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Some things don't change
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2025
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Meanwhile, Psychologists:
Not a science.
What makes something a science?
A methodology with reproducible experiments and results.
Psychology is as much as science as medicine was a science in the Middle Ages.
That doesn’t mean we should stop pursuing knowledge in the field, but to call it a science at this point in its development is just disingenuous.
And why don't you think psychology fits this?
It lacks predictability and reproduceability. At least to a certain extend. As long as every diagnosis is "this most likely is" or even "could be", it is not science.
But you can still look down on economists, who are somewhere between crystal ball readers or tea leaf interpreters and random number generators on that behalf.
Economists aren't trying to predict the future. That's a misconception that is done away with in the first few days of intro.
Economists set option prices. That is literally trying to predict the future.
Edit: To be fair, I shouldn't say "economists" in general. There are plenty of good economists out there that understand that economics is not a predictive science, I know a couple personally. But there are definitely some economists out there that think their degree lets them predict the unpredictable.
Various meta analysis have found that the results of 50%+ of all studies in the field are non reproducible. It could be as high as 70%+.
Again this does not mean that it isn’t a valid field of knowledge, it just not a science yet. People somehow take offense at this because I guess they feel like I’m invalidating the field. I actually only invalidating the validity of their findings so far which is more like a “sorry, try again until you find the fundamental rules of your field”. There’s also this pervasive attitude that all fields must be a science in order to be valuable which is just not true.
The term “social science” reeks of insecurity to me because other than using the scientific method, they are not a sciences at all, but I guess academics needed a way to to defend themselves from the bullying physicists.
My personal opinion is that psychology ignores biology too much, and insists on humans as purely socially constructed beings. If they started looking more at how our biology is the fundamental mold for our psychology, they might start making real progress towards being a science. But then maybe it wouldn’t be psychology anymore.
Im asking these questions to asses what you actually understand science to be.
Do you have a degree, or better yet a terminal degree in a science field? What is your actual academic experience in doing social science experiments?
I have a degree, but not in science. Does that make me unqualified to state that the field of psychology, and most other social sciences lack the epistemic rigor of something like physics or biology and therefore are not real sciences?
I’ll repeat it, psychology is a science in much the same way that medieval medicine was a science. It may one day become an actual science much like medieval medicine became a science.
What is your field?