Is psychology a science? Bad Thinking and Ideology.

     I watched a YouTube video on this. YouTube videos are a perfect way to package ‘information’ that is really masked worldview, bad thinking, or ideology (propaganda). They almost exclude careful thinking about their text – the video presents its ‘information’ not as a move in a conversation, not in order to raise questions and stimulate thought, but to give its audience an easy ‘truth’ to work with, to show off with, to act on – one that confirms their own prejudices often. It is wearisome work as these issues are not really on the cutting edge of philosophy of science – actually long refuted, or as close to refuted as you get in philosophy;  but I will break down one of these videos: certainly not the worst, but all the more dangerous because it could be confused as ‘educational.’ The speaker’s name is Hank Green. He wants to pontifically inform the audience that psychology is a science and ignore both the metaphysics and morality of psychology grounded in its metaphysics as practiced. 

 

§  Psychology is the science of what makes humans tick. Yes, psychology is a science.

 

·         A science of ‘what makes humans tick.’ The metaphor is taken from a clock – what makes a watch tick. You look inside and find the spur gears, an unwinding spring, the driving wheel, etc.; you can see how it all works. That is supposed to be a metaphor for the way our inner lives ‘tick’ – if they ‘tick’ at all! Of course, if our inner lives are strongly analogous to a mechanical clock (or electric clock), then science is the perfect method to understand them better. But it is at least highly debatable that our inner lives are remotely like this. Yet the uncritical use of the metaphor has suggestive force, basically setting the parameters for the reality of the inner life (the ‘object’ of study) and thus begging the most fundamental question in the ‘debate.’

 

§  People have been debating this pretty much since psychology started as a science back in the 1800’s. You can sort of see why people might think psychology doesn’t count as science.

 

·         Psychology conceived as a science does have its roots in the Enlightenment, the scientific revolution of modernity. Precisely the worldview dominated by the mechanical view of the universe (as a clock-like reality). The first psychologists were all people who firmly believed that the inner life was like a clock and that psychology was the science to uncover what made us tick. Notice the way he phrases things, with the subtext: ‘Psychology obviously is a science as anyone who has studied it knows, but there are some superficial reasons why the uninitiated might mistake certain appearances that seem to suggest otherwise. I will proceed to debunk these.’ The force of this passage is to make the ‘debate’ into confusion; once one understands the matter one will see there is really nothing to debate. It is like ‘debating’ the meaning of a Bible text with a fundamentalist who thinks the literal meaning is obvious. One could see how someone who has not seen the light could mistake it for something other than it plainly is; it is the job of the preacher or missionary to enlighten that person. The very confidence with which one dismisses serious alternative conceptions suggests to the unknowing (often willfully unknowing) that the full weight of ‘common sense’ is behind the speaker. The Enlightenment becomes fundamentalist and dissolves itself.

 

§   The study of the human mind is often missing the tightly-controlled experimental conditions and conclusive results that you’ll find in other fields, like astronomy or chemistry. And yeah, psychology research can be tricky because brains are complicated. But it’s still a science.

 

·         Notice the ‘reasons’ listed why you can almost understand why laypersons might get confused about the status of psychology as a science are all problems conforming to a model of natural science: physics, astronomy, chemistry – sciences that investigate inorganic matter, sciences that seek to uncover regularities in the universe conceived as inorganic, and explain them by looking into the mechanics of it (the universe as a clock). Obviously, we don’t have a mechanics of the ‘brain’ that in any way replicates the models that exist in chemistry and physics. But the brain is a phenomenon that can be studied in the same way; no one disputes that. Neuroscience is making progress in uncovering the regularities of human brains and offering biochemical explanations of the gears and wheels that make the brain tick. Is, therefore, psychology today the same as neuroscience? And what can neuro-science tell me about my inner life? Can it tell me how to raise my boys? Whether I should retire? What my relationship with their mother should be? With the wife that I abandoned? Who to vote for? How to understand the characters of Huck Finn and Jim from Twain’s novel? What I should devote the rest of my life to? Whether my love of the boys’ mother was real? Whether my reaction against my son’s week-long class trip is overblown? Can it tell me anything about my grief over my father’s death or the meaning of his life? Why did I fall in love with two troubled women?  I think not. Surely psychology should have something to say about our inner lives? Psychology as neuroscience may have some medical and technological applications – some of these might be good; all should be critically scrutinized. But I don’t believe the speaker wants to say that psychology has merged into neuroscience. Why then the talk about the brain as the object of psychological investigation? Is psychology a science? It depends on what you mean by ‘psychology’ and ‘science’!

 

§  Now defining science is surprising because there is no standard definition that everybody agrees on. But most people would probably agree with this: science is systematically observing natural events, and then using those observations to develop laws and principles. Then those principles are tested through the scientific method, that list of steps you probably learned in your first science class – observation, hypothesis, experimentation, analysis, and conclusion.

 

·         Well, I wouldn’t because it is not clear what it means. What is it to observe ‘systemically’; what is a ‘natural event’? What is a ‘law’? What is a ‘principle’? And what is the difference between them? Notice how the method perfectly matches the object it is supposed to investigate: the clock-like universe. Now anyone who has any understanding of science can recognize how over-simplified this understanding is (he suggests some important qualifications below, but they don’t get to the heart of the oversimplification).

