Quote:
|
I took the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, and let me tell you, that test took 600 seemingly unrelated questions, and put together a profile that knew my deepest darkest secrets.
|
I have yet to see a test like that where it doesn't boil down to asking "do you have a penis?", then at the end saying "we have determined you are male!"
Quote:
|
Hard Sciences - Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Astronomy, Georgraphy, Geology, Mathematics
|
While there exists Experimental Mathematics, a surprising amount of mathematics is as unrelated to the scientific method as eating dinner.
Quote:
|
The point of scientific method is to reduce the variables so that you can have a control group and a study group, within the study group ALL variables are to be eliminated save for the one variable you are hypothesizing is responsible for the experimented result.
|
That's true for the easy sciences.
My answer:
Psychology is a science, but a hard one.
Astronomy is another hard science, for other reasons.
Experimantal Mathematics is the easiest science we have found, followed by Physics.
Just because psychology is studying something that is difficult to study, doesn't mean it isn't a science.
From the other thread:
Quote:
|
You can take scientific experiments and in the exact same conditions repeat the experiment and get the same results.
|
False. Quantum Mechanics gives you "if you repeat the experiment like this 1000 times, you will get X events like this, 19 times out of 20". You do exactly the same conditions, and you get different results.
You can't predict exactly how many times the even will happen, all you can predict is the probability.
The same can also be said of most chaotic systems: orbital mechanics cannot predict the orbits of the planets indefinately, climatology can't predict weather with 100% certainty, hell most hardware generates random noise which has to be filtered out. (note: I am not implying that QM's randomness is due to chaos) This is because you cannot actually generate the "same initial conditions".
Astronomy and cosmology are both another example: they cannot generate conditions, but they are still a science.
The easy sciences are the ones we have progressed the furthest in. The hard sciences, we are still taking baby steps. Which makes doing science in the realm of psychology hard and you don't get easy results, but you can still do science.
Science is not the scientific method. Science is not having a simple problem to find an answer for.