Its my 3rd year of psychology, and ever since I’ve started studying psychology I’ve always seen psychology as a science not an art (although it is offered through arts faculty. And now psychology is under the department of medicine etc.)
So for 3 years I felt quite comfortable thinking about psychology as a science. We do sciencey things like experiements, critical reviewing of past articles, statistics etc
But now I’m being asked “Is psychology a science? If so what kind of science should it be?”
Most people will think ok I’ll define what science is and work from there. And then the second thought is to go to wikipedia and get the definition. But psy is so tight! References have to be from articles, though they allow electronic non article references … but its frowned upon…
By third year they “expect more of us” so I’m going to assume that using a dictionary is below expectations. But is someone going to actually write an article about what is science? Isn’t science something that everyone generally has an idea of, and if we are unsure we just check the dictionary for it??
And to make it more complicated there are different types of science:rationalism, logical positivism, falsificatonism and then the hardcore science… physics.
As mentioned earlier “We do sciencey things like experiements, critical reviewing of past articles, statistics etc”
So I thought that science would be logical positivism (which is like the evolved version of empiricalism which is basicly abotu experimentation). But where do these experiments start? From reading past experiment… but where does it all start from? At the very begining?!
Observation? Or just plain thinking?