 

·         In the morning I listened to a fugue of Bach. Imagine a psychologist systematically observing what he takes to be a ‘natural event.’ What would he see? What would make the observations ‘systematic’? Well, he doesn’t see much. Blinks, twitches, scratches, a few slight twisting or turning movements, steady breathing, certain facial expressions (perhaps using math to describe them?), etc. etc. etc. All my brain and body events are in principle observable (e.g. hormonal changes, neurological changes, etc.) Perhaps he goes on to observe other people listening to a Bach fugue: sometimes he observes similar kinds of bodily events; sometimes very different ones. I guess what makes it systematic is first of all the purpose of observing events of something ‘listening to a Bach fugue’ – which is hardly natural but gives the observations a focus, and prevents the observations from being totally random. Why? Perhaps to understand the psychology of responding to music. In any case, systematic observations are always focused by a certain intent and purpose. We know this even from the natural sciences: a scientist does not just start observing but observes events already partly conceived in a certain way as relevant or not for a particular theoretical purpose – falsifying a particular hypothesis about what makes a person tick.

 

·         Three things need to be said about this picture of things. 1)If by ‘natural events’ and ‘systematic observation’ the scientific psychologist means to exclude the whole idea of ‘meaning’ from the practice of listening to a Bach fugue – what makes music different from the mere sound waves produced in a song; what makes the experience of listening to music, the unique kind of pleasure the beauty of a musical work can afford and the meaning such a piece can have for a person (for me, a kind of substitute for prayer, but also many other meanings) – no such consideration is by any standard a ‘natural event’. The point is this: if psychology blocks out the very idea of meaning because it imagines itself to be investigating something that works like a clock – my inner feelings, intentions, thoughts, meanings on this understanding being nothing but the effect of certain unseen mechanical processes – then rather than being a science of my soul (psyche in Greek) but is the science of explaining away my soul, of reducing it to categories used to understand inorganic nature insofar as it behaves in ways analogous to a clock. 2) The scientific process of blocking out meanings and emotions is itself one meaningful expression; you cannot get outside of meaning. Science is like a telescope or a microscope – it reveals things about the physical universe that are not visible to the naked eye of common sense; the reflective eye of wisdom, contemplation, philosophy; or the poetic eye of art, religion, myth. But if science – here, psychology conceived and practiced as science – imagines its microscope in the only way answering the questions like ‘What is the soul? What is a human being?; or imagines these questions are reducible to the question What makes us tick? – then we have left the realm of science far behind and are dealing with an unrecognized totalizing, reductionist metaphysical interpretation of reality as a whole. And since science does not take place in a vacuum, we must ask what motivates this metaphysical interpretation of reality? And we must answer: even as the modernist Entzauberung of nature (disenchantment of the world; emptying of all intrinsic, symbolic meaning) was the prelude to power over nature, typically resulting in the rape of nature for profit, so the will to see scientific psychology as the only legitimate psychology, however well-intended, is a prelude to power over human nature, with the same potential to do to human nature what science-technology-capitalism has done to the rest of nature. Indeed, an investigation into the role of scientific psychology in the practice of mass manipulation through the media, from corporate advertising to Russian disinformation, would be illuminating. Psychology can be practiced as a science, of course; but it needs strict monitoring by ethical authorities when so practiced, as the potential for weaponizing its findings is so great. The danger is human nature becomes reduced to the picture of human nature scientific psychology makes of it at any given time (e.g. Frederick Taylor’s scientific factory management theory; B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World). 3) Is psychology a science? Depends on what you mean by ‘psychology’ and ‘science’. I would just point out that in fact there are serious conceptions of psychology that are not scientific in Green’s sense: for example, Viktor Frankel’s logotherapy with its emphasis on meaning or Carl Rogers's humanistic psychology. And there are serious conceptions of science that do not conform in the least to Green’s simple model (the Greek conception, for example).

 

§  Still these are just basic guidelines and most branches of science will operate a little differently from one another. Like, particle physics can’t directly observe the Higgs boson. Instead, they rely on statistics to know it’s there. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist or that physics isn’t actually science. The so-called rules of science all depend on the type of work a scientist is doing, and psychology is no exception.

 

·         These are valid points. I want to focus on the reality of what cannot be observed in physics and psychology. Of course, direct observation is impossible at the subatomic level; physics relies on its general theories, the observation of effects, and description through mathematical equations. However complex this is in practice, it makes sense based on the foundational assumptions of physics about the object of their study – the material universe as describe-able and/or predictable by means of mathematical equations. The problem with the analogy to the mind is this: what cannot be observed, meaning, the human spirit, does not fit in with the foundational assumptions of physics. If the foundational assumptions of physics are not taken as metaphysically absolute conditions of reality, but as an aspect, a level of a more complex reality, then no philosophical problem arises. If, however, psychology assumes the foundational assumptions of physics as an absolute metaphysical truth applying to everything in the universe including the human mind, then that which is not observable is simply written off as unreal.

 

Again, this is wearisome work. I would put most academic philosophy professors to sleep (others I might upset). And yet on YouTube – and I suspect many introductory college classrooms – distortedly metaphysical versions of subjects like psychology. Psychology is often a lifestyle (complete with metaphysics and values) parading as science.