this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2025
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And why don't you think psychology fits this?
Various meta analysis have found that the results of 50%+ of all studies in the field are non reproducible. It could be as high as 70%+.
Again this does not mean that it isn’t a valid field of knowledge, it just not a science yet. People somehow take offense at this because I guess they feel like I’m invalidating the field. I actually only invalidating the validity of their findings so far which is more like a “sorry, try again until you find the fundamental rules of your field”. There’s also this pervasive attitude that all fields must be a science in order to be valuable which is just not true.
The term “social science” reeks of insecurity to me because other than using the scientific method, they are not a sciences at all, but I guess academics needed a way to to defend themselves from the bullying physicists.
My personal opinion is that psychology ignores biology too much, and insists on humans as purely socially constructed beings. If they started looking more at how our biology is the fundamental mold for our psychology, they might start making real progress towards being a science. But then maybe it wouldn’t be psychology anymore.
Im asking these questions to asses what you actually understand science to be.
Do you have a degree, or better yet a terminal degree in a science field? What is your actual academic experience in doing social science experiments?
I have a degree, but not in science. Does that make me unqualified to state that the field of psychology, and most other social sciences lack the epistemic rigor of something like physics or biology and therefore are not real sciences?
I’ll repeat it, psychology is a science in much the same way that medieval medicine was a science. It may one day become an actual science much like medieval medicine became a science.
What is your field?
That would depend on your actual field. If you had a masters or phd focusing on the philosophy of science, then yes. If you have a degree in anything else I would suggest considering that your lack of experience within science might be what is behind your misconception.
My education was in political science and international relations. At the undergraduate level for most programs political science is more pre-law or governmental studies and does not seem like a science. When you go for your masters it suddenly become very much a statistcal science.
What the anti-science (not you) ,science agnostic (not you), and those without a background in science (this is you) typically miss is that not all sciences are created equal. Things that rely on metastudies, as many social sciences do, typically will be less conclusive than say an experiment that can be observed directly, but that doesn't mean both are not science.
Pretending that social sciences are science in the same vein as the natural sciences is academic insecurity. The validity of your field does not hinge on it producing objective knowledge but rather on whether it is useful or not. I’d say psychology is useful, and that alone makes it a valid field but it does not produce objective knowledge consistently so it is not a scientific field. Using the scientific method or math to conduct experiments does not make it a science especially when your data points come from self reported surveys or can be manipulated with sampling methods or even simple unconscious bias. Now do the natural sciences suffer from this too? Yes, but to a much lesser degree and as the methods and tools have become more refined so does the science become more certain and the knowledge produced more objective. Their primitive stages are not different from the state in which psychology exists in the present, but I would not have considered them science then just like i do not consider psychology a science now.
When the basis of psychology becomes rooted in the biology of humans and the the chemical processes that give embodiment to our consciousness, maybe it will become scientific. And also when a mind reading machine is invented because I believe that’s really the breakthrough that psychology needs in order to make reproducible experiments, self reporting is simply not reliable.
No one is "pretending" anything.
You literally have no experience or knowledge to determine what science is and is not since you have no background in any form of it.
Im sorry if the above offends you but it is the xase that a lack of education and/or experience in a field does mean you aren't going to be someone who has an understanding of it.
If ypu are interested in learning why these are seen as sciences consider looking into the philosophy of science. You might be surprised what you learn when you try to.
It doesn’t offend me because I don’t think it’s true. I don’t need to play baseball to know that they guys playing basketball saying it’s baseball are not actually playing baseball. I can observe for myself the difference in the game. Similarly I can observe that psychology fails time and time again to produce objective knowledge which is the intention of all science. You have failed to refute this point and instead try to wave it away by saying:
If you can refute how psychology can be a science without producing any objective knowledge maybe I’ll read any works of the philosophy of science that you think will further convince me. I’m currently reading Kant so it’s somewhat adjacent anyways.
This isn’t like understanding a child’s game so I would say your baseball analogy is a false equivalence.
That isn’t ad hominem. Suggesting that the roots of your misunderstanding is due to your lack of experience or education in the field is not a personal attack. I am also not making an emotional appeal which is an alternate form of ad hominem.
Ad hominem would be if I suggested you couldn’t have an understanding because you are stupid (which I am absolutely in no way suggesting that you are unintelligent). I have not done this. I have suggested your lack of expertise in the field might be a good reason for you to question your own conclusions.
You dont need to become an expert but if you want to understand what we believe science is this is the place to start as the other place is a terminal degree in a science field which would be silly to suggest. The philosophy of science is the best field for you to get the answers to the uncertainty you have in your understanding
This is also not an example of ad hominem.
Why not read about the philosophy of science to expand your understanding? Why do you need to do it because I proved something to you?
You've successfully turned the discussion from being about "can a field which does not produce reproducible results be a scientific field?" to "what are the requirements to judge whether a field is scientific?"
I have a PhD in chemistry, and a good bunch of published scientific articles. Besides that I've studied philosophy of science for half a year. I assume that should make me qualified (in your eyes) to reiterate the questions and points made by !plebcouncilman@sh.itjust.works: "Can a field that is largely incapable of producing reproducible results be regarded as scientific?", "Why do so many fields that are incapable of producing reproducible results insist on being called scientific?".
That’s the thing you haven’t proven anything, in fact you haven’t given a single argument in favor hat psychology is science. The only thing you said is that psychology is a science because it uses statistical method and the scientific method but that does not make it a science.
There’s too many things to read and too little time to read them so I would appreciate at least you trying to make an argument in your favor, by the time I get to read what you want me to I will forget this argument entirely.
It lacks predictability and reproduceability. At least to a certain extend. As long as every diagnosis is "this most likely is" or even "could be", it is not science.
But you can still look down on economists, who are somewhere between crystal ball readers or tea leaf interpreters and random number generators on that behalf.
Economists aren't trying to predict the future. That's a misconception that is done away with in the first few days of intro.
Economists set option prices. That is literally trying to predict the future.
Edit: To be fair, I shouldn't say "economists" in general. There are plenty of good economists out there that understand that economics is not a predictive science, I know a couple personally. But there are definitely some economists out there that think their degree lets them predict the unpredictable.