Is posivitism necesarrily incongrous with marxism?

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pi makes my piipii hard

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I was describing Positivism. I'm not advocating it.

Jesus, user.

Anyway, if you want to understand Positivism, I suggest reading Auguste Comte.

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You didn't answer my questions. But I'll answer yours, and hopefully you'll respond with an answer instead of rhetoric.

I'm not completely sure what you are asking here. We can already discuss the limitations of understanding in a purely scientific realm. There are only certain wavelengths of light that my eye can visually recognize and process. Limits of understanding in more philosophical means can't accurately be measured, because they are arbitrary. Derrida beautiful elucidated on the absence of fixed meaning in language. This can be explained more concretely scientifically. Humans are heuristic computational machines, unlike silicon computers. This allows greater efficiency and the input of a constant, larger array of data. However, we are less accurate and precise in our analysis. Including the vast differences in biology among individuals, you are going to have vastly different interpretations of the same sensory input. When moving towards a more philosophical realm, like arguing the validity of a philosophy such as marxism vs neoliberalism, I think it is best to approach the reality in the way marx sought. Use material reality as a axiom from which to build social understanding (origins of the private property state etc), with a dialectical understanding of the arbitration and contradictions that exist in human realms of reality. In simplistic form, why do I agree with leftist ideology? I think it is the most logical and fair. I don't think any individual is fundamentally inferior or superior to anyone else. I think that we all operate on a relative interval of biological experience. We all want to be happy and live comfortably. We all deserve to have equal freedoms. Fundamentally, this is what socialism tries to achieve.

Considering natural philosophy is the predecessor to modern science, I don't really see how the first part of your statement is relevant.

The quote I posted says information derived from sensory experience. It never says that the sensory experience is math like pi or i. It says it uses logic and math to understand the data.

A fundamental part of vision is the G-protein-coupled receptors Rhopsin. This was studied using x-ray crystallography to determine the structure, which uses math to calculate the diffraction pattern of an x-ray from a crystallized protein. We can also measure how the photon and the agonist retinol interact with Rhopsin an change its conformation which results in a signal cascade that eventually reaches the brain. We can then measure electrical activity in the brain to see how the signal is proliferated across the brain. This is using math and logic to measure sensory experience in the purest form. How the brain interacts in its dynamic environment is something that has yet to be accurately modeled, but when it is modeled completely it will use computer science and mathematics. The logic will be the underlying biology and chemistry that have been determined to be absolute. We already understand how some chemicals such as glucocorticoids can have explicit emotional and experiential effects on an individual. Some day we will reach the scientific sophistication to understand how the dynamic brain of many manifests into the complexity that exists in social science. Simply because social science lacks the adequate tools and understanding to investigate their given fields to fully realize their study in such detail and accuracy does not mean that the method (positivism) of investigation is wrong.

Here's a trend I've noticed with STEM folk. When they notice they have been spanked by humanities fags (e.g. "Math is not sensory, you dumb dumb!" or "You remove the subjective dimension from the objective without any justification, ending up with a completely silly and mechanistic materialist model!") they grab onto needless specifics about a somewhat related topic and just diarrhea out terms to cover their tracks: "uuuhm, sugar-phosphate backbone! uuh, reverse transcriptase enzyme! uuh, Jack W. Szostak!"
It's like watching a B-category sci-fi movie. Seriously, I've had the pleasure of witnessing this multiple times IRL.
That's the thing, you see. A good chunk of the sciences are just data and classifications and relations between objects. Most of you study them by swotting. And this is how you end up. A little fool that gets triggered by being told that math, or concepts, aren't part of your sensory experience, and thus your whole positivist edifice is doomed to fail since it already relies on philosophical underpinnings to justify itself. So what do you do? You show us what you learned to associate with intelligence: not an ability to comprehend, intuition, or creativity, but spitting out those classifications you so eagerly learned for your next test.

And btw, yeah, science is fucking awesome, but Einstein, Bohr and co. would fucking vomit at the sight of today's ideological scientific community. Scientists around the 20st century used to read and already laughed at positivism.

Yeah, bull fucking shit I didn't. It's not my fault you block it out.

It's not what it's intended to do.

Brilliant.

You just don't know what you are talking about. You take the weakest part of Marx and put it in a light that it never deserved.

Jesus, I don't care, you are visibly autistic!

I for one honestly believe that freedom is a reactionary concept to begin with, and the communist focus is equality. BTW, I'm one of those who don't consider socialists comrades, especially ones who seem to have a vague mixture of p-bourg lib-socialism and weird positivist marx in their head.

Call us again when you figured out how meaning enters the picture.

Just wow.

You just said that science is nowhere near understanding the brain. The hubris!

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Yeah I saw that one coming.

You are the one triggered my friend.

One example please. Just one.

You call my explanation of the science of how vision operates diarrhea and claim that somehow this irrelevant to a discussion about sensory input?
You said

I showed you how pi and i are used to explain the sensory input, and distinguished between sensory input being the math and pi. (ie. the diffraction pattern of an xray being used to determine protein crystal structure)

My first response:

The second sentence of my second response literally contradicts what you are saying here. That reading comprehension.

You ignored my comparison between engels origin and marxist ideas of dialectics and axiom as material reality. You ignored my comment on Derrida's interpretation of language.

Then you say something about DNA and the rest of your comment is just ad hominen. Clearly, there isn't a discussion to be had. You're retarded.

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What isn't tautological?

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I never advocated vulgar materialism or reduction. Try reading it again.

See complexity sciences.

Clearly you don't know what heuristics is.

If you have around 10 hours of free time, this is a great introduction into how meaning enters the picture.
youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA

I've been having these debates IRL before you even tipped your first fedora, son. Meaning can't pop up due to heuristics. It's misrecognition on our part, if anything.

I've actually seen the Sapolsky series about 2-3 years ago and at no point does he talk about how human beings come to acquire meaning. He talks about genetic code and its connection to the brain, to the phenotype, but these are completely different things.

Also,
– what I've been talking about.

So it looks like you have nothing meaningful to say so you've just resorted to insulting me. This is fun.

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your mom

I said this as rhetoric because of the dismissive attitude towards any reference towards science I've made. In your previous posts you've dismissed 80 years of research by hundreds of scientists saying it's nothing more than diarrhea spewed out as defensiveness. This is an introductory explanation and that alone is 10 hours of your time. To understand the mathematics of game theory alone could takes years. The entire attitude from you (and maybe others?) towards science has been disgusting and pretty insecure.

This is a philosophy thread if you haven't noticed. Your diatribe about G-protein-coupled receptors don't mean shit when the topic is epistemology. I'm sorry. Let me try to explain it to you. It is very similar to when you try to date a girl and you are so autistic that you go on about x-ray crystallography instead of having an actual conversation with her. It will not get you the puss. Similarly, it won't get positivism justified. It's like bringing cooking recipes to a math test, musical scores to your mineralogy lecture: very, very autistic.

And it was stated that science is based. Positivism isn't science. Science isn't hated. You are.

Get better soon! Or don't! Maybe consider killing yourself instead!
(I honestly don't care.)

