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From: fostel@ncsu.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.ai
Subject: RE: Rational Psychology
Message-ID: <2355@ncsu.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 28-Sep-83 10:32:35 EDT
Article-I.D.: ncsu.2355
Posted: Wed Sep 28 10:32:35 1983
Date-Received: Sat, 1-Oct-83 23:50:19 EDT
Lines: 30



    I must say its been exciting listenning to the analysis of what "Rational
    Psychology" might mean or should not mean.  Should I go read the actual
    article that started it all?  Perish the thought.  Is psychology rational?
    Someone said that all sciences are rational, a moot point, but not that
    relevant unless one wishes to consider Psychology a science.  I do not.
    This does not mean that psychologists are in any way inferior to chemists
    or to REAL scientists like those who study physics.  But I do think there
    is a difference IN KIND between these fields and psychology.  Very few of
    us have any close intimate relationships with carbon compounds or inter-
    stellar gas clouds. (At least not since the waning of the LSD era.) But
    with psychology, anyone NOT in this catagory has no business in the field.
    (I presume we are talking Human psychology.)

    The way this difference might exert itself is quite hard to predict, tho
    in my brief forray into psychology it was not so hard to spot.  The great
    danger is a highly amplied form of anthropomorphism which leads one to
    form technical opinions quite possibly unrelated to technical or theoretical
    analysis.  In physics, there is a superficially similar process in which
    the scientist develops a theory which seems to be a "pet theory" and then
    sets about trying to show it true or false.  The difference is that the
    physisist developed his pet theory from technical origins rather than from
    personal experience.  There is no other origin for his ideas unless you
    speculate that people have a in-born understanding of psi-mesons or spin
    orbitals.  Such theories MUST have developed from these ideas.  In
    psychology, the theory may well have been developed from a big scary dog
    when the psychologist was two.  THAT is a differnce in kind, and I think
    that is why I will always be suspicious of psychologists.
    ----GaryFostel----