If something cannot be predicted as it occurs at random, always, any attempts to establish a causal relationship that explains this phenomenon is useless. A theory that is no better than random chance is nothing more than wishful thinking. Is psychology wishful thinking? Some parts it’s hard to disagree isn’t. Some may argue all of it is.
The most predictive parts of psychology, and, therefore, most scientific are made-so because of statistical methodologies. Statistics is the study of randomness. The normal distribution is what we except when things behave exactly randomly. If we can see that something isn’t happening at random, then, perhaps, we can try to understand a causal relationship between variables that affect the instance of that thing. To reify this idea, let’s think about the example of smoking cigarettes and lung cancer. The chance of getting lung cancer isn’t completely random. The possibility of getting lung cancer is determined by factors such as genetics, environment, pollution, smoker status and so on. Somebody who smokes cigarettes isn’t guaranteed to get lung cancer — in fact only about 10% of people who smoke regularly get lung cancer according to some estimates. Regardless of this, the chance of getting lung cancer if you smoke is above those who do not smoke. Therefore, we have established a causal relationship between these two variables: lung cancer occurrence and smoker history. In light of what we know about medicine, nobody these days can seriously argue against this correlation and accepts this more-or-less as conventional knowledge.
The same is not said about many things in psychology. When we talk about statistical power, reliability, validity and so forth concerning psychology, many object to it having the same level of scientific-backing as statistical methods used in medical science (epidemology). The study of mental illness is mostly the domain of psychiatry which falls under the discipline of medicine, although clinical psychology, neurobiology, and neuroscience also conduct research in this domain. So, this dissolves into the demarcation problem: What is science and what is non-science?
A non-science or pseudoscience has zero predictive power. You could have the most beautiful theory but if it does not accurately explain any empirical phenomenon, it is useless. Mathematicians and theoretical physicists are perhaps the most acutely aware of this. String theory in physics and group theory in mathematics aren’t representative of empirical reality at all. Maybe one day string theory may be shown to be an accurate model of reality but mathematical objects do not depend on empirical reality. They are shown to exist by using logical necessity. The less use mathematics has in explaining physical reality some say the more beautiful this is. We still call mathematics a “formal science”. This is a separate category to empirical science but relevant to this enquiry.
We determine something is an empirical science if it follows the scientific method and produces strong evidence that its hypotheses are supported. Hypotheses such as “Does psychopathology exist?”, “Does schizophrenia exist?”, and “Is there any neurobiological support for how addictive behaviours work?” have been supported by many positive experimental studies. The fatal floor found within psychology is that there is always an exception. Somebody may have lied about having a mental disorder, other unforeseen factors meant a different psychological manifestation occurred compared to what was statistically expected. Once a violation of these supposed ‘truths’ uncovered by psychiatry (which psychology builds upon in many cases) are undermined in this way, people will start to claim the whole discipline is a pseudoscience or non-science and should be relegated into the realm of bad philosophy.
Nothing is absolutely certain in empirical reality, and it is likely that even the most surest theories we have about how physical laws work will be showed to be wrong in the future in one way or another. This happened in the past with Heliocentrism, and theories of how gravity and subatomic particles work. We use the most certain methods we can garner to attempt to uncover and interpret objective reality as best we can know it. We can’t even be sure that we aren’t 100% wrong as to what this really is like (Kant’s noumenal realm).
Yes, a lot of psychology may sound like “folk psychology” to some, but it’s not always wrong and often is in alignment with what we expect to see through scientific studies in medicine and neuroscience. It’s when psychologists project their own ideas about reality onto their studies is where their discipline loses credibility. Freudian psychology is a case in point. However, even Freudian theories can be shown to have some limited experimental predictability from time to time, but for the most part aren’t taken very seriously by psychology researchers. What makes “good” or “useful” psychology as opposed to “scientific” psychology might be a more important aim of making the world a better place.
Related:
Is “Social Science” an Oxymoron? Will That Ever Change?
Psychology’s brilliant, beautiful, scientific messiness.
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