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What's with these nerds who keep seeing le scientism everywhere? There aren't any sam harris fans on this board and everyone else just wants to be pragmatic.

Empirical research is useful. Falsification is useful. The point is to make sure you are making undeniable progress when studying a field, so you can actually help people. Yes, to help people, not just to tip fedoras in a circle and brag about our math skills.

For instance, when you can empirically prove that human beings are not rational agents, but are in fact irrational and easily manipulated, you can use those test results to go tell the chicago school of economics to fuck off with their views. You can convince governments that people need to be nudged in the right direction, and that they need protection from exploitation. Empirical research becomes even more valuable at this point, because the results also show how easy it is for people to deceive themselves when they are left without statistical tools. Sounds like a good time to do MORE empirical research, not give it all up just because some asshole on /lit/ screamed "scientism" at you.

Use these tools to do good, before the megacorps fuck you first. And they WILL fuck you, because they'll use the same tools to more efficiently manipulate you at every turn.

This is paranoia.

It means EVERYTHING when it shows that the methods used to investigate sensory inputs were positivists and showed results.

Positivism isn't a method.

Holy shit, you call me autistic? I didn't say positivist is a method. Your semantic compulsion is bordering masturbatory.

Positivism was described in OP. Nobody ITT has been able to articulate their issue with it beyond some strawman about scientific capitalism which was nothing to do with what OP said.

The scientific method isn't "positivist method." Positivism is an epistemological position.

Do you even fucking know what epistemology means?

HURRRR

"social scientists"

whoops

Antipositivism is a cultural marxism

Allow me to present this very serious and complex problem in a retard-proof fashion. Pic related is a breakdown of the scientific method. Positivism is the belief that only pic related produces legitimate knowledge.

Again, we are at the point when I'm giving you definitions.

You can always make a bigger fool out of yourself.

not everyone shitting on you is me friend

I don't befriend know-nothing ideologues, son.

heres proof

I try.

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It assumes needless epistemological limitations and suffers from the assumption that empiricism and scientific knowledge are somehow "objective" and not free from ideological constraints, positivism being one of them among many. People create plenty of meaningful knowledge in a variety of ways and it's wrong to deny this subjectivity simply because it doesn't conform to this arbitrary Western/Modern notion of "valid knowledge." In fact, this method of epistemological control is yet another oppressive system borne out of capitalism as it attempts to twist cultural narratives to its benefit: that the only knowledge that can be "valid" is that constructed by and propagated by capitalist institutions. To think that huge epistemological frameworks such as psychoanalysis, postmodernism, Marxism, etc. are not valid by virtue of them not being "empirical" or "scientific," and simultaneously denying their cultural importance and impact as well as their efficacy in knowledge construction is absurd.

People forget, fundamentally, that science and "facts" do not tell us anything per se. We need to INTERPRET these in a narrative (theory) for it to have any kind of meaning. And between the facts and the scientist is ideology. The idea that science and empiricsm is "objective" is an over-simplistic fantasy. Positivism is bullshit.

This isn't true though. Gravity is gravity is gravity whether you accept it, reject it, are completely ignorant of it. Regardless of how you interpret the theory, it's physical effects are knowable and verifiable. This knowledge of the natural world is hard and fast. It cannot and will not change. Basically the entire natural world can be explained and understood in such terms.

I agree with what you're getting at, but you should check this out:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embodied_cognition
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conceptual_metaphor
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_Mathematics_Comes_From

Embodied cognition posits that all knowledge comes from "embodied" (i.e., sensory/situated experiences) and that our thoughts and concepts are inherently structured by experience and context. Basically, nothing is purely "abstract" but that more abstract things are grounded by metaphorical conceptual relationships/mappings.

I don't think this undermines your point. Rather, I think it only supports the argument that positivism is pretty much impossible. Subjectivity is all. The methods that we use to verify sensory data are inextricably tied to sensory experience to the point where they shape our very cognitive structures, let alone any embedded ideological motivations we might have. Any information that we consciously work with has already gone through the ringer that is our brain. We would have to wonder how "valid" such information ends up being.

This is idealist bullshit. Not leftist, but on the order of Hegel and approaching solipsism.

Don't confuse the observation/pattern for the model or theory that is used to explain it. Any meaning we impart from "gravity" is based on our theories used to explain it. They might be great explanations, but they are explanations nonetheless. This becomes much more clear in theoretical sciences and social sciences where competing models and theories are common.

I'm not saying that empiricism or rational skepticism, or science is a bad method. I think it's very powerful in generating knowledge. I'm saying that a positivist view does no favors by rejecting other forms of knowledge that do not apply to the more easily measurable physical world and by assuming that only certain arbitrary epistemological forms are "valid." It draws completely unnecessary distinctions between "right" and "wrong" knowledge and methods of understanding and disregards large spheres of experience where science doesn't really fit in. Furthermore, it allows tons of ideology to sneak in, yet operates as if it were free from it.

Uh, no. It's strictly materialistic. Embodiment treats cognition and consciousness as a "reliable illusion" created from physical interaction with the world. Solipsistic, maybe, but they have theories that explain social and cultural behavior (again, through physical means). The idea actually arises in reaction to idealistic hypotheses in linguistics iirc.

But what is the line between the natural and artificial world?

Comparing all scientific discipline to the theory of gravity is fallacious: classical mechanics being so rigidly true is not the rule, it is the exception. It is lucky because unlike many other disciplines, it has effectively zero overlap with the "softer" world of philosophy, which is why it was so easy to use mathematical rigor to determine things we only recently confirmed to be fact and required obscene amounts of money to make observable, like gravity waves.

When philosophy and science start to blend together, shit gets ugly. Political agendas in the academic world lead to bias not only in testing, but the very foundation of theories that outside of scientific hypotheses, we would probably scoff or gag at, like theories of dysgenics in modern society being used to justify a return to segregationism.

There is no such thing as natural or artificial. It is a purely arbitrary pseudo-catagory based on the ego of humanity.

A few posters ITT have alluded to this. Can you provide an example?

It also kinda strikes me that anti-positivists are fighting a boogieman. I mean has anybody claimed that the human mind for example can be known and understood completely and through empirical testing?

Thank you for giving an eloquent response among a sea of shit. I was going to disagree with some of what you said

But here you explained my main contentions.

Now do the same with quantum jumps!

this tbh

And how, exactly, does calling oneself a scientist grant immunity to these biases? The basis of postmodern bullshit psychobabble is that humans being biased makes all human knowledge subjective because it is impossible to know what is or is not objective truth. If we cannot separate science and philosophy, we cannot prove that something would be true even if there were no people to believe it.

Sure. Positivism itself is one, which synergises with capital-driven cultural assumptions that the only "worthwhile" sciences and fields are those that produce more profit. It would make sense that it would then reduce "valid" knowledge to that produced by these systems. Moreover, it upholds largely Western/Modern cultural norms that emerge in construct operationalization, wording, sampling, measurment biases, data falsification, etc. In the past, IQ testing was used to perpetuate normative notions of racial superiority/inferiority. When the general scientific consensus turned to environmental explanations of IQ in the 70s, all of a sudden the field turned on almost all gene explanations. The problem is we only see something is "wrong" in hindsight. When it was going on, it was assumed valid because of positivistic notions around science. The truth is, ideology shapes science at it's very core, starting with the assumption that science is a valid epistemological method. Note that I'm not saying empiricism isn't valid; I'm just saying that we shouldn't deny other epistemological frameworks.

