mmt@dciem.UUCP (Martin Taylor) (12/14/83)
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I am responding to an article claiming that psychology and computer
science arn't sciences. I think that the author is seriously confused
by his prefered usage of the term ``science''.
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I'm not sure, but I think the article referenced was mine. In any case,
it seems reasonable to clarify what I mean by "science", since I think
it is a reasonably common meaning. By the way, I do agree with most of
the article that started with this comment, that it is futile to
define words like "science" in a hard and fast fashion. All I want
here is to show where my original comment comes from.
"Science" has obviously a wide variety of meanings if you get too
careful about it, just as does almost any word in a natural language.
But most meanings of science carry some flavour of a method for
discovering something that was not known by a method that others can
repeat. It doesn't really matter whether that method is empirical,
theoretical, experimental, hypothetico-deductive, or whatever, provided
that the result was previously uncertain or not obvious, and that at
least some other people can reproduce it.
I argued that psychology wasn't a science mainly on the grounds that
it is very difficult, if not impossible, to reproduce the conditions
of an experiment on most topics that qualify as the central core of
what most people think of as psychology. Only the grossest aspects
can be reproduced, and only the grossest characterization of the
results can be stated in a way that others can verify. Neither do
theoretical approaches to psychology provide good prediction of
observable behaviour, except on a gross scale. For this reason, I
claimed that psychology was not a science.
Please note that in saying this, I intend in no way to downgrade the
work of practicing psychologists who are scientists. Peripheral
aspects, and gross descriptions are susceptible to attack by our
present methods, and I have been using those methods for 25 years
professionally. In a way it is science, but in another way it isn't
psychology. The professional use of the word "psychology" is not that
of general English. If you like to think what you do is science,
that's fine, but remember that the definition IS fuzzy. What matters
more is that you contribute to the world's well-being, rather than
what you call the way you do it.
--
Martin Taylor
{allegra,linus,ihnp4,uw-beaver,floyd,ubc-vision}!utzoo!dciem!mmt