Psychology sub-forum?
I feel as though we need a category dedicated to topics pertaining to psychology. The intent is to create and attract a user base advanced in matters about psychology that is so intertwined with philosophy, that they would enjoy their stay here.
I can't even describe how many topics here are actually about psychology instead of philosophy. That's not to say that's a bad thing, as I enjoy psychology and topics pertaining philosophy and how they mesh; but, my hope is that we could draw a distinction when topics are more psychological than philosophical if that is possible at all.
I hope that made some sense.
My hope is to attract a user base that has formal training in psychology.
:cluck:
I can't even describe how many topics here are actually about psychology instead of philosophy. That's not to say that's a bad thing, as I enjoy psychology and topics pertaining philosophy and how they mesh; but, my hope is that we could draw a distinction when topics are more psychological than philosophical if that is possible at all.
I hope that made some sense.
My hope is to attract a user base that has formal training in psychology.
:cluck:
Comments (28)
My proposal is simply to invite more trained professionals to frequent the forum when issues pertaining to psychology arise. Or to put it more bluntly, we need more psych majors on the moderation team in my opinion.
That's my take. I don't expect the moderation team to be able to maintain such a distinction from arising, as that would be a monumental task.
Thanks for your consideration.
Wow, thanks for your service, heh. Guess not then.
Probably not. I'd find it interesting, but I'm not all that interested in 'academic philosophy' anyway.
There are a couple of Psyche majors here that I am aware of... :clap:
The question is: will they come forward?
And as always: if nominated will they run and if elected will they serve?
Some maybe for a second time on a moderator team....
How many are on it now? Maybe you know more than me. I'm not aware of what majors the mod team are although I believe everyone except @Hanover has had at least some formal schooling.
:rofl:
If the treatment of topics pertaining to law is any indication, the treatment of topics pertaining to psychology wouldn't be well received particularly if someone with formal training participated.
Just saying.
Moving papers from an inbox to an outbox requires no formal training.
As might surprise you, the moderation application process does not involve the submission of resumes, although we do require an extensive criminal background check and drug testing. Mine both came back positive. I persuasively argued that a positive could not be logically construed as a negative, and I was therefore selected. Had I not been quick on my feet with that response, I'd still be a commoner.
I don't quite understand what you mean by this. Care to expand?
Well, since one of my degrees is in social psychology I suppose I ought to try and mount a defence of it.
The best I can do is probably to liken it to sciences we all recognise as such. Take biology, for example. Recently there was some research into gene mutation rate and its effect on cancer. This was very careful and difficult research to carry out, and I'm sure I don't need to explain that this kind of research is crucial to many medical advances. The research (I don't fully understand it myself) found a specific rate of mutation with a particular chain of physiological response. The headline, however, was "60% of cancers down to nothing but bad luck" (or something like that). I'm not talking here about the headline in some tabloid written up from a press release, I'm talking about the title of the actual paper. A luminary no less than David Spiegelhalter himself was compelled to write to them pointing out that their results showed nothing of the sort. What they'd done is taken their careful measurements and way over-interpreted them in one biased direction. Their paper even opened with a statement that their intention was to reassure cancer victims that it wasn't their fault in any way. A noble aim, but not one appropriate to the detached approach science requires.
I understand physics even less than I understand biology, but I've read enough to be reasonably certain the same happens there. Careful measurements are reported in a way which goes significantly beyond what the measurements actually show, often by the actual scientists themselves.
Psychology is no different. It does make an attempt to gather careful measurements of what people actually do in certain circumstances. It does at least try to eliminate confounding variables, and people do try to repeat experiments with an aim of refining them, or highlighting flaws. It's also true that the conclusions reported, often by the scientists themselves, go way beyond what the measurements could reasonably be said to demonstrate, and usually do so with some bias. But, like the rest of science, I don't think we should let the reporting prevent us from taking those careful measurements, nor from using them to inform our own judgements. Wielding them like a gospel is certainly unwarranted, but I don't see what prevents us from making careful use of them in that which we readily acknowledge are speculative ventures anyway. No-one knows how or why humans behave the way we do, but that doesn't mean we have to be 'paralysed by hesitation' about it.