I didn't say that what you linked was not material. I said saying "all is subjective" is idealist.

The natural world is that which is physical, governed by and subject to the universal laws of nature, themselves derived from falsifiable basic principals. So that which can be empirically verified.

When I think of science I mean just that. Science. Social sciences are not scientific in the same way that natural sciences are.

That was oversimplifying it a bit, I admit. It's not saying there's no "objective" world, just that we can only simulate it in our brains and what we experience and work with is actually this simulation. We're limited by our machinery, basically. I'm not exactly sure where this falls in between materialism/idealism as I don't know that much about those camps beyond the basics.

So…everything.

Though the details may vary, they still adhere to the same scientific method.

Scientific racism was bad science from the start though as it set out to confirm it's practitioners bias.

Interesting point. It seems to me that most of the sketchy science today is 'soft' science though. I really struggle to see an issue with science today in terms of bias.

Fair enough. But can we ever truly KNOW anything from these other systems or are they best for speculating and explaining most likey outcomes from a given situation?

user, I think you are confusing positivism for people falsely claiming that their political biases can be made objective facts with scientific research.

In IQ, for example, it's been found that researchers like Murray and Lynn have used flawed methodology in their work and often ignored whatever evidence they dislike. Turns out that IQ differences between races are slowly shrinking in the US, for example; Murray debated this but was met with strong skepticism from people that we have no reason to believe are politically biased.

Pretty much but some of it is too complex for us atm. We don't understand enough the brain so anything that flows from it can be considered artifical. I see how you can turn this round on empericism but the differences are tangible. Physics happens regardless of our observation (inb4 quantum weirdness). Psychology and sociology only work because we've agreed to agree on and accept certain things as truth even even when they aren't universal.

To clarify between social sciences and hard science, hard science gives us answers that will always be correct. Social sciences can at best offer theories that work for a given time, place and culture. This is because what they study are constructs of the human mind, itself an unknown factor.

Yes, but it was allowed to persist and was even promoted by the state in some cases thanks to the cultural assumptions at the time. Another point where it pops up is in ethics, where the standards change over time in response to cultural changes.

Because that stuff is harder to conceptualize and test, but you see it happen in stuff like astrophysics with the recent "black holes aren't real" stuff.

The better question is can we ever truly know anything, period? It's the simple limitation of a subjective existence. I was baffled one time when someone said there was a competing theory of physics that suggested there were no such thing as electrons. But after a while, it's like, why not? Maybe what we think we know can be undermined in a flash. After all, that's the basis of the scientific method. I don't understand why the same skeptical line of reasoning can't be applied to the entire system itself–that it might have some holes and that it might not be the only framework of "valid" knowledge. When you say that certain frameworks that are so buried into our culture, like psychoanalysis or Marxism don't generate "real" or "valid" knowledge, I think that's just silly as they produce their own sets of knowledge that happen to be meaningful and important in a broader sense. Think about it, what board would we be on if it wasn't for Marxism? Would the knowledge and understandings generated from that framework not be "valid" just because it's not hard science?

I would suggest you reconsider how positivism itself facilitates such misuses of science by holding itself above other frameworks. But it's more than just this. Ideology can come into what questions you ask and what avenues of science you seek to explore. It informs our behavior on an unconscious, implicit level. I doubt these guys were going out of their way to be super racist, they probably thought they were being good scientists. And my point is a little more complicated than that, because once the IQ explanation shifted in the 70s, it was still closed off, only this time in the other direction. Again, scientists thought they were "right," but now we know intelligence, like almost everything psychological (or everything in general), to be a combination of factors. I won't forget what my research methods professor kept repeating: "Science seeks to prove science." I think people run with the same theories and models so long that they forget that they're just ways of looking at things and not to be taken for granted. Scientific inquiry means being skeptical of even this most beloved of methods, and I find positivism to ultimately be incompatible with that.

Can't just ignore quantum mechanics, dude. You also can't just arbitrarily separate sciences in order to justify positivism, and indeed the "natural" and "artificial" or "hard" and "soft" dichotomy is a false one. It's all science at the end of the day. I mean, everything is always "just happening."

I have issue with thinking of it in terms of absolutes. All we know is that our observations are consistent and that our explanations for them have not yet been replaced with better ones.

Both rely on statistical methods of determining significance. Social sciences have actually identified some things that might be considered "universal" such as certain personality constructs and emotional expressions.

Again, a physical/non-physical distinction is fallacious. A lot of the things that affect us on a social/cultural, and individual level are not "real" in a physical sense. People get spooked, but it produces real, measurable effects. Psychoanalysis is bunk science and yet we can't get rid of it in our culture and day-to-day conversations it seems. It only goes to show that the things that "matter" are not really scientific facts. That no one cares if certain personality constructs are seen in almost all cultures tested, but they care a lot about their personality and what it says about them and others and so on and so on. It's how this stuff gets tied into our lives that matters as that serves as a base for our knowledge.

Anyway I'm rambling now so I'm off to bed.

underrated post

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I am going to take that notion to task and say that whatever effects us must always be physical.

Observation in quantum mechanics means something completely different to what is being discussed in this thread. It has nothing to do with subjective observation.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer_effect_(physics)

Speaking to the subject of quantum physics, Alan Sokol wrote a particularly insightful piece that is pertinent to this discussion here:

physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html

I would encourage everyone in this thread who is interested in a different way of doing science to read it.

I wholeheartedly agree. (Cultural) narratives are of utmost importance to communists (and to the broader left). You can not think aesthetics, propaganda, or even economic analysis (just think about advertisement!) without it.

>When you say that certain frameworks that are so buried into our culture, like psychoanalysis or Marxism don't generate "real" or "valid" knowledge, I think that's just silly as they produce their own sets of knowledge that happen to be meaningful and important in a broader sense.
Allow me to defend both. Psychoanalysis isn't a science because of only one (failed) condition: reproducibility. I can't contrast the EMPIRICAL experience of one of my analysands to another, yet it still remains empirical. I can't reproduce my session with Joe with my session with Martha. Now contrast this with the establishment standard: psychology & psychiatry. They both focus on statistics (as secondary representations of individuals; wiki: DSM) as opposed to the individual. If I'm a Lacanian analyst, my patient is always and by definition unique!
This is not to say that we disregard the broader socio-economic context – on the contrary! We are the ones who truly deal with harmed, the harmed by the broader social context!

Second, Marxism. "Valid knowledge" for us, as 21st century communists, stem not directly from the economy! Yet we don't deny the source! Think of Marx's theory of commodity fetishism: a subjective experience that is perfectly part of the universal.

