Conceptual Issues & Psychology

1. Conceptual Issues & Psychology Dr Roy Allen School of Psychology room: G09 email: roy.allen@abdn.ac.uk

2. Readings associated with this lecture: Cooper, R.M., (1982). The passing of psychology. Canadian Psychology, 23, 264-267 McComas, W. (1996). Ten myths of science: re-examining what we think we know. School Science & Mathematics, 96, 10-16. Popper, K. (1957). Science: conjectures and refutations. In C.A. Mace (Ed.). British Philosophy in Mid-Century: A Cambridge Symposium. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd.

3. About Exam Questions Questions may come from one, some or none of the Readings associated with this lecture. Questions will be multi-choice, e.g.: “Sir Karl Popper’s ideas regarding falsifiability, were a rejection of: a) Logical Positivism; b) Epistemology; c) Formal Logic, or; d) Post-Modernism?

4. Introduction from 2nd to 3rd-year involves a change of emphasis from books to peer-reviewed journal articles; tend to be out-dated; present information as factual; gloss over detail; tend to be more up-to-date; very dense; focus on minutiae.

5. Epistemology Theory of Knowledge: • “What is knowledge?“; • “How is knowledge acquired?“; • “What do people know?“; • “How do we know what we know?” • How knowledge is acquired: • a priori/analytic – not requiring experience to validate, e.g., "My father's brother is my uncle." • A posteriori/syntactic/empirical – requiring experience to validate, e.g., “My father’s brother has a black moustache

6. Logical Empiricism & Science 1910s-30s Vienna Circle, coffeehouse group, made a concerted effort to clarify the language of science by arguing that: • the content of scientific theories could be reduced to truths of logic and mathematics (analytic) coupled with propositions referring to sense experience (empirical). They held that metaphysical speculation was nonsensical, propositions of logic and mathematics tautological, and moral or value statements merely emotive.

7. Verifiability 1 • Deduction – the use of universal rules or laws to explain an individual observation, e.g., • All diamonds are hard • Therefore this diamond is hard Induction – the accumulation of individual observations sufficient to produce a general rule/law, e.g., • Crow number 1 is black • Crow number 2 is black • Crow number 3 is black, etc, etc, • Therefore all crows are black This is very much the “test/retest” approach of the “Scientific Method”

8. Verifiability 2 • Unfortunately, “universal” laws aren’t always robust – so we have good reason to assume that current scientific laws may also be wrong too • Many of our laws are of the “all other things being equal” sort- unsatisfying because in a logical sense you can never be sure of all other things being equal

9. Verifiability 3 • and individual observations never seem to guarantee universality – compare previous example with: • Swan number 1 is white • Swan number 2 is white • Swan number 3 is white, etc, etc, • Therefore all swans are white! • Doh!!

10. Falsifiability 1 Sir Karl Raimund Popper (1902 – 1994): • Professor & Philosopher of Science @ London School of Economics; • saw how unsatisfactory the observationist/inductivist account of the scientific method was (i.e., Logical Empiricism); • believed biggest problem in the philosophy of science was “demarcation”, i.e., how to distinguish between science and non-science; • was profoundly impressed by the differences between the allegedly ‘scientific’ psycho-analytic theories of Freud and Adler and the revolution effected by Einstein's theory of relativity in physics in the first two decades of the last century.

11. Falsifiability 2 Popper realised that: • while Einstein's theory was highly ‘risky’, in the sense that it was possible to deduce consequences from it which were, in light of the then dominant Newtonian physics, highly improbable and which would, if they turned out to be false, falsify the whole theory (e.g., that light is deflected towards solid bodies - confirmed by Eddington's experiments in 1919); • nothing could, even in principle, falsify psychoanalytic theories…”; • He concluded that since proof was logically impossible, scientists should, instead, aim to falsify theories and laws.

12. Psychology 1 • Sadly, in social/biological sciences like psychology we don't have anything quite like the natural laws of chemistry or physics, so we are forced to depend on statistical explanations… • and these are inductive, not deductive in the way we wish natural laws to be…. • In the statistical inference approach, you have to make assumptions about what you believe is the relevant description (not really a cause) that determines an outcome, e.g.: • there is a 0.80 probability that a person voted New Labourif their parents voted New Labour . . . • but if they were a self-made millionaire it might be a 0.55 probability . . . • if they were a woman it might be a 0.62 probability . . . • and, if she likes Gordon Brown it might be a 0.70 etc etc etc.

13. Psychology 2 • I have always found psychology depressing because I came into it from physics and engineering thinking that, since it experimentally studied the human mind it was a science. • I soon realized that it was not a science but a catalogue, and a methodology for adding to the catalogue. I don't doubt that it is a useful catalogue: it's certainly important to know such things as how to help people who are depressed or to understand how people's memory or opinions can be changed in emotional contexts or by clever questioning (say in eyewitness testimony). • But many of us had hoped that there was a theoretical science like physics or chemistry there somewhere and we were disappointed. I now believe that the problem is simply that there is no unitary subject matter for psychology -- it is not a natural scientific domain. • But I find renewed hope now that within psychology lies one or more natural scientific domains, and that cognition, suitably circumscribed to include those aspects that are explainable in terms of symbol processing operations (together with the non-symbolic mechanisms required to support symbol processing) may be one of those natural scientific domains. Is the statistical inference approach a “stop gap” while we wait for proper behavioural and scientific laws to be developed which have real “mathematical proof”-like properties? Pylyshyn, Z. (1986). Cognitive Science Society's Eighth Annual Conference, Amherst, Massachusetts, August 16.

14. Ten myths of science (McComas 1996) 1. hypotheses become theories become laws; 2. hypotheses are educated guesses; 3. there is a commonly-applied scientific method; 4. evidence leads to sure knowledge (i.e., the problem with induction); 5. science and its methods provide absolute proof (i.e., all swans are white . . . Popper); 6. science is not a creative endeavour; 7. science can answer all questions; 8. scientists are objective; 9. experiments are the sole route to scientific knowledge; 10. scientific conclusions are continually reviewed.

15. Learning Outcomes: • Know what epistemology is, and how knowledge is acquired; • Have a general idea about what Logical Empiricism is; • Know what deduction and induction are, and the problems of verifiability; • Understand Popper’s criticism of Logical Empiricism and his notion of falsifiability; • Have a clear understanding about some of the myths (at least 10) associated with science; • Have some feeling for the particular problems associated with knowledge acquisition in psychology; • Understand, and respond to, some of the criticisms directed towards psychology as regards its “passing”.