Philosophy Now Forum

THE OFFENDING ARTICLE HERE

I shall paraphrase

Peter Rickman wrote:Well, it isn't physics, is it?

Thanks for that Pete.

In seriousness the article failed to say anything substantive and was riddled with the kind of lazy reasoning and empty rhetoric that makes the 'academic-as-expert' within philosophy highly suspect.

At no point did Mr. Rickman bother to elucidate on the significance of the label 'science', either to him or at large. What does it matter if psychology is labelled a science or not, what consequences does it or should it have in the way that we treat it or its products? This would have been helpful, as it would have gone some way to explaining his peculiar bias, as well as providing us with a basis for creating criteria for measuring various disciplines as scientific or not.

After all, what is the need for this distinction of 'science' and 'non-science', what do we accord to one and not the other?

For the most part his article centred on things which purport to be psychology and purport to be science but which fail to be scientific. Yet, there are many things which purport to be scientific in all fields which, under scrutiny, fail to be scientific. All that he has established is that not everything which says it is science, and says it is psychology, is science.

His conclusion is that we should rule out 'psychology as science'. This conclusion is not valid. There are two possible valid conclusions. Either there is two kinds of psychology, the scientific and the non-scientific, or alternatively, as with all other disciplines, psychology is wholly scientific but there are many things which falsely purport to be psychology.

His argument against behaviourism is a particularly stark example of lazy argumentation. He uses the following joke:

Two behaviourists spend a night passionately making love. In the morning, one says to the other, “It was good for you. How was it for me?”

I would not denigrate the argument on the basis that it is a joke, as humor can make good points. However, the above joke does not make a good point, humorous as it is.

Much as some behaviourists may take their perspective to be a universal theory of psychology I suspect Mr. Rickman has missed the point of the doctrine entirely. It is not that all psychology is reducible to behaviours, any more than physics that all existance is reducible to the read-outs on its machinery. Behaviourism states that the only scientifically observable element of the psyche is behaviour, and so a science-proper should only involve itself with these things.

He further goes on to talk about 'communications' as if these are seperate and distinct from behaviours; they are themselves behaviours and observable facts. While we cannot observe the rate of promiscuity within a population we can observe the rate of reported promiscuity within a population, and this is the proper limitations of any such claims. But, then, this is sociology, not psychology. Why on earth would I talk about sociology when I am supposed to be talking about psychology? Ah yes, because Mr.Rickman decided to conflate the two, along with history, as they are clearly precisely the same thing.

Perhaps the most grating thing within the whole article was where he said

It follows that the human studies cannot naïvely ape physical science.

As if the principles of scientific methodology were produced not only because of, but wholly within, the practice of the physical sciences; as if the discipline of the philosophy of science is not its own distinct discipline with its own purview, but merely a commentary on the actions of these great eminent physical scientists.

Is Psychology Physics?
Peter Rickman tells us why it isn't.

Every now and then I read a novel and get irritated for two reasons:

1) I could have written on such a subject much better
2) That someone else had bothered to write it, whereas I had only thought about it.

The novels are rarely as bad as I think they are - but I know how they could have been so much better.

I suspect this is happening with you Psychonaut. You could have written it better - but in this world its the generic academic philosophers who get asked rather then people who have really thought it through.

I think this article was always going to be a bit rubbish because it needs a book to do the subject justice.

Never mind...

I'm going to stand up for Peter Rickman here, as this piece was one of my fave articles of this year.

I know the article starts off as if it is going to be a criticism of psychology for failing to meet the standards of the physical sciences. This is a bit of a tease, I think, as then it goes on to argue that psychology (and the other human studies) shouldn't be trying to use solely the methodology of the physical studies, and that they go astray when they do try to. Prof. Rickman then explains - and this is the real meat of the article - how he thinks the human studies differ in methodology from the physical sciences in their reliance on interpreting different forms of communications. In other words, despite its title this is really an introductory article about hermeneutics, not about psychology's status as a science.

You may be right that communications are pieces of physically-observable behaviour themselves, but presumably you'd agree that they are at least a special type of behaviour, with shared characteristics that set them apart from other kinds of physical behaviour?

You can't really apply the scientific method to the full on human behaviour, its way too complex.
And not being a 'hard science' doesn't make it false by default.

Psychology could be regarded as a philosophy.