Through the method of Zizek (&co.) we are able to detect an intrusive force, which is IDEOLOGY, that pinpoints us to an underlying and OBJECTIVE reality.

In the end it most certainly is always physical means, but that doesn't mean that people aren't driven by spooks or the virtual. Your thoughts and beliefs are the result of electrochemical reactions and they influence your behavior, but that doesn't mean that what you think and believe is necessarily true and yet it produces physical behavior nonetheless. People often conflate the signifier for the signified; this is what I meant by not "real."

I won't say I know anything about it, but I do know that observation doesn't mean "spooky consciousness." I only meant that observational ambiguity and competing theories are common in theoretical sciences, even the "hard" ones and so creating some epistemological distinction between sciences when they use the same method is being somewhat intellectually disingenuous.

Yeah, in another post I called it "bunk science" even though I acknowledge that it does have some limited application in therapy settings. The theory itself also happens to be unfalsifiable (everything can be due to "unconscious impulses" and "repression"). At the same time, there's this undying cultural fascination with it, I think because (1) it radically changed how people could look at the world and human behavior and (2) that it touches on these universal aspects of human experience. I think it illustrates that divide between empirical validity and what might be personally meaningful.

Yeah, this. For all that philosophers bang on about how science needs philosophy and so on, philosophy has never come close to improving humanity's conditions in the way science has. And meanwhile, some scientific advances have eclipsed certain branches of philosophy. I'm of two-thirds of a mind that philosophers are just upset that science will render them and their work useless and masturbatory.

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No, what it does mean is that what you think and believe is caused by physical, not metaphysical, changes. Who you are then can only be defined as what you are, the physical reality of you, however, that reality is a part of the ever-changing totality of reality.

I've already stated agreement with a strictly materialistic notion of reality and human psychology. I'm not sure why you're continuing to press and I'm having trouble seeing your point past the truisms. I have been making a distinction between "virtual" and "real" to argue that they are functionally the same which ties into the larger argument against holding one form of knowledge more "valid" than another because it's tied to something more "real."

Prove me wrong.

By questioning the efficacy of the scientific method, by coming up with counterexamples to disprove it and then testing them, you are using the scientific method.

Protip: you can't.

It should be the other way around.

Science needs to demonstrate it's own efficacy, which it has thanks to convergence with other fields of inquiry. But using the scientific method to justify science is ultimately circular. For a system built on skepticism, there's ironically a lot of faith placed in the system itself.

People have survived in the past without applying our current scientific standards. People have created huge bodies and systems of knowledge before modern science. This board itself is based on some of this knowledge. Language and culture existed long before modern science. And before you go to question quality of life or draw whatever arbitrary distinction you please, I'd suggest you check your ideological assumptions.

How about instead of spewing ideology at me, you offer a specific criticism.

Not that user but m8, that was as specific of a criticism I've ever seen.
How is this "spewing ideology"?

Actually, you know what? You're right. Never mind.

Come up with a way to question it, even in theory, without using it and I'll concede the point.

It's like language. You could say something like "I hate language" but you'd still have to use language to convey the message.

Come up with a way to question it, even in theory, without using it and I'll concede the point.

It's like language. You could say something like "I hate language" but you'd still have to use language to convey the message.

Reprogram your internet website warmscooter

There have already been criticisms in this thread that are philosophical and deal with ideological concerns rather than strictly empirical/scientific ones. I think you should check your own ideology. It's not anyone's job here to "prove you wrong." Other epistemological systems have already demonstrated their efficacy, how about you "prove them wrong" without relying on circular positivist ideology?

That's not positivism, it's empiricism.

It's wrong because you can't base your logical categories on experience itself, wow case closed.

Read Kant.

Also this doesn't necessitate scepticism, if you want real positivism look at Comte and Hegel.

No, I'm not reading that 30 post argument between Freudfag and that other guy.

Fuck off, nobody has a job here, I'll prove you wrong if I damn well want. If you don't want the challenge then quit replying.

Do these other systems, pray tell, come up with assertions, and then test them against evidence?

Elaborate.

You're right they don't but a good corrective would be to recognize the idealogical basis for our modes of analysis, shouting muh empiricism is their response to such things.

Why do they need to? You spooked.

Kant is full of shit.

Do you see what you are doing? You are using the scientific method as a justification for the scientific method.

classic

I won't because I'm not here to teach you, if you want to learn then simply engage with the vast history on the topic. It's really well understood in epistemology, and if you won't read Kant at least read Kuhn(who is a positivist)… maybe you can gain an appreciation for what empiricism actually offers.

lol whut

Or it isn't scientific, never was, and an claims that it is are lies to justify capitalism.

What are these systems and how do we know they are efficient?

FTFY

Are you not fond of knowing things, and knowing reasonably well that they are true?

Efficacy.

I'll look into it.

Answer the question fagget. We both know where I'm going with this which is why you're avoiding it.

Math is the only way to truth, science is pragmatism and philosophy is defined by inability to give any answers.

Philosophy can give you an answer for anything you care to know, it just can't justify any of them.

Various philosophical methods? Logic and deduction? Dude, read the thread. Knowledge is more than just inductive/empirical (i.e., scientific) methods and science itself is not some kind of hard "objective" standard; it involves plenty of subjective aspects.

Spooked.

You do not know anything with certainty and this includes scientific knowledge. What if I told you scientific facts didn't generate any meaningful knowledge for the individual and that even in light of "valid" information, people are prone to ignoring it or misapplying it? People care about interpretations, which are inherently subjective, not the facts per se.

/thread

Maybe you should stop avoiding the fatal logical fallacy you're engaging in first.

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Philosophy and logic aren't the same thing. Most philosophy is illogical.

Logic falls under the larger umbrella of philosophy. Math is considered "formal logic," though forcing it into one kind of category is needless. Even science was once considered "natural philosophy." Doesn't change the point that modern science is not the end-all of epistemology. It is only one system out of many.

Self-defeating.
Self-refuting
You know, unlike philosophy
Can't help you there, pal.

The fuck are you talking about

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Yeah I'm done.

People are of course confused about what positivism is because of the Vienna circle and the like.

You did read the OP and then my original assertion, right?

Validating the scientific method by using the scientific method is a logical fallacy.

That pic… even high-income blacks score lower than whites on average. Sorry to break it to you fam

Because it doesn't allow you to simply make up shit when you don't like the results, like feminists do.

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Historically many Jews were very well-off due to a cultural emphasis on education as well as being unaffected by the Christian ban on usury.

According to Holla Forumsacks such as yourself, they're in fact so well-off that they rule the world. So which is it, Holla Forums? Are they rich from profiting of le goyims or are were the just as poor and oppressed as blacks?

Also historically, they were the target of countless pogroms and exiles

Yes, their history is full of ups and downs. But you'd be hard-pressed to compare the station of Jews with that of blacks. What I said is true, by and large they were far from being "on the brink of starvation".

Pol not understanding class.

Yes, Jewish communities were generally well-off. But you can't deny that they were often repressed by the rest of the gentile population regardless.

European Jews and African-Americans do have some in common though. Historically they both have been the target of harsh (and often institutionalized) discrimination and have a tendency to live in their own segregated communities.

kek

Cool, so we're in agreement then. That image is stupid because Jews weren't living in slavery or destitution.

They were both marginalized, but in different ways. One group was grindingly poor while the other was "generally well-off".

I wrote a long ass reply to and hotwheel's site is shit. I'm not writing it again.

All blacks were, until US integrated them fully, always poor or slaves.

Jews has always classes, and one could even propose, that as the had no land of their own (in terms of feudalism), they were proto-capitalists. Thus there were always poor and rich (well off) jews.

Hell, according to the Pianist (movie) they even had classes in the ghetto, in Warsaw!

I know that feel comrade

Fair enough, I basically agree with what you're saying, I just wanted to clarify things before a bunch of idealists start using quantum mechanics to justify their bullshit.

On a more general note, I'm kinda disturbed by the amount of mathematical realism/platonism that pervades this thread. Many of you seem to be taking the position that maths/logic is some kind of external thing that can be discovered through reason, rather than being constructed in reference to the material world (though I suppose you could argue that the basis for it is innate in the human brain and still be a consistent materialist).

FYI most in the field of mathematics (and philosophy of science) take this position too. 'Truth' is a very complex topic.

you obviously weren't paying attention
it was used as a reply to "muh gravity is self evident" as a way to portray the nature of scientific paradigms

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I'm aware that a great many mathematicians are basically platonists, I'm just saying it's a very strange position for a materialist to take.

Like I said:

I was mainly concerned that once the topic of quantum mechanics was raised bullshit would inevitably follow. I've seen it happen more times than I can count on other leftist boards (revleft lol).

lacan.com/badbodies.htm

I concede.

Could you elaborate on that essay? I'm afraid I'm a physical science dropout, not a philosophy graduate.

Social and cognitive psychology have been demonstrating this for decades (I won't say "prove"). Most of our thinking is automatized into heuristics that lend themselves to serious cognitive biases; rational and critical thinking are the exception, not the norm. Politics (and, unsurprisingly, advertising) severely manipulates our cognitive biases from things as subtle as framing, wardrobe, and word-choice to shit as blatant as spamming a name or catchphrase. Over time you won't remember and or even notice most of the shit, but your brain does and this is why people will vote for Shillary, I don't know.

I think it's patently clear that sciences, regardless of sticking to the same rules, are not taken seriously unless they're profitable. I'm sure this is why you get this "scientism" bullshit; it's Porky getting his rocks off by hooking more STEM, most of whom will not be doing actual science but will instead go to applied fields where they can be proper cogs. I'm not at all surprised that now that psychology is tied with neuroscience and big bad brain scanning machines and researchers are regularly whoring themselves out at TED talks talking about next-level Matrix shit, all of a sudden psychology (at least, cognitive psych) is being considered more of a "hard" science. People have been doing "hard" psychophysical research for centuries. Fuck outta here.

Ok. So what other method are you talking about and which theory of hard/physical/natural science has been updated, changed or scrapped as a result?

There is faith in scientific method for pretty good reason anoon. The method of theory testing theory and reevaluating when necessary is pretty solid. Can you name or describe another methodology that would be as efficient and regularly correct for describing the natural world?

You don't necessarily need to test something in order to disprove it. There are also things you can simply not test.

I question faith in general. Ideology and so on and so on…

I have already agreed multiple times to the efficacy of the scientific method in this thread (I am personally studying science). That is not the point of contention here, but if you want some viable alternatives, I don't know, maybe probability theory (especially Bayesian theory, maybe game theory), and perhaps just simple human hypothetico-deductive reasoning and social learning? You're reducing it to "methodology that would be as efficient and regularly correct" which makes it more difficult due to these weird terms "efficient" and "correct." You also limit yourself be restricting knowledge to only that which "describes he natural world." Speaking frankly, most of what we know as individuals has actually NOT gone through the scientific process; we don't do mental statistical analyses with all these control groups and such. And yet how many of us would contest the bulk of our knowledge as being invalid? I don't think that I would say what we perceive and act on on a day-to-day basis is not "efficient" or "regularly correct"; it's reliable enough that we are still alive after all. So why should we not consider this "folk" epistemology valid in its own right? It's precisely the reduction of knowledge to arbitrary distinctions of "validity" and "correctness," and disregarding entire frameworks based on these distinctions that I take issue with, not science in general. It's been repeated so many times in this thread by myself and others that this will be the last time I do so. I also don't get this line of reasoning where if someone criticizes something, they must be some irrational hater of it. If you want a methodology to survive, you MUST be critical of it.

I don't see anything odd here. Correct as in predictive ability of theories developed along the lines of scientific method.

Because the scientific method works best describing the natural/physical laws governed world.

True I guess. But in a way the vast majority of this knowledge you mention was derived from early precursors of modern natural science, namely observation and analysis. Natural science is almost a natural progression of how we've always understood the world around us.

I've only seen people ITT cling to validity with regard to natural sciences. YOu say you're studying science. Do you not think that there are certain physical systems that can be considered universally and objectively true? For materialists that there are universal truths in the physical world should be evident and sensical. Scientific method at its most basic is an attempt to discover these universals and I think it is the best method to do so.

I'm not saying that the methods of natural science can be used in every situation. The study of any human constructs will trip these method up as human behaviours is far too chaotic with too many variables to fit neatly into empirical verification.

Point to anyone disagreeing with that ITT.

YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND!

Point to someone ITT who has advocated scientism. Hell I've not seen anyone anywhere say that hard only science should be considered. Seems to me more like a strawman that left/pol/ and others build as a means of attempting to poke holes in and discredit the scientific method. Why, well I could only speculate.

Positivism is closely associated with scientism.

Are you implying some kind of conspiracy?

He is but he won't admit it.

Not exactly. Just I suspect some leftists (though probably more reddit tier) may have issue with some probIamatic aspects of natural sciences, particularly life sciences.

Yes I'm talking about trans shit

Are you the sex = gender user?

he is one of them but he knows that people will consider it retarded and fear that would weaken his case for positivism

can we scientifically test these, plz?

he also believes that trans people are mentally ill, tbh

wow, he's a legit douchebag

Not exactly. I just know that some trans activists would really like if chromosomes would just FOAD. Some feminists certainly resent biological truths.

I rest my case

are you implying that he is toning his edge down due to narcissistic concerns and that he isn't really interested in finding out truth in a debate by assuming his real position but just pushing a dirty agenda?

how unscientific!

pppsssh! he can hear us! and worse, he's furious!

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I agree, but then how can we validate the scientific method, or any other method for that matter?

You can't prove that with the scientific method, so it should be disregarded.

and we are back at the beginning:

So are you saying we have to use philosophy in order to validate methods, including the scientific method? Do you have a text example?

I highly recommend this sub to anyone who's starting to get into philsci: reddit.com/r/PhilosophyofScience/

You'll find some entertaining and insightful texts and discussions here:
reddit.com/r/PhilosophyofScience/search?q=positivism&restrict_sr=on&sort=relevance&t=all

And well let the LHC run of feels? As ever, you're great at criticisng but when it comes to offering an alternative you've got nothing.

Scientific method is fit for purpose. It generally isn't any good for studies of the sociological as such fields are steeped in human construct. Fortunately for you guys nobody except your strawmen are trying to force social sciences to use scientific method. But given how subjective social sciences are to natural sciences it really shouldn't trigger you so hard that they are given different levels of credibility. Methodologies derived from the scientific method approach like Newtonian mechanics is always going to give more consistent results than say psychoanalysis because of the complexities inherent in all studies of human behavior.

Thanks for sharing user.

I'm not too keen on "social sciences" myself. I wouldn't call Marx's socialism scientific, for example, nor psychology or psychoanalysis. Yet they are essential at understanding our human world.

Why would I want to offer an alternative to science when I like science? I'm not the one who thinks it's an EITHER/OR case with other sources of knowledge.

(I'm gonna copy this one because it is witty and I like wit.)
—–

LP : So tell us Quine, what is it about us you don't like? Do you agree that science is the only path to knowledge? There is no knowledge that can be gained outside of the naturalistic view?
WVO : Yes sure - I agree with that.
LP : Ok … and science is pretty much about reasoning and observation right?
WVO : Right
LP : So what's the problem? If you want to know whether a hypothesis is true or not, you either have to derive a logically sound conclusion to support it, or you have to go out and verify it by observation! Right?!
WVO : Ah no. The problem is you can never know whether a hypothesis is true or not.
LP : What are you talking about?? All bachelors are unmarried men! I know this for sure!
WVO : Actually you don't. Define for me precisely what a bachelor is.
LP : Are you kidding me? You know perfectly well what a bachelor is!
WVO : Yes I do. It's an unmarried man.
LP: Right! …. errr ….. wait ……
WVO nods
LP: This piece of copper conducts electricity. What the hell is wrong with that then?
WVO : Prove it
LP hooks up a light bulb on one end and a battery on the other. The light bulb flashes
LP: Satisfied?
WVO : The electricity flowed from the hand holding the battery, through your body to the hand holding the bulb.
LP: Are you serious?
LP gives the bulb to Quine, repeats the experiment, bulb goes on
WVO : Your shirt is green
LP : Excuse me?
WVO : Your shirt is green. That's what caused the bulb to light.
LP : Now you're being ridiculous.
WVO : Ridiculous? How about … time expands and contracts. Each moment, our Universe bifurcates into many other Universes….
LP …….
LP …….
LP : Newtonian physics still works just fine.
WVO : Thought you guys were logicians - not carpenters.

See, then you're asking someone to bring up a competing theory against a methodology literally made to fulfill these things. I would bring up natural philosophy, the precursor to modern science, but it wouldn't abide by your metric. I called them "weird" because this moving of the goalpost brings it back to a circular line of thought in which science justifies itself.

Yes, it's a refinement of older methods. But these older folk methods are valid in their own right, I would argue. It is what we all rely on day after day, after all. They don't always work, but they still generate useful systems of knowledge nonetheless.

I reject essentialism and naive notions of "objectivity." Where science is concerned, I only abide by reliability and validity; I don't generalize beyond that. I think there's an "objective" world, but I don't think humans are capable of knowing it beyond their own subjectivity (e.g., sense, perception, and measurement schemes). We know what we know and we sometimes know what we don't know, but there's a huge chasm of things we don't know that we don't know. So thinking our knowledge is anywhere near complete or that we can begin to know objective universal truths is really shortsighted. In general, I think it's poor intellectual form to assume that anything is absolute or "true" per se.

There have been people so adamant in defending science ITT that they have to create straw men and deny their own argumentative shortcomings. Multiple posts have conveniently ignored the circular reasoning in using science to "prove" science and are getting heated against people who aren't even trying to discredit the scientific method. People out here saying I'm saying science is shit when I'm involved in god damned research. Forgive me for having a nuanced understanding of something!

You change your ideological framework for what constitutes "validity." It converges with mathematics, philosophy, the other humanities, etc. It's not as if science does not borrow and contribute to other fields. Plenty of philosophy takes from science (and science fiction). It's the convergence between fields and how they might be applied that validates them as systems of knowledge/understanding.

Science fiction represents a nice little cross where it combines ideas and gives us a pretty accurate reflection of current life and concerns. I hope you see how robots, which are the result of scientific progress, don't mean much per se, but that a story about robots, say Blade Runner or Ghost in the Shell, tells us a lot about the world, the future, the present, humanity, etc., while incorporating these very developments. That you could watch a movie and then rethink your whole shit, I think that's just as valid.

I'm rather tired of having to explain this, but psychology undergoes the same kind of scientific rigor as any other scientific discipline. It's even harder because of the way you have to operationalize constructs, but make no mistake that psychological findings are not "made up." They're all founded on empirical evidence that is statistically tested and then replicated. Lots of constructs undergo extensive statistical analysis for reliability/validity checking. And really, it's not like this "scientific" psychology is a new thing either. Psychologists have been doing empirical "psychological science" (a redundancy) for centuries.

And I'm tired posting this text all the time: melbournelacanian.wordpress.com/2015/08/30/on-the-crisis-of-reproducibility-in-psychology/

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WEW LAD

Yes I know about the "crisis" but it's still contested (I heard the original study in question had questionable methodology) and psych research is changing its standards to avoid some of this in the future. For one, instead of using a rather arbitrary .05 alpha level for statistical analysis and reporting, people are now reporting effect sizes. Open science initiatives are allowing psych research to be more transparent and to allow for reporting of non-significant findings. I hope you can appreciate that some of the blame for this lies with the fact that journals have a financial motivation to deny non-significant findings. That shit poisons research.

Beyond that, I don't see why you would take one contested study as being damning of an entire field of study over centuries old that has already demonstrated it's efficacy time and time again on it's own and in other fields. It's intellectually lazy at best and disingenuous at worst and if you're the one fervently defending the scientific method, it's absurd that you'd draw conclusions like this.

>>>/fringe/

Fucking I actually just skimmed that article and you know what? Fuck you for promoting that garbage.

You are missing the point completely. I agree with your assessment on capitalist science journals. The article is saying: the whole approach of establishment psychology is flawed. And it argues this not from the position of those who wrote the original polemic against them, but from a Freudian standpoint.

You can't expect to create stabil systems with a statistical approach when the subject is the psyche. You either botch all individuality from your patients and your "findings" will lose any meaning due to this, or you keep the individuality and then you can't systematize.

The problem is the method. You can't create a pathology from it. If you try you end up with ridiculous shit like the DSM. What is already shoddy at sociology is disastrous in psychology.

it shows

such critique

Maybe so but the brain isn't well understood so there are many variables. Hard sciences are much more likely to give repeatable results as the human wildcard factor is limited to observation and interpretation of results, not an integral part of the whole analysis as it is in psychology.

So much this. The human brain is arguably more complex than any other system in the universe. Our understanding of it scratches the surface at best. Psychology can only ever talk to a person's own subjective experience which may be wildly different to the next person.

