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If there are general laws of psychology, please show how you can causally deduct some consequence from these laws.
"Causally deduct?" That's a distractingly placed modifier if I've ever heard one. I'm just going to replace that with "predict," and the sentence then begins to make some parsimonious sense. I'll answer it that way.
Before I do, though, a brief thought on scientific "laws" vs. "theories." Philosophy of science as I understand it still tangles about the distinction. "Theory" often seems to inhabit a continuum between loosely confirmed hypotheses and laws. I don't tend to make much of a distinction. Some people are fussy about laws, and demand that they must be absolute and universal in some way--in other words, they
always predict
everything about their subject matter. I don't tend to agree. Many of Newton's "laws" only work well in the comfortably nonrelativistic space around us--his understanding of gravity is, of course, just wrong. Einsteinian understandings
replaced it. But that doesn't mean Newton's laws don't make really, really good empirical approximations if I, say, want to hit you with a cannonball or something. To me, they're still plenty good laws. There's some semantic and substantive debate about what these terms mean; I tend to throw up my hands a bit, and I'm going to use them interchangeably. Mostly just because I'm feeling snarky. (Nonetheless, I'd maintain even strictly defined "laws" aren't necessary for the scientific process--I'm not sold that biologists have them in a strict sense, and it doesn't make them any bit less scientists in my book.) Anyway, back to the question. You want a law? I'll give you something like it...
Let's take operant conditioning, a relatively powerful way of describing a sizable range of behavior. The basics of these "laws" are that behaviors which are reinforced increase, while behaviors that are punished decrease. Reinforcement and punishment gain power by--among other variables--proximity to the behavior for which the consequence is applied.
Negative reinforcement (which describes the reinforcing power of the removal of a noxious or unpleasant condition, as opposed to the more familiar
positive reinforcement, involving a Scooby Snack) is extremely useful in describing the set of circumstances around, for instance, phobic and anxious behavior.
In panic attacks, for instance, individuals characteristically avoid situations in which attacks might occur, and remove themselves from situations in which they do occur. Negative reinforcement paradigms predict this: avoidance is negative reinforcing, since it removes stimuli associated with the unpleasant attack. The behavior (that is, the
attack itself) is thus made more likely. We can confirm this experimentally: when we more dramatically reinforce panic attacks by making avoidance behaviors easier, the attacks themselves become more frequent. Clinically, the most efficacious treatments fall under a paradigm loosely known as "exposure," in which we systematically restrict avoidance in the presence of the feared stimuli (for PD patients, those stimuli are often internal sensations which we have to deliberately induce for treatment--it's not the funnest thing in the world.)
And then what happens? The panic behavior looses its reinforcement, and fades--a process we call "extinction." The specific treatment for panic disorder, Interoceptive Exposure, is one of the most efficacious in a clinical psychologist's repertoire. It works because its nitty-gritty details are so well-predicted and explained by relatively simple laws of behavior which have been verified experimentally for decades. In the usual inductive/deductive cycle of science, these procedures, informed by the law and theory, get translated into experiments which inform the theory with new empirical details, which thus lead to new hypotheses and new empirical work.
There's nothing terribly distinct about psychology as a science in this process sense. I will say that our stats tend to be more complex, since the focus of our study is human beings, who carry along with themselves vast and irritating individual differences and free wills that rats, paramecia, jars of benzene, and globular clusters simply don't have in such abundance. The study of these ridiculous creatures is far from impossible, but it's statistically tricky. It also means that the certitude of our predictions is lower--I can't predict the outcome of mixing two people in a room with the same reliability as a chemist and predict the outcome of mixing two chemicals in a flask. Part of that's because some of my variables are stubbornly invisible. A lot of it's because I don't have the cash to measure all the variables necessary. When you're far away or limited in that way, your predictions have error (hear about any of those newly discovered extrasolar planets lately? You think they know the mass of them as precisely as we know the mass of earth?) That doesn't mean your predictions are meaningless, or you're not acting according to scientific laws, under the guidance of the scientific method.
I'll say it all over again for the back row: the theory gets informed by empiricism, and guides further empirical work which goes on to shape it. Round and round. So, yeah, pretty mundane scientific method. Move along folks, nothing to see here. If you're curious, the family of exposure methods has been rigorously and carefully investigated, and has seen a flowering of applications (you need to be well-guided by behavioral law/theory if you're going to stretch it like this) for not only panic attacks but social phobia, PTSD, OCD, and even physical health conditions like Irritable Bowel Syndrome. In most cases, its efficacy is superior to that of psychopharmacological interventions in both short-term (sometimes we're on par with the pills there) and follow-up (we more or less run the table there). Sorry, psychiatrists. Better luck next time?
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In my term, here is the examples about the level of unification in the fields of science, from high to low: physics, chemistry, biology, psychology.
I have learned never to doubt that deep, Linnaean urge deep in all of us to make cool-sounding hierarchies. That's a beautiful and arbitrary little list you've got there (and isn't the arbitrary often beautiful?) Can't say I haven't seen it about a thousand times. I do wonder if it
means anything.
N.B.:
Pro tip.
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PhDwannabe, on 10 February 2011 - 11:22 PM, said:
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