Ethical systems and critical thinking

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Pavlov was a psychologist and did his classical conditioning research as a psychologist.

Fine. The empirically sound parts of psychology are trivial.

ruveyn

Quite - some seem to think science is something that happens to people we then call scientists, rather than something people become scientists to do. Kind of like it's fallibility makes it infallible. Have you read any Mary Midgley? She's fantastic on things like this. Facts are nothing on their own, and are always fitted into theories and concepts that are a lot harder to falsify than the facts themselves. Her answer is that we don't need to do away with this - if we even could - but that we need to be aware of it.

re 'pseudo' sciences. There are areas of human experience that need to be thought about and talked about and analysed, and in a satisfying way. What matters is concepts and theories can be discussed and argued and tested. It's not as easy as, say, adding chemical a to compound b, but even a lot of science isn't that easy. We are here talking because of Psychology (yes yes, computer engineering, telecommunications, etc).

I think that's a value judgment more than anything else. What you may see as trivial may be very important to someone else.

Classical conditioning is useful for a lot of people. It can help train service animals. Understanding it can also help people understand why they may have irrational fears/phobias (some phobias are caused by classical conditioning), because sometimes knowing why something in particular makes one extremely uncomfortable can help them recognize that their fear or hatred of that thing is irrational.

Psychology doesn't need to have anything to say about the neurological mechanism, though. We understand things at a human level. I'm sure if it were all measured, I could neurologically document the effects the sh***y behaviour of my stepfather had on me. I could be told about this brain activity and that rise or drop in a chemical x. But it wouldn't mean a thing until they started talking about anxiety and depression and self-esteem and so on, translating the measurements back to their (supposed) human experience terms. The 'talking cure' can be remarkably effective. Its 'proof' is in the improvements of the patient - if it makes it more 'scientific', you can also measure the patient's neurology in a lab as she goes along. We have an inner life - toothache is as real as teeth. We need language to talk about it effectively.

Proving that there is no argument that cannot be snatched from the jaws of defeat by moving the goalposts.