On the actual topic at hand - no, I don't think we should have a psychology sub-forum. We don't have an electrical engineering sub-forum. This is philosophy site and I think it's probably best it remains one.
Not everyone self identifies as a philosopher here, you are aware of that?
Absolutely, I certainly don't, but that doesn't get around the fact that this is a philosophy forum. Presumably we're all here because of a shared interest in philosophy, from amateur to student.
There are loads of really interesting general discussions here, many of which I've enjoyed taking part in, but in a sense, that's the beauty of the system as it is. To have a specific sub-forum for a non-philosophical topic would raise that particular subject above other matters of passing intetest; anthropology, physics, biology, maths, all of which have yielded interesting, but not strictly philosophical, discussions.
EDIT: Actually though, the Philosophy of Mind category seems to cover that.
[Edit: Cross posted]
And here is one that I wasn't even aware was within our ranks... :up:
Pseudonym is not alone in this.... :razz: True story. :100:
So firstly, I think I'm a bit more strict that you in my definitions. I don't take science to be a clearly defined set of activities, but rather (much after Quine) a set of properties an activity could have greater or lesser degrees of. Like 'tall', there are not only 'things which are tall' and 'things which are not tall', there's 'things which are more tall' and 'things which are less tall. So I take science to be more or less your first definition only, but things have that property to a greater or lesser extent. Your second part I would hesitate to include in 'science' because of the rather ambiguous 'organised'. Without an agreed definition here, you end up with just '... thinking about a determinate subject' which to me is too wide a definition to make the term useful.
Nonetheless, with the first definition. Research in psychology is a science. Being a psychologist (which I'm not) is not. In the same way as medical research is a science, but being a doctor is not.
A research paper in social psychology might start with a testable hyposesis, which, if good science, should be something along the lines of "people in situation X tend to exhibit behavior Y" and the experiments done will hopefully be more and more refined efforts to get at exactly 'situation X' and not 'situation X (plus a bit of A, B, and C, that we didn't control for). I know I run the risk of vastly over simplifying, but at its heart, science is simply asking what causes what, and broadly, its doing it by observing the effect with more and more control over the causes. Social psychology is just doing this with human behaviour, hence I consider it a science, just one whose results must always be presumed to be general guides, rather than the specific laws of something like physics.
Sociology, however, is bunk!
My impression is that input from actual practitioners of disciplines which become topics in this forum isn't sought, and when given is unwelcome.
Can we be clearer? "What" about sociology is "bunk"? Is it not a science? A sociologist could state a falsifiable hypothesis: "Rental agents discriminate against black people". The hypothesis can be tested by presenting potential renters to agents where the only significant difference is being a black person. This experiment has been done and it has been found that rental agents discriminate against black people -- when they are visually identified as black and when they are aurally identified as black (speech patterns tested in phone calls to rental agents).
What is not scientific about that sort of sociological experiment?
Much of sociology is descriptive or speculative. Many books, some of them in the category of sociology rather than history or psychology, have assessed the degree of acceptance by Germans of the National Socialist (Nazi) government between 1934 and 1945. The results vary by the methods of determining acceptance, approval, endorsement, etc. We Thought We Were Free by Milton Meyer conducted long interviews with 10 men from one medium sized German city immediately after the war (well, within a year or two). They represented the sort of vocational and class divisions one would have found in Germany during the first half of the 20th Century. Most of the men thought they were had been free, and were enthusiastic about the years during Nazi rule.
There is nothing "scientific" about Mayer's book, or most of the other books written about the Nazi Germany. The various books can be criticized for being poorly researched, being inaccurate, being very well documented, being thorough, and so on -- but they fit into the categories of history, or descriptive social studies.
History isn't a science either -- since we can't run experiments on the past (at least until we steal some really good time machines from an alien civilization). That doesn't mean "history is bunk" as Henry Ford thought.
Yes, let's start a therapy thread?
Sorry, just being facetious. At my old university there was a little friendly rivalry between sociology and social psychology and I couldn't help indulge in a little dig, just in case any were reading. Excellent defence though.
Thank you, I have been waiting for you. :snicker:
Now....one more that I am aware of that has yet to show.... :smirk: