o · outcry!

Clearly a case of hysteria. Didn't you get your penis as a child?

Meh. It is difficult to study anything besides behaviour in as rigorous a fashion, but when one doesn't attempt to, one misses a big part of the story.

Maybe less rigorous ideas on psychology can't be applied as readily, but studying the 'how' and ignoring the 'why' feels hollow to me. Human minds aren't physical particles or biological systems, where you can just observe a correlation or a cause-and-effect, and extrapolate the whole story; they are conscious, self-modelling entities, and that makes things a lot more complicated. And again, if you don't bother asking *why* people act the way they do... what's the point? Isn't that, really, the most important part?

And you shouldn't put "social" sciences in scare quotes. Firstly, because scare quotes are evil. And also, because some social sciences are quite science-ey. Sociology for example, or my darling economics.

Also this was meant as a reply to the first post, not to the comment. >_> User malfunction.

Sociology is not at all sciencey, and economists themselves admit that they can't predict things reliably. They're called 'soft' sciences.

Otherwise, see Leela's comment below!

Scare quotes are still evil!

Both sociology and economics are adequately sciency, and can make predictions, though admittedly nothing as clear cut as "if particle A hits particle B result C will occur." Economists study tons and tons of well-researched data, form hypotheses to try and explain it, test these against evidence, and do all that good sciency stuff. When an economic theory is observed not to match what actually seems to happen in the world, we toss it out and try to build new models.

I think the real problem is the subject matter. We are studying the behaviour of collectives of human beings. There is an unavoidable degree of un-predictability here, although general trends and processes can be, and are, identified. This is not a flaw in the way the science is being done, and we work as hard as we can to do the best science we can given the complexity of the subject.

Really, randomness is a euphimistic excuse for "we don't quite understand the factors of the universe". It is indeed a flaw in the science being done, but perhaps too often because we tend to ignore so many of the factors that moderate the outcomes. Economists and political theorists can ignore the impact of the individual choice, erecting more policy than genuine truism, diminishing them to philosophical speculation.

Particle A does hit B to cause C. Just because C doesn't occur in conditions D, E, and F doesn't mean it doesn't occur otherwise.

Critique of the subjectively loaded aside, the 'how', the 'what' and the 'why' aren't so mutually exclusive; why does emotion come about? Emotion is a change in metabolic activity primarily associated with the amygdala due to perceived stresses, facilitating an appropriate response. Through that, I can equally answer a question of 'how does emotion occur', just as 'what is an emotion'.
Certainly, neither of the latter questions' answers are entirely complete, and nor is the example, but it offers logical conclusions to objective evidence that includes subjective (though often an objective average) experience.
Simply because behaviouralism focuses so heavily on mechanisms of learning and reinforcement, it doesn't actively preclude questions of 'why'; it rather acknowledges that the 'why' is simply a logical cause of effect, and is of itself part-and-package of the phenomenon.

"Anyone who goes to a psychiatrist needs to get their head examined."

...The brain is the most complex mechanism that we have ever found. It has been very hard to isolate certain functions and get them to work predictably- Skinner and Pavlov are well-respected by the scientific community because they did just that. Sadly, it's only neuroscientists that make real strides to map out the complexities; it seems like all the other fields of psychology are just making predictions of what the neuroscientists are eventually going to find.

Yes yes yes! That exactly.

I think neuroscience and psychology might be looking at different layers of the same thing. Understanding the structure of the human brain will not explain the human mind, which is a process or pattern for which the brain is the medium. Even if it were possible to "see" thoughts and ideas represented as physical phenomena in the brain, doing so would not help one understand what those thoughts and ideas and the relationships between them mean to the mind that is having them. Trying to understand the mind by studying the brain is like trying to understand software by studying the computer hardware on which it is running: theoretically possible, but only if you're willing to somewhat miss the point. Such are my thoughts. >_> I really think focusing on this misses some of the point of psychology, which is to really try and understand the mind, and why we think what we think and why the things that mean stuff to us mean what they do, and so on.

Truly, I think psychology has a grander purpose than merely observing behaviour, and would further argue that if a subject cannot be studied as rigorously as we wish it could, that does not mean it is not worth time and energy to study it as best as we can. After all, what is most important to science is not the stuff that is easiest to study and analyse in a clear-cut way, but the things that are most important to understand -- and what could be more important to understand than the nature of our very minds? A scientific approach is the best way to understand, well, anything, so we must apply it as best as we can, ever-aware of the limitations of its application in certain contexts, but never disparaging of its noble goals. -_-

I think your analogy may be specious. The parallel circuitry of a computer is substantially both like and unlike the neural networks of the mind: while computers can re-code (magnetically or otherwise) vast strips of core memory, the brain features wonderful methods of re-wiring itself. It only seems faster and more advanced than the computer simply because it can do this and do it millions of times at once.

Really, studying the peripheral nervous system might be more apt a metaphor: you're examining an electrical system heavily focused on simple 1-0 input/output mechanisms: action/reaction. However, to apply a more defeatest mentality to perhaps the most concrete, observable, and measurable elements of human psychology is an effort that is mired in either irrelevant or illogical dogma.

Would we know that much about the liver or heart if we hadn't dissected them, measaured their metabolic processes, examined their circuitry, or palpated and assessed every last possible dimension? The mind is one of the final frontiers of human biology, if largely because we treated it as being a useless organ up until post-Renaissance areas (excepting those who indicated the importance of the head via trepanation and other practices).

Perhaps you are correct in describing the insufficiency of certain practices: examining underlying electro-chemical gradients, or macro-metabolism may not reveal precise mechanisms for the development of self. Still, physiology's ability to connect structure with function, thought with brain; these are so infinitely applicable to medical and scientific development. Please don't discard it so readily.

The brain was never useless...it was used for tanning hides. Granted, I don't know how many human hides were tanned, but I bet its more than zero. You know, humans being the sick fucks that they are, and all.

"Pavlov's Pothead...I hear a bong clink and my eyes start to water."

Schrodinger's pothead: If locked alone in a room with a lighter that may or may not light (but activates independent of output), the stoner is given a pipe loaded with skunk attached to the lighter. Because the stoner does not by any measure constitute a conscious observer, he exists simultaneously in a state of being stoned and not stoned until confirmed by observation.

Freud's pothead: Oral Fixation combined with lack of superego integrity. Treat with cocaine.

Marxist pothead: Bogarting is a bourgeois practice; Puff, puff, pass.

You've got me giggling like a school girl over here!