I expect neurology will teach us more about the brain over the coming decades but I doubt we'll ever fully get the brain. And all social science relies on assumptions and models created by these imperfect brains.

anti-slide bamp.

Really though who the fuck slides left/pol/?

No, see you and the guy who wrote that shit don't understand psychology at all. Psychology is much more than it's clinical side which gets much deserved criticism (though I still think its findings are still useful as a complement to overall health). It's an incredibly broad field, and by painting the entire field as "unscientific" you undermine the work of countless people over the past few centuries who's findings have actually contributed to other sciences and technology and so on. The original article that claimed this "crisis" apparently didn't even randomly sample from psych studies. So how could you possibly generalize anything from those results? That the blog is written by a Lacanian says a lot. Psychoanalysis as an entire field has been rejected by the larger Psychology establishment. I don't think it's quite fair, but to think this guy is going to be impartial is absurd.

Honestly, I don't want to read a butthurt Lacanian misinterpret the findings of a contested study against an entire field to serve his own interests. Psychology being discredited doesn't bring psychoanalysis any more credit. And that he doesn't understand the breadth of the field, this counts the shit going on BEFORE psychoanalysis (yes, psychology existed before psychoanalysis and Freud!) means he's simply not a trustworthy authority on the matter. It's not hard to see the bias in his writing.

Psychology has brought about many highly reliable findings. Things like optical illusions and how they work are an example of this along with findings on attentional limitation. You think individuals are highly variable (they are) and yet they still manage to respond in highly consistent ways; the field of psychophysics wouldn't be able to exist if people were truly "wildcards." I do recommend you check it out, because even if people have a different subjective baseline, the way they scale subjective responses still correlates very highly with other people's scaled responses, for example. Or that you could create a test measuring some aspect of "personality" and again and again people with some kind of quirk will answer things in a certain way with say, 80% prediction accuracy (and they really do have to be quite high for you to include them an item in the test). And the beautiful thing is that this can all be statistically analyzed and verified. All of this misconception, that psychology is just "muh mind" and its vagaries, is the result of people not understanding how old and how broad psychology is and how much it's changed over time.

You certainly can create stable constructs with statistical approaches because you can statistically define "stability" in terms of reliability.

The amazing thing is that even though we can never know what people actually experience internally, we can still predict their behavior in very reliable ways. Do you think advertising just magically works or that they're playing guessing games with those huge sums of money? Fuck no. They get psychologists that are personally trained to fuck with people. If you've ever bought a product and managed to use it straight out of the box without even needing to look at the instruction manual, that's likely the partial result of some kind of behavioral specialist who helps design interfaces. Vision science wouldn't be anywhere without psychology's behavioral/psychophysical methodology. Everyone might process shit differently, but I would bet they all get influenced by the Stroop effect, or the McGirk effect. The truth is that people are not actually that special and unique. We all depend on very similar hardware, and we all (generally) respond in predictable ways.

I'm not labeling psychology as "unscientific" – it's not in my agenda. I'm saying it can't be scientific. You can't have a science of the individual.

I agree with that but you don't want any kind of criticism raised against psychology from either side. It seems to me there's no way of influencing your views so this whole charade seems unnecessary. You are completely disregarding what is said here, for instance:

Oh my, so critical.

This isn't true at all. The 'psych' fields remain fragmented worldwide. Psychoanalysis has been preferred in Spain, France, and most of Latin America, for the last century, only recently has there been a push due to neo-liberal pressure to standardize (read: make more bureaucratic and "efficient" for the economy) and to prefer pharmaceutical treatment over long sessions.

I'm pretty sure you haven't read a single line from Freud and reject it as pseudo-[anything] based on your sympathy with the authority of the current biopolitical regime.

You are talking about findings in the subject of cognition. And that is alright. What is not, is trying to reduce human problems to cognition only.

Circular reasoning.

No, that's basically the work of Karl Popper who was literally about as bad as Hayek in understanding economics.

Literally every and all claims that Marxism is "unscientific" come from Popper.

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Excerpt from my PhD thesis, section on the materialist dialectic as a method when contrasted with positivist and reductionist approaches. Example originally from Levins and Lewontin's 2007 "Biology Under the Influence".

"The theory that malaria is caused by parasitic protozoa carried by mosquitoes is certainly objectively true. But its 'truth' really only works on a certain level of abstraction, which ignores the interaction 'protozoan-mosquito-human' and the forces that shape and influence various aspects of that interaction. To paraphrase Levins and Lewontin, do poor people get malaria because of parasitic protozoa, or are parasitic protozoa one of the ways that poverty kills?. After all, mosquito-bites would not be a problem if everyone could afford mosquito nets. Human-caused eutrophication of lakes can lead to plankton blooms, followed by a lack of oxygen that kills, inter alia, the dragonfly larvae which are a main predator of mosquitoes, thereby increasing the number of mosquitoes. Human-caused climate change can also intensify the spread of mosquitoes by expanding their habitation zones. Again the tension between the absolute and relative is illustrated by a dialectical approach; while the culpability of the parasitic protozoa is absolute, a biological fact, the extent to which this influences humanity is relative and depends largely on our own choices. Hence the simple claim that malaria is caused by protozoa is, on its own, implicitly a denial of the other factors that have a role in the spread of the disease; an obfuscation of the social injustice and political decisions that allow the disease to spread. Such a claim would provide implicit support to the existing social order by not holding it responsible for the reality we observe, and ignore how social change can alter biological conditions. The very same claim also implies that the best solution to the malaria problem is to be found in new and better medicine.

If the social dimension is ignored by science, it is also marginalized from the political debate concerning potential solutions. Many aspects of our reality, rather than being 'neutral' facts, are instead results of political-economic outcomes, and can be altered through political struggle. For instance, lack of public health-care is as much a cause of disease as are bacteria, parasites or viruses. […] Such a relationship between, and mutual influence of, theory and practice is a crucial dialectical concept, and is argued by Ollman to be one of the defining aspects of Marx's work (Ollman, 2003:14-20)."

Mladen Dolar: Freud and the Political

mariborchan.si/text/articles/mladen-dolar/freud-and-the-political/

But it's not strictly about the individual?

I'm well aware of the limitations of the field both historically and now. I know most research lacks generalizability. I know a lot of research is done just to get grant funding and to make money. I know academia gets cliquey and shitty and people try to argue about what's "really science" and what's not. The criticisms in this thread come out of ignorance. What says is little more than sweeping generalizations. How are we defining "psyche" here? Why can't we form pathologies? Even the DSM and clinical psych has its uses and has demonstrated efficacy in treatment, some methods as good or better than drug treatments. If it helps people, I think that's great. I'm largely against "normative" distinctions and there's an issue of pathologizing individuals simply to treat them ($$$$$$$). I still believe there's a benefit here.

There's nothing wrong with looking at general tendencies if that's what you're going for. If you want individual data then you go with a different methodology. And it doesn't "botch" anything because you can correlate findings from general studies to more personal ones and unite them with theory.

This is very frustrating because it's quite clear that these arguments are coming from people who haven't studied research methods, but are insisting on things nonetheless.

