The Philosophy Café

The Philosophy Café at Harvard Book Store is a monthly gathering meant for the informal, relaxed, philosophical discussion of topics of mutual interest to participants. No particular expertise is required to participate, only a desire to explore philosophy and its real-world applications. More information can be found at www.philocafe.org.

The Philosophy Café is held on the third Wednesday of each month, from 7:30-9:30 pm, in the Used Book department on the lower level of Harvard Book Store.

Join us at the April 18th Philosophy Café for a debate over what makes good science, with a look at psychology and neuroscience.

Modern clinical and research psychology is threatened by the claim that it is not rigorous or “hard” enough to study human behavior accurately, and that it may ultimately be replaced by neuroscience. This challenge has been issued on many fronts--from philosophers, policy makers, funding agencies and other scientists. In spite of the meta-theoretical research and empirical findings produced by psychologists and other social scientists that opposes this claim, the criticism continues to have serious consequences for the health and stability of psychology as both a clinical and an academic discipline.

One way to approach these problems is to consider the role of language in scientific theory. An important part of the development of scientific accounts of phenomena is the production of terms or labels for the entities under study; these are commonly referred to as “theoretical entities.” Theoretical entity generation can be understood as a process definition, whose goal is to establish an unambiguous link between a sign (a word, a term in a mathematical model, etc.) and the phenomenon under investigation. Such rigorously defined theoretical entities become a solid foundation for the operations performed during scientific testing and analysis, as they avoid the shifting character and context dependency of natural language.

Questions to consider:

1.) What makes psychology and the social sciences “soft” sciences?
2.) Is this label necessarily pejorative? If so, what is wrong or inferior about a discipline’s “softness”?
3.) Are all sub-disciplines within a certain domain uniformly “hard” or “soft”?
4.) If the properties of “hardness” and “softness” help form our opinion of the quality of scientific research, can we use them to select between scientific accounts of the same phenomena (e.g., neuroscience and psychology for human behavior) under the assumption that the “harder” account is always “better” (i.e., more accurate, powerful, complete, etc.)?
5.) Does psychology provide tools to identify aspects of human behavior and emotion(such as fear, anxiety, shyness, bullying, assertiveness) accurately enough for scientific study? Does neuroscience provide tools to do this?
6.) If psychology is replaced with neuroscience--even to the degree of the excision of psychological terms from the natural language, as Paul and Patricia Churchland and Daniel Dennet sometimes suggest--what will become of the referred-to entities? How will we understand ourselves without recourse to terms that already describe our thoughts, feelings, and emotions?

Suggested Readings:
Scientific realism (SEP): http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/realism-sem-challenge/#Sem
Scientific realism (Wikipedia): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_realism
E.O. Wilson:  American Scientist article - what good science is and does:
http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/1998/1/scientists-scholars-knaves-and-fools
Video: Neuromania? The possibilities and pitfalls of ourfascination with brains  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ku-GmndXDXo