Re: Conflict Survey for Men

In article <877j11c3to.fsf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Charlton Wilbur <cwilbur@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
whheydt@xxxxxxxxxxx (Wilson Heydt) writes:

One wonders if there is any commonality between psych students
and education majors? One can see which side of C. P. Snow's
_The Two Cultures_ they sit on, even though psych--if it were
self respecting and rigorous--*ought* to be on the side with
the sciences and engineering, but just doesn't manage it.

Oh, *please* don't try to foist psychology off on the humanities.
It's got an -ology on the end of it; let it be known as a science with
no rigor and no predictive value, rather than as a humanist field with
pretensions to objectity.

See, there are standards of argumentative rigor on both sides of the
two cultures, and psychology doesn't play nicely by *our* rules
either. As tolerant as we are of special cases and exceptions,
psychology doesn't really offer anything substantive except
statistics, which don't prove a damn thing beyond what the
number-fiddler wants them to.

(I see this in my field, music, all the time: some idiot can't come up
with a good explicative theory to explain something he or she has
observed, and so resorts to statistics, because numbers never lie.
This is called, quite pejoratively, "physics envy," because the
statistics that never lie also never illuminate, but somehow give the
impresson of Truth: and those envious of physics somehow manage to
miss the difficult step, which is the physicist looking at the numbers
and explaining why they form the pattern they do.)

I undestand your point... Part of the problem is, that to use
statistics, you have to have at least an effective hypothesis
behind them. Quantum mechanics is, in a number of respects,
a largely statistical field, but the statistics are based on
physical theory, so the results have to make sense in terms of
pre-established theory.

Psych lacks a theorhetical basis...so far as I know.

--
Hal Heydt
Albany, CA

My dime, my opinions.
.

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