[bad_user]

> falsifiable evidence ("testable against the empirical world")

That's not what falsifiable means.

> I'm a doctor and I've created a revolutionary cure for the common cold. My cure is to shake a dried gourd over the cold sufferer until he gets better. The cure might take a week, but it always works.

Because the common cold has a non-zero mortality rate, you can't say that your cure always works. That statement, taken literally, is provably false, as sooner or later somebody will die even if you're shaking a dried gourd over his body. But lets say that you meant the cure improves the condition of those that suffer from common cold, or that simply we want to find out before anybody dies.

Well, we can do doubly-blind A/B testing and measure several things, like the presence of the associated symptoms, its progression, the average duration and so on. And nowadays, any treatment must beat the placebo effect in order for it to be considered valid.

But lets say that we couldn't determine if this particular cure is valid or not. It would still be falsifiable, because it's related to things that we'll be able to measure in the future, if we can't already - like the autoimmune system's response to this treatment.

[lutusp]

>> falsifiable evidence ("testable against the empirical world")

> That's not what falsifiable means.

You truncated the original, cut out an essential word, then argued against the edited version. Here's what I said:

> Because psychology's topic is the mind, and because the mind is not a physical entity, psychology cannot produce empirical, falsifiable evidence ("testable against the empirical world") to supports its claims. [emphasis added]

In point of fact, empirical, falsifiable evidence is the only legitimate basis for theories that should be discarded if reality disagrees, and on which the notion of falsifiability depends -- that's how it's defined.

The meaning of falsifiability is that a reality test decides whether a given idea has merit, not philosophical weight or rhetorical argument. And if the reality test fails, a scientist discards the failed idea. A pseudoscientist may elect to discard reality instead.

> Because the common cold has a non-zero mortality rate, you can't say that your cure always works.

Yes, and on that basis I can claim that my idea is falsifiable. But until I take the daring step of trying to explain what I have described, I haven't crossed the threshold of science.

That's why I use this example -- it has empirical evidence, it is falsifiable, it is replicable by dispassionate third parties. It has everything that psychology recognizes as science, except the crucial element of theory, of explanation. Because psychology is satisfied to describe without making an effort to explain, so am I.

[bad_user]

My point that I failed to explain is that falsifiability is a much more abstract notion than testability in the empirical world. At its essence, a theory is falsifiable if it is possible to come up with an argument that proves the theory to be false.

When it comes to treatments of all kind, all of them are falsifiable, as long as the treatment involves the promise of effects that we can observe either now or in the future. Mental illnesses are very much real and because of that it is entirely possible to measure the effectiveness of a psychological treatment.

The problem with many psychological treatments is the same problem we have with nutrition - doing studies is excruciatingly hard because the validity of a test is compromised if the patients aren't kept under observation 24/7, because patients have a tendency to lie or to forget, so short of keeping them locked in a cage for the next 10 years, we lack the capability of keeping them under observation and this is necessary to eliminate variables that could have an impact on the result. Doubly-blind tests are also excruciatingly hard sometimes - for example, in regards to nutrition, the only way one could conduct such a test would be to control the patients' basic senses. And in the future, we may be able to directly measure the body's reaction to a treatment, which would eliminate the need for A/B testing entirely.

Bottom line is that us being unable to measure the effectiveness of a treatment, doesn't make that treatment unfalsifiable.

[lutusp]

> My point that I failed to explain is that falsifiability is a much more abstract notion than testability in the empirical world.

Not in science. In science, falsifiability means the failure of an empirical test, a failure that invalidates a claim.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability

Quote: "The concern with falsifiability gained attention by way of philosopher of science Karl Popper's scientific epistemology "falsificationism". Popper stresses the problem of demarcation—distinguishing the scientific from the unscientific—and makes falsifiability the demarcation criterion, such that what is unfalsifiable is classified as unscientific, and the practice of declaring an unfalsifiable theory to be scientifically true is pseudoscience. This is often epitomized in Wolfgang Pauli famously saying, of an argument that fails to be scientific because it cannot be falsified by experiment, "it is not only not right, it is not even wrong!"" [emphasis added]

> At its essence, a theory is falsifiable if it is possible to come up with an argument that proves the theory to be false.

No, falsifiability in science means that an empirical test -- a test against reality -- proves a claim to be false. In science, falsifiability is not about philosophy or rhetoric, it is about empirical tests.

> When it comes to treatments of all kind, all of them are falsifiable, as long as the treatment involves the promise of effects that we can observe either now or in the future.

In psychology, defined as study of the mind, none of those are falsifiable in a scientific sense, because the mind is not a source of empirical evidence.

> The problem with many psychological treatments ... [etc.]

Your paragraph explains why psychology is not and cannot be scientific.

> Bottom line is that us being unable to measure the effectiveness of a treatment, doesn't make that treatment unfalsifiable.

On the contrary, that is exactly what it means. No objective empirical evidence on which similarly equipped observers can agree, ergo no falsifiability, ergo no science.

