tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5352450344824585503.post1255564470104526727..comments2023-10-20T02:20:45.487-05:00Comments on Patrick S. Forscher: The quest for (social) scientific truthUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5352450344824585503.post-38578824147852582752014-07-28T09:53:38.898-05:002014-07-28T09:53:38.898-05:00Excellent insights.Excellent insights.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06987545006207221297noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5352450344824585503.post-88004416414422136162011-08-12T17:59:57.307-05:002011-08-12T17:59:57.307-05:00I would add to this discussion that our philosophy...I would add to this discussion that our philosophy of science is rather antiquated and immature. We have, essentially, a Machian positivistism and operational definitionalism that was discredited long ago, but remains the primary methodological locus of psychological research. It's unfortunate, because Donald Campbell's evolutionary epistemology (or some version of it) is, in my opinion, a much better way of thinking about science, and he was a social scientist. Experiments should be primarily for discovering constraints on theory, selecting out hypotheses, and selecting out theories when hypotheses (or a significant number of hypotheses) fail critical tests against other theories. Instead, most of what we do is select in (by failing to rule out, statistically) hypotheses, and by extension, theories. Furthermore, we reject any other selection criteria as being "armchair philosophizing". In -principle arguments, for instance--logical incoherence, circularity, infinite regress, etc. We had a brownbag in my department discussing the Bem "precognition" paper; one person asked why the physicists don't feel worried by this data, as it seems to contradict basic principles in physics. The reason, I would imagine, is that they have more sophisticated selection criteria than significant differences.P. Adrian Frazierhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04214839055576596218noreply@blogger.com