[feanaro]

I see this position somewhat often, almost unavoidably accompanied by a reference to Feynman. The position is, of course, pure nonsense if you take a few moments to think it through.

Not only has the world moved on drastically from when Feynman, a non-expert in the area, wrote that essay, but it is also ludicrous to claim that a part of existence is unamenable to scientific study. If it exists and has an effect, it can be studied. There is no reason to believe human behaviour and thought is beyond this.

[CriticalCathed]

>Not only has the world moved on drastically from when Feynman...

You're right, social science got even less replicable and less scientific.

>If it exists and has an effect, it can be studied.

Yes, you're right. But that doesn't mean that you can ground it in empirical evidence or effectively apply the scientific method of inquiry. Philosophy is a method of studying human behavior -- it is not, however, science. And for substantially the same set of reasons the social sciences are also not science.

[feanaro]

> You're right, social science got even less replicable and less scientific.

You'll need to substantiate this claim, of course.

> Yes, you're right. But that doesn't mean that you can ground it in empirical evidence or effectively apply the scientific method of inquiry.

Why not?

> Philosophy is a method of studying human behavior -- it is not, however, science. And for substantially the same set of reasons the social sciences are also not science.

You are simply repeating the old misconception I've hinted at: that human behaviour is off-limits to scientific inquiry, even though it is real and physical. I fail to see why this would be the case. We are, after all, talking about measurable, quantifiable things inputs and outputs regarding human behaviour.

[Torgo]

You're arguing that everything can be subject to exploration via scientific method, and he's arguing that some people reject this anyway. Here is a quote about an ideological split that happened in the anthropology community:

>The divide is trenchantly summarized by Lawson and McCauley (1993) who divide between ‘interpretivists’ and ‘scientists,’ or, as noted above, ‘positivists’ and ‘naturalists.’ For the scientists, the views of the ‘cultural anthropologists’ (as they call themselves) are too speculative, especially because pure ethnographic research is subjective, and are meaningless where they cannot be reduced to science. For the interpretivists, the ‘evolutionary anthropologists’ are too ‘reductionistic’ and ‘mechanistic,’ they do not appreciate the benefits of subjective approach (such as garnering information that could not otherwise be garnered), and they ignore questions of ‘meaning,’ as they suffer from ‘physics envy.’

cite: https://www.iep.utm.edu/anthropo/#SH4b

[CriticalCathed]

>We are, after all, talking about measurable, quantifiable things inputs and outputs regarding human behaviour.

I don't think it's true. Looking at behavior is like trying to guess at the internals of a black box piece of software that's very well obfuscated + randomized.

The empirical way to do it is more along the lines of neuropsych -- taking a look at the physical processes involved. I think human psychology and behavior is a lot like the plumage of a peacock; pretty, loud, but ultimately an abstraction above what is really going on.

[feanaro]

> The empirical way to do it is more along the lines of neuropsych -- taking a look at the physical processes involved. I think human psychology and behavior is a lot like the plumage of a peacock; pretty, loud, but ultimately an abstraction above what is really going on.

There is no denying it is an abstraction. I would in fact claim the converse: all human scientific study to date has dealt with abstractions of varying degrees.

To offer a counterargument, we treat a great deal of systems like (semi-)black boxes and ultimately manage to derive useful statements about those systems. Examples include economics, black-box software analysis (like fuzzing), biology (e.g. we've learned many useful facts about the human body before we even knew of the existence of the cell), even basic physics (like the physics of gasses, as an epitome of something randomized, but still following broad rules). There is no reason to assume human psychology is different in this particular aspect.

In fact, we cannot assume so, as a lot of psychological knowledge we've gleaned demonstrably works, despite other results proving to be irreproducible due to the usual reasons[1]. As an example, it's hard to deny the existence and predictive power of modern human personality trait models.

It should also be telling that many modern, advanced statistical tools were invented by none other than psychologists, for use in psychology.

Neuropsych is definitely a worthwhile approach and I wouldn't separate it from the rest of psychology. Ultimately, we cannot really hope to derive everything using the bottom-up approach any time soon so a variety of approaches are needed. Also, to continue the above example, many studies of personality traits have shown connection to underlying genetic and environmental factors, such as this one: http://doi.org/10.1016/S0191-8869(01)00137-4

[1]: Science is hard, humans like and many times need to cut corners, the black-box system is extremely complex (as you noted).

[Kaiyou]

Because most humans behave sufficiently different from each other. Even if you experiment on a subset of humans and get knowledge about this subset, a different subset of humans could react completely different. It's so bad that even the same subset of humans could react completely different if you do the same test 50 years later.

[feanaro]

> Even if you experiment on a subset of humans and get knowledge about this subset, a different subset of humans could react completely different.

They could, but that does not mean they do. There are quite obviously rules and patterns to much of human functioning. Denying so seems like human hubris.

Even if each human displays unique behaviour for a particular trait, knowing that it is so for that particular trait is useful and therefore still amenable to scientific exploration. Even if humans reacted randomly in some situation, the random behaviour would be subject to a probability distribution and knowing it would be useful.

It's hard for me to see where exactly the leap to "it's impossible to study human behaviour scientifically" is necessary, particularly when we have so much evidence to the contrary.

[Kaiyou]

It's not science if you don't reliably get the same output if you provide the same input. It's useful, sure. But it's not science.

[feanaro]

Sorry, but this just sounds like a deepity. Science is a process, not a result.

It holds for most of science most of the time that you don't reliably get the same output if you provide the same input (because you don't know all the variables or the entire set of equations). Only when a phenomenon is completely known does this stop being true.

But when is a phenomenon completely known? After all, for a long time we've known classical mechanics to be completely known... Except it wasn't. And during the time we thought it was, you could get into exactly the type of situation you describe above: for the "same" input, you could get a different output, depending on the components of the stress-energy tensor you were not aware were relevant. The effect was subtle there of course, but there are many examples where it's not (e.g. the entirety of biology and medicine).

So I disagree with this description of science.

EDIT: Also, it completely slipped my mind the first time around because it's such a stupidly strong counterargument, but by your definition the entirety of modern physics (quantum mechanics, quantum field theory and beyond) is not science.

[dragonwriter]

> Even if you experiment on a subset of humans and get knowledge about this subset, a different subset of humans could react completely different.

The same is true of chemicals, rocks, or lots of other categories of things subject to scientific inquiry. In fact, interesting scientific results tend to come from how the behavior of different subsets of categories like that behave in similar conditions, rather than being made impossible by such differences.

[dragonwriter]

> But that doesn't mean that you can ground it in empirical evidence or effectively apply the scientific method of inquiry.

Yes, it does. The scientific method and empirical investigation apply to any phenomena in the material universe, including human behavior.

Such investigation might lead to models with irreducible areas of randomness if there is some.ares of human behavior not controlled by deterministic laws, but our best models in certain areas of the physical sciences also have irreducible randomness, so that's not a distinguishing feature.