What are the arguments against the fact that psychology has benefited from modelling itself on the natural sciences?

-- Jo Airey (joey_air@ivillage.co.uk), October 15, 2002

Answers

Check the philosophy of science section of the previous questions in this forum. There are about half a dozen threads related to the question of whether or not psychology qualifies as a natural science. I would start by rewording your question: you assume as "fact" rather than hypothesis or opinion the statement that psychology has benefitted from modeling itself on natural science.

-- Hendrika Vande Kemp (hendrika@earthlink.net), October 15, 2002.

The main one, I think, is simply that we have (allegedly) made so little solid progress in understanding the mind (as opposed to our understanding of biology, chemistry, physics, etc.). Psychological "knowlege," so it is argued, seems to be captured by fashions and fads. Hardly a single theory last more than a couple decades. Most last far less than that. As I once heard it put, "whereas natural scientists stand on the shoulders o those who went before them, psychologists mostly stand in teh faces of thsoe who went before."

-- Christopher Green (cgreen@chass.utoronto.ca), October 15, 2002.

This is an interesting question and well worth your time to follow up on. Psychology has lost by attempting to model itself as a “natural science”.

The tag “natural” science implies that the arts and humanities study something ‘outside nature’. I find that strange and do not believe it is true. All the disciplines attempt to understand natural things and so they are all natural sciences.

I believe that non-sentient life evolved from non-living matter, and sentient beings evolved from life. I believe that non-sentient life, and sentient life, are two distinct and irreducible structures. Psychology studies sentience.

Attempts to model psychology on physics is based on the assumption that sentience can be understood in terms of pre-sentient evolutionary structures and functions. I reject that assumption. I reject it partly because the stream of psychology that has attempted that reduction is incoherent, i.e. there is no such thing as a thoughtful, imagining, and willing automaton. The thoughtful/machine incoherence is not resolvable. So I abandon the automaton heuristics and turn to irreducible sentience as a guiding idea in psychology…This post-reductive perspective has great potential for a coherent theory of consciousness.

-- John Hedlin (jhedlin@shaw.ca), November 18, 2002.