> They should be considered temporary interpretations of statistical data or in short meta statistics cause that's really what they are.
This is what a lot of experimental sciences are, even physical ones, when the systems being studied are complex.
There are very few areas of scientific study anymore that offer convenient, deterministic results. That fruit was picked a long time ago.
Even at the cutting end of physics, researchers have to infer from statistical results.
The difference is only that some of these fields have more reproducible results than others, often because they are studying less complex phenomena, whose causal factors and mechanisms can be more directly observed.
Psychology is at one end of that spectrum, because it is studying the output of the mind, a biological information system whose mechanisms are among the most complex and obscure that people have ever studied.
I understand that and I agree with how you think about it but the problem is that it creates a very unhealthy public debate because one end of the spectrum gets confused with the other.
This is what a lot of experimental sciences are, even physical ones, when the systems being studied are complex.
There are very few areas of scientific study anymore that offer convenient, deterministic results. That fruit was picked a long time ago.
Even at the cutting end of physics, researchers have to infer from statistical results.
The difference is only that some of these fields have more reproducible results than others, often because they are studying less complex phenomena, whose causal factors and mechanisms can be more directly observed.
Psychology is at one end of that spectrum, because it is studying the output of the mind, a biological information system whose mechanisms are among the most complex and obscure that people have ever studied.