In any case, falsifiability is only one missing property in psychology. Another is psychology's tendency to be satisfied to describe what it should be explaining. Are testable, empirical explanations required for science, or are descriptions adequate? To find out, read my description of a phony cure for the common cold posted above. It shows that explanations are a requirement for science, and to avoid all sorts of quackery.

[singingfish]

OP is incorrect that psychology is not a science. The remainder of the discussion is quite tedious, and shows that the OP has a very confused notion of mind body separation (hint, by and large they are not, whether you're a dualist an epihenominist or something else - I tend to something else but wouldn't feel confident to write my viewpoint down).

What is correct is that experimental designs are more or less not possible in behavioural psychology. This could be OP's second point of confusion. Essentially the only time real experiemnts as opposed to quasi-experiments are possible in science is where a known physical quantity is already well understood (e.g. moles of Hydrogen, quanta of photons, metres of distance, joules of energy etc). Where complete control over a known physical quantity is not practical, the only possible experimental design is in fact a quasi experimental design. However, to claim that quasi experiments are not valid is to deny a large amount of scientific knowledge, and flies in the face of deductive logic.

Next up we have this whole notion of falsifiability. It's a red herring. The discipline of psychology was the original field that enabled the types of statistical analysis that underpin much of the modern economy. Psychology provided the intellecutal basis of using single case studies (e.g patients with a rare or unique illness) to further scientific understanding. In psychology this resulted in much of our understanding of the functions of different parts of the brain prior to the development of neuroimaging.

Finally, lots of concepts in computer science originate in psychology - heuristic being the one that comes to mind at the moment. My entire development methodology is based on the idea that human short term memory is fixed to 7±2 items (based on data from quasi-experimental studies). Thus when I am writing code my primary purpose is to only have to attend to 5 things at a time, at most, as this is the lower bound of the reliability of my short term memory.

[lutusp]

> OP is incorrect that psychology is not a science.

Pretend to be a scientist and post your evidence. Here's mine -- the director of the NIMH has recently ruled (http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2013/transforming-dia...) that the DSM (psychology's "bible") may no longer be used as the basis of scientific research proposals, for the simple reason that it has no scientific content. The director went on to say:

"The goal of this new manual, as with all previous editions, is to provide a common language for describing psychopathology. While DSM has been described as a “Bible” for the field, it is, at best, a dictionary, creating a set of labels and defining each. The strength of each of the editions of DSM has been “reliability” – each edition has ensured that clinicians use the same terms in the same ways. The weakness is its lack of validity."

"Unlike our definitions of ischemic heart disease, lymphoma, or AIDS, the DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure. In the rest of medicine, this would be equivalent to creating diagnostic systems based on the nature of chest pain or the quality of fever. Indeed, symptom-based diagnosis, once common in other areas of medicine, has been largely replaced in the past half century as we have understood that symptoms alone rarely indicate the best choice of treatment. Patients with mental disorders deserve better." [emphasis added]

There is often an embarrassing degree of self-reference in discussions where psychologists try to claim that psychology is a science. The defenders invariably see no need to produce evidence for their claim, as though evidence is irrelevant in a discussion of science. And for a typical psychologist, saying psychology is a science is expected to end a conversation, whereas for a scientist, that claim can only begin a conversation in which evidence rules.

> Next up we have this whole notion of falsifiability. It's a red herring.

Only if science isn't defined as it is in the law -- which it is. Science-defining laws are on the books to keep Creationism out of public school classrooms, and while crafting those laws with the assistance of expert witnesses, guess which non-negotiable criterion always appears in the final ruling? Falsifiability.

Here is one such ruling (http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/mclean-v-arkansas.html) -- science must have these properties:

1. It is guided by natural law;

2. It has to be explanatory by reference to natural law;

3. It is testable against the empirical world;

4. Its conclusions are tentative, i.e. are not necessarily the final word; and

5. It is falsifiable.

I bring up this law to make perfectly clear that falsifiability, empirical evidence, and the other standard requirements for science, are only red herrings to people who think they can define science any way they please. For a scientist, obviously this kind of argument is unnecessary -- they already understand what science requires.

> What is correct is that experimental designs are more or less not possible in behavioural psychology.

Wait, what? Because one cannot design reliable experiments in psychology, therefore psychology is scientific? On what basis -- that real science is too difficult?

> This could be OP's second point of confusion.

The only confusion is yours.

[ItendToDisagree]

For fun replace 'psychology' with 'quantum physics'. Is it also not science?

1. Contradicts some natural laws

2. Is not explained by the natural world except in reference to itself (often due to changes beyond a certain scale)

3. Not necessarily testable against the empirical world (yet)

4. Always up for debate (so good there) as is psychology.

5. Falsifiable or not depending on your stance, in a similar way to psychology, in that there is a lack of complete understanding. The swan example in the wiki article could not be applied for instance because all of the facts and observations are not available (again... yet.)

As for Kahneman (and many other psychologists), if you believe that he starts with the conclusion and refuses to change it regardless of the evidence developed during the course of the investigation, you may have skipped some very important parts of Thinking Fast and Slow. The book in question goes over many examples where the outcomes do not fit what is expected and lead to discovery.

