From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!floyd!cmcl2!philabs!sdcsvax!davidson
Newsgroups: net.misc
Title: Re: REAL Sciences Don"t Eat Quiche (reply)
Article-I.D.: sdcsvax.2128
Posted: Tue Jun 22 00:47:44 1982
Received: Sun Jun 27 01:46:24 1982
References: utzoo.2184

Before settling into graduate school in computer science, I had the
opportunity to be part of a modern psychological research laboratory,
and based on that experience I can say without qualification that
psychology is a science in the strictest sense.  Psychology uses some
of the most sophisticated models and paradigms of all of the sciences.
Where most sciences are still tied to Vary One Thing at a Time,
psychologists use powerful multivariate experimental designs.  And
schematic models of reasoning, which have just been discovered by
workers in Artificial Intelligence, were invented by a psychologist
a hundred years ago (Bartlett), and have been quite valuable ever since.

I believe the authors of some of the recent flames about psychology are
confused about two things.  First, they think that clinical psychology,
as currently practiced, has much to do with the science.  As far
as I can see, this is simply not the case.  Experimental and cognitive
psychologists have successfully discovered many of the properties of
some of the subsystems of the human information processing system,
including parts of the visual processing system, auditory processing
system and various components of the memory systems.  What they simply
do not have, is much understanding of how mental illness works, or
whether it is appropriate to describe it as an illness.  (Actually,
a number of disorders involving organic damage have been well explained
by psychologists and neurophysiologists.  It is the functional disorders
that are mysterious.)  To the extent that experimental and cognitive
psychologists do have something to offer to clinical practitioners,
the latter are often not aware of it.

Second, many people have been taken in by the recent (well, up to
about ten or fifteen years ago) American obsession with Behaviorism.
How this strange theoretical framework came to dominate this continent
is of some interest to historians of science, but modern psychologists
are simply glad that behaviorist theories have finally been abandoned
as unworkable.  It seems that the computer metaphor had a lot to do
with the abandonment of behaviorism, but this does not explain why
Americans got into it in the first place, whereas others did not.
(The most recent psychological models show a picture of the human
information processing system quite unlike that of the modern computer,
but for a period of about five years, the computer was a very important
metaphor for psychological theories.)

I am happy to say though, that although there is much misunderstanding
of psychology in many quarters, this is not the case with the best
people in artificial intelligence and neurophysiology, who have
cooperated with cognitive psychologists, cognitive anthropologists and
several other cognitive disciplines to form the productive new field of
cognitive science.

So please don't quote Freud, Jung, Skinner, or Psychology Today as an
example of why psychology is a "soft science", lest I begin to quote
Kepler, Priestley and Science Digest as an example of why physics and
chemistry are a combination of magic and alchemy.  (I'm sorry, but I
can't think of any really awful recent physical scientists, although
I'm sure there are plenty.  I can think of plenty of non-recent good
psychologists, though; for example, Bartlett, James and Piaget.)



Greg Davidson