psych as a science

Psychology as a Science Psychologies earliest discovery can be dated back to the 17th century. When Rene Descartes introduced the idea of dualism. Dualism is defined as the mind and body, being separate from one another in order to create the human experience. Psychology has always been a branch of philosophy until the 1870s, where it was developed into an independent scientific field in Germany. Psychology as a field of study began in 1879, when Wilhelm Wundt founded the first laboratory exclusively for psychological research in Leipzig. Wundt was also the first person to refer to himself as a psychologist and wrote the first textbook on psychology: Principles of Physiological Psychology. Psychology had its separation from the field of philosophy in the late 1870s, at this point Psychology became its own branch of science. Science greatly revolves around Empiricism, which states that the only true source of knowledge comes through our senses, and experience. By gaining knowledge through experiment, lead to the development of scientific enquiry. Scientific enquiry focuses on three main topics, what to do with a theory, the foundation of your hypotheses, and actual methods of enquiry. The main method of enquiry in science is the experiment. An experiment is conducted with an independent, dependent, and extraneous variable. This creates a cause and effect for each experiment. This is why I believe psychology is considered a science. It follows the same guidelines as any other experiment that would be conducted in a Biology class. Science is the human attempt to better understand the history of the natural world and how the natural world works, with observable physical evidence as the basis of that understanding. The main idea in Psychology is to find out how mind and behavior work. The only way to find out the answer to this is by experiment along with trial and error. All science is conducted with experiments that help to draw conclusions on theories. This is exactly what psychology does. Therefore is should be considered a science. Science requires empirical evidence as well as theories. Science implies both methodology and content. Methodology is the precise guidelines philosophy follows, it is a study of structure, meta theories-theories-hypotheses-data. Dr. O'Brien asked us if you really get feedback from such theories, and the answer is yes. A hypotheses is an educated guess on a predicted outcome, you'll either prove to be right or wrong. In doing so we must gather all our experiments contents and try to prove our theories based upon it. Even though psychology should be considered a science there are still a few limitations that can be holding psychology back. Objectivity, verification and testability to only name a few. Science states that there are laws of human behavior that apply to each person. A psychological explanation is often restricted to specific times and places. Objectivity is a major problem in psychology. Due to humans studying humans, it is very difficult to study the behavior in an unbiased approach. Verification may be an impossible to prove. You can never truly prove a hypothesis, you will never be 100 % confident even if your evidence supports the hypothesis until the end of time. Karl Popper argues that the best hypotheses are those we can disprove. He says that, "if you know something is not true, then we know something for sure." Testability also cannot be accurately measured. Due to there being many variables that influence human behavior, it is impossible to control these variables effectively. Therefore you cannot draw any precise conclusions. Only what your experiment has lead you to believe. From my previous knowledge of Psychology, to trying to determine if Psychology is a science I have concluded that Psychology is indeed a science. There are in fact some outliers that can lead you to believe psychology is not a science such as the verification and objectivity. These points do put psychology on the border of being a science. However science is the human attempt to better understand the history of the natural world and how the natural world works. This is exactly what psychologists do on a daily basis. They try to find out who, what, when, where, why, and how. They test for this the same way a scientist would. Psychology is in fact a science and should be recognized as one.