Not arguing exclusively against what you are saying, just pointing out that there are fields that utilize the scientific method, which by their very nature are not entirely beholden to the current 'laws of science' often because their laws have not been fully laid down or explored yet.

Medical science moved past simply treating based on symptoms due to a great deal of work. Who's to say psychology can not do the same? There is still much to learn.

[lutusp]

> For fun replace 'psychology' with 'quantum physics'. Is it also not science?

There are fundamental differences. In quantum theory one can craft a theory that makes empirically falsifiable predictions about phenomena not yet observed, even in advance by decades, like the Higgs boson.

The theory is the Standard Model, and it predicted the Higgs boson decades ago. Much time passed because we just didn't have a way to observe reality in the right energy domain. Now we do.

There is nothing remotely like this in psychology.

> Contradicts some natural laws

Not really. The quantum and relativistic worlds are non-overlapping, but both have copious observational evidence, which means we need to look for a theory that explains both of them in a unified way. That search is underway. One candidate is string theory, very controversial because no single string theory candidate is the obvious "final theory".

> Is not explained by the natural world except in reference to itself

This is a non sequitur because it's true for any theory -- at some scale it becomes self-referential. Cosmology, a theory about everything, is self-referential at the level of the entire universe.

> Not necessarily testable against the empirical world

No. Quantum theory is constantly empirically tested and is the best-confirmed theory in existence, both in terms of description and prediction. In fact, the computer you're sitting at represents a confirmation of quantum theory.

There is no other scientific theory that has so much agreement between an abstract theoretical construct and careful observation. During the debates that led to modern quantum theory, Einstein and his group (the critics) posed any number of seemingly absurd objections to quantum ("... and that would be a perfectly absurd outcome"), but each of the objections turned out to be true -- entanglement, superposition of states and others.

There are some quantities predicted by quantum theory that have been confirmed in experiment to ten decimal places -- an outcome unmatched by any other scientific theory.

Title: "The Most Precisely Tested Theory in the History of Science"

Link: http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2011/05/05/the-most-preci...

Quote: "Experimental tests of QED measure small shifts, but to an absurd number of decimal places. The most impressive of these is the “anomalous magnetic moment of the electron,” expressed is terms of a number g whose best measured value is: g/2 = 1.001 159 652 180 73 (28) ... Depending on how you want to count it, that’s either 11 or 14 digits of precision ..."

> Falsifiable or not depending on your stance

Definitely falsifiable. There was much discussion before confirmation of the Higgs that its absence would constitute a falsification of much of the Standard Model, which is technically accurate and was a matter of much speculation before the results were in.

Quantum theory is eminently falsifiable in the classic sense, persistently resists falsification, and is the cornerstone of much of modern technology.

> As for Kahneman (and many other psychologists), if you believe that he starts with the conclusion and refuses to change it regardless of the evidence developed during the course of the investigation ...

Wait, I never said that and I don't hold that view. What I said was that Kahnemann's work describes, it doesn't explain. It is in the area of explanation that psychology fails. To explain (and to put it simply), psychologists would have to seek out root causes of behaviors, but that would require the mind to be a physical organ, open to empirical observation. This is why society is moving away from psychology toward neuroscience -- the chance to offer an empirical, falsifiable explanation.

(What follows should clearly demonstrate the difference between description and explanation.)

Neuroscience is in a rather primitive state, but there are some very encouraging signs. Depression, for example, a condition that psychology can't really treat in a way that distinguishes actual results from the placebo effect.

In a recent neuroscience study, a brain area known as Area 25 has become a matter of much interest because deep brain stimulation of Area 25 can cause a patient's depression to lift instantly.

Title: "A Depression Switch?"

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/02/magazine/02depression.html...

Quote: "Deanna later described it in similar terms. "It was literally like a switch being turned on that had been held down for years," she said. "All of a sudden they hit the spot, and I feel so calm and so peaceful. It was overwhelming to be able to process emotion on somebody's face. I'd been numb to that for so long.""

I emphasize that the patient in this procedure repeatedly experienced a dramatic improvement for reasons she could not see, by means of actions out of her sight. Until this procedure, she had been so depressed that she had given up on life and voluntarily submitted herself to institutionalization.

> Medical science moved past simply treating based on symptoms due to a great deal of work. Who's to say psychology can not do the same?

That's easy to answer -- psychology's topic is the mind, which, because it is not a physical thing, cannot be a source of empirical evidence. And surely, given the present confidence crisis, if psychologists could produce empirically verifiable, testable results accompanied by explanations, they certainly would. But they cannot.

[singingfish]

Yawn. There are very few scientific laws compared to the body of scientific knowledge. Most scientific concepts are relegated to theory rather than law as they are are amenable only to inductive proof. The only scientific ideas that have the status of law are those that are amenable to deductive proof.

You are very long winded, and you present as if you think your understanding is better than it actually is.

[lutusp]

You have failed to address any of my arguments, standard arguments that clearly define what science is and is not. And you have decided that ad hominem is a better approach, even though a logical error. Given your inability to defend your position, this isn't too surprising.

[singingfish]

No, I outlined that your entire frame of reference is wrong, yet you persist with long winded and mostly irelevant time wasting.