psychology isn’t science. it’s a grave mistake to read/interpret it a such. does that mean it’s useless? of course not: some of the findings (and i use findings very loosely) help us adjust our prior probabilities. if we’re right in the end, we were lucky. otherwise we just weren’t.
I think psychology is very successful at categorizing abd treating mental illnesses. The DSM is really a monument and hold for most of its part very well to scrutiny.
Where psychology is massively failing to replicate is in trying to characterise healthy individuals. Typically the work of Kahneman.
But that's what interest people and sells, pop psychology.
Genuinely curious, how would you scrutinize a categorization tool that includes both causes and effects in its key?
I'm only tangentially following the whole autism/Asperger's/ADD/ADHD development, and I'm growing more and more convinced that all these categories are mostly arbitrary constructs grown out of random history and academia politics. Happy to be proved wrong here, though.
it’s fundamentally unscientific at this point. much of our current science lies in the realm of natural law. so far we haven’t found any laws that govern human behavior. what we know, with considerable certainty, is that behavior can be positively influenced. but at the point of action, nothing we know of compels any specific/predictable behavior. until we have found rigid laws of reasons that apply to both the brute and the civilized, any ‘discoveries’ of psychology are reports of someone’s idiosyncrasies, imho.
There's nothing about the scientific method that requires the process to output tidy little laws to be deserving of being called science.
Some fields are quite lucky that the universe is so elegantly organized, but for that isn't true for the overwhelming majority of fields with as many degrees of freedom as biological systems and anything more complex.
That doesn't mean we can't conduct experiments that reproduce.
The history of science generally doesn't seem to be characterized by shifts in theory due to empirical disproofs. Usually, when theories are "disproved", we don't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater, but rather, we want to stick to the theory and try to patch it up. When Uranus didn't seem to be moving according to the predictions of Newtonian mechanics (a disproof!), physicists didn't throw out Newton, they posited the existence of another planet. And they turned out to be right, Neptune existed.
See Chalmers' What is This Thing Called Science? for an introduction to these kinds of topics, or Kuhn and Feyerabend's work for historical responses. (And the Duhem-Quine thesis for the "auxiliary hypothesis" response to falsifiability I hinted at with my example.)
