of what a science is. This chapter summarizes some of the characteristics that are widely agreed upon as central in the current philosophy of science and suggests how well psychology measures up to these characteristics.

3. Challenges and Controversies in Establishing Psychology as a Science

Another strength of early natural sciences is that they conceptualize particular entities as belonging to mutually exclusive categories. But most scientists involved in the study of cognition or motivation have accepted phenomena exhibiting the logical inconsistency of being both unconditional and conditional, and many very influential psychologists have developed abstract personality theories that exhibit the illogical characteristics of encompassing all members of a particular group while at the same time categorizing members in a mutually exclusive personality style. Finally, while astrophysicists are willing to wait for the invention of ever more sensitive instruments to study new stars, most psychologists do not have the patience to adhere to strict methodological rules of research that would preclude finding the kinds of certainties they desire.

Over time, psychology has developed a variety of strengths and weaknesses that were not typical of the natural sciences when they were undergoing similar growing pains several hundred years ago. One strength of many natural sciences is that they deal with entities that are particular and not generic, but most mainstream psychologists have, at least in principle, directed the construction of general, abstract theories of family resemblance based on groupings of particular entities. Predominantly, the response of natural scientists as they develop specialized techniques and instruments to study minute particularities of their entities has been to limit the generality of their scientific conclusions.

4. Empirical Evidence Supporting Psychology as a Science

The concept of semiosis has been constructed at the very foundation of many natural and anthropic sciences in a formal way. One of the main tasks of the present investigation is to construct its representation on the base of the currently developed experimental data. One of these disciplines, whose structure is based on the concept of individual semiosis, is psychology. In its turn, psychology must constitute an ontological foundation for such disciplines as semiotic linguistics, semiotic logic, and at least some of the actual directions in cognitive science. Then, to fulfill this and some other tasks, as it has been noted in the introduction to the present article, psychologists use various methods to address questions those are devoted to formal, empirical, and applied parts of the discipline: empirical-experimental studies, analyses of brain organization and activity, neurolinguistic and neurophysiological studies, various types of modeling as well as others.

As we have mentioned in the introduction to the present article, the content of any scientific discipline can be subdivided into three classes of questions: (1) formal – questions about the definitions of concepts, the bodies of theories, models, and methods used by researchers of the discipline; (2) empirical questions of different types; and (3) questions about the possible applications of disciplinary methods (methods can be applied to the other sciences, to non-scientific areas including either common and expert activities) within or outside the science itself). So, let us now give our attention to the empirical status of contemporary psychology as a science. Since we are using the same criteria for psychology as a science as we proposed for semiotics as a scientific transdisciplinary field of study (for which psychology is a basic discipline), in the latter case, we have to consider the same empirical criteria as well. Moreover, some special features of manifest empirical phenomena that have to be taken into account can be detailed at this stage better than at the stage of formal presentation.

5. Conclusion: The Future of Psychology as a Scientific Discipline

If we are to know what the future holds for psychology as a scientific discipline, we would, of course, already have to know the future, and can do no more than speculate for the most part. However, in our opinion, three development paths seem most likely. The first trend towards a scientific monoculture (an entirely Paleolithic materialist account of all human behavior and mental experience, without seemingly perceptible regard for other explanatory approaches). Not that this is an inevitability, but the trend has been there in the past and will no doubt continue. Such a discipline will operate entirely in its own world, with no bleedout into other explanations for human-related problems, no regard for environmental, developmental, or educational explanations for reported differences between groups or for changes in behavior and experience over time. Such an event would probably not demand too rigorous an output from its professors, who of course could be dealt with by machines equally well as graduate student professors. Psychology will also thus have lost both its soft and hard grandfather disciplines, as all psychology eventually becomes a department in the school of Paleolithic materialist studies.

While it is clear that psychology’s consistently poor reputation is largely unjustified (in Bradley’s words, the claim “psychology is not a real science, any more than the search for a lost set of keys is real exploratory behavior”), the present book has been mostly critical of the field. Yet, while we have identified numerous deficiencies in the wider practice of the scientific method in psychology, the essence of any critique of statistics should be seen for what it is, a comparison of actual with ideal performance, rather than with absolutely anything that the field might be. There are branches of psychology that perform their scientific duties well while keeping their methods within manageable bounds (those studying more straightforward forms of perception, memory, and learning for example). The fault lies in sundry malapplications of these exemplary practices, especially in clinical, social, and abnormal psychology.