Guy is anything but impartial. He doesn't even know the history of his own field if he says psychology can't be scientific. Some of the first modern psychological efforts were strictly experimental/empirical.

Now I need you to clarify what you mean by "psych." This entire time I have been referring to experimental/research psychology. Things like biopsychology/physiological psychology, cognitive science, behaviorism, social psychology, developmental psychology, psychophysics, psychometrics, etc. I have not been referring to it as applied "clinical"/treatment psychology. Psychoanalysis has been mostly crowded out from most research institutions here in the US. Plenty of people have already talked about it's methodological problems so I won't mention them here. Do I think it's useful? Sure. But there's very clear distancing between "Psychological Science" and Psychoanalysis. Call it establishment or whatever you want, that's just how it goes and it probably leads to a handful of resentful Lacanians.

Silly. I used to read some of his stuff on dreams and the unconscious. I think Jung's ideas on archetypes and persona and how we navigate socially is fascinating. I've defended Psychoanalytic theory as valid in this very thread, but it's usefulness is more akin to that of philosophy, not "science."

It's more than that. I'm telling you psychology is a huge, huge field. No one is trying to reduce problems to "cognition only." And even psychoanalytic theory still has a little spot in there where personality and emotions and certain disorders come into play. There are so many ways of exploring human experience and none of them need to be mutually exclusive. They are complementary.

Not necessarily because it relies on empirical data. Moreover, statistical analysis of reliability/validity within a construct is only one thing you check. You also need to tie it to other data (other tests/types of tests, theories, constructs, replications) to build convergence. It's produced/identified plenty of stable constructs.

In the end it doesn't even matter. But I just get so tired of people who don't understand something but then jump in and pretend like they know everything, going so far as to deny the work of countless people. What other field does this happen in? Does anyone tell a baker that they're not doing "real cooking"? Does anyone handwave theories of physics? It's like people think they're experts on psychology by virtue of the fact that they can think. It doesn't work that way. The only other field I can think of where this shit happens regularly is philosophy. I hate it when it happens there too, but at least you can scare them off with multi-syllabic words.

Let's examine your argument.

Which means: you can create reliable constructs with statistics, because it can justify itself by its own methods. In other words, we can trust it because it says we can trust it. This is circular.

The power of statistics comes from its mathematical roots. It's weakness comes from its application in reality. It's greatest vice is creating an illusion where we mistake the interpretative conclusion (its construction) for the real thing (the group in question) or the properties of it.

Let's say we are studying depression. Our very first problem is how we define it, because we want to create a group of hundred people who suffer from it, so we can analyze the groups properties. So we put forward an ambiguous definition, ambiguous because it is abstracted from clinical work (the praxis) where each and every patient had different concerns and problems originating in and caused by their radically different personal lives, and find people who fit this criteria. We already sacrificed accuracy for the sake efficiency, mind you.

Now that we have found our hundred "depressed" people, we give them a questionnaire. It consists of 500 tiresome questions, with inbuilt safety-checks: asking every question in different ways – so the story goes, but in my experience these "differently asked but essentially same questions" always miss the mark (maybe statisticians should study some comparative literature, nudge nudge, wink wink). People answer these questions and this is how our unified data is born. We have to suppose, for our endeavor to make any statistical sense, that when Johnny answered YES (or rated his answer from a scale going from 1 to 10, etc.) to the question "Do you regularly experience problems with sleeping?"meant THE SAME THING when Martha answered it with a YES. (Not to mention Carl, who doesn't understand what we mean by "problems," or Bruce, who does have serious problems every year or so, but not on a "regular" basis, or Anna who has delusions and thinks that she does never sleep, etc.) What happens, again, is that we lose any resemblance of truth, because Johnny might have indicated his inability to sleep, and Martha her inability to stay awake.

(Let me also point out that there are already A LOT of suppositions built in: that an individual can answer question about his life at all in terms someone else defines them, in other words that we disregard the exteriority of our endeavour to the individual; that this reflects something real, graspable; that we get to something that is true of most if not all; that this fictitious construction can be 'scientific' reference or base for future constructions of this same sort.)

Then comes my favorite part, publication, then the press: "Cambridge's Department of Psychology Proves Link Between Irregular Sleep Cycles and Depression."

Irregular, indeed.

So who or what was the empirical data in this example? The individual? Certainly not, I just explained how we abolished it.

I can replicate this test all I want, in India then in England, the only thing I'd prove is my belief in a process that can not but produce fiction.

I'm not questioning the intentions of these "scientists", just as I don't question the intentions of charitable millionaires.

Does physics claim to tell facts about individuals?

You start by accusing me of ignorance just to prove your own with your last sentence.

More about DSM and its incredible corruption in 2014 What About Me - The Struggle for Identity in a Market-based Society, Chapter 7:

mega.nz/#F!jMUARa7b!696eTsGQlV-HYS0OMxASWA

Marxist strategy against capitalist scientism:

Another thread where Holla Forums demonstrates that it is mostly populated with bitter humanities scholars looking for any opportunity to criticise science. I'll never understand why so much effort is wasted attacking science here when the world is still so far from socialism or communism. If you believe that science is inherently capitalist then you're as deranged as the far right who make the same claims.

I just explained to you how psychological research is anything but scientific.

Who the fuck said this? Point to the post!

good stuff

this guy gets it

Saying that "we cannot depend on science to fill in for philosophy" and "science is capitalist" are two very, very different things. But you seem to be too retarded to realize that.
Kill yourself soon, faggot.

Not the user you are responding to, but a few things. First, you need to relax.

Second, I don't think the main contention has been that science can't fill in for philosophy. Instead, scientism is being critiqued for the presupposition that it alone can explain everything. Scientific thinking could be the ultimate method of observation, but because of its current epistemological underpinnings, it has failed to accurately explain that which it observes in a dialectical way.

I think this post does a really good job at explaining what I am (poorly) trying to get at.

Okay, so you're going to reduce all of psychology down to its clinical application, yet again.

No. Not all constructs are "statistically created" (i.e., factor analysis). Some come from theory or from observations that are then experimentally tested. It's used to pull multiple forms of data together (e.g., into a possible construct) and to separate them (e.g., to discriminate one construct from another). Statistics also tells us what's a "real" (i.e., statistically significant) difference. Your criticism is entirely valid for certain things (e.g., IQ or certain personality constructs); it does not apply to all constructs, like depression for example which relies on lots of data from different tests and fields.

That's kind of the point of inferential statistics. Statistics that can't be applied to the real world would be meaningless. It takes data from the real world in order to say something about the real world! Are you under the impression that math isn't "real"?

No one is saying the statistical models that validate a construct represent the "thing" itself. The construct is just a "slice" of this thing. This is why we take multiple "slices" by different methods and fields and bring them together. This is how you create a stable construct, which itself only reflects to a limited degree, the "real thing."

If they display common symptoms and respond to similar treatments, then I think it's appropriate to group this into a construct. If they respond similarly in tests against a proper norm group (i.e., randomly sampled, large sample size, etc.) then we can say that they display differential behavior from "normal" people. Of course, these differences are statistically verified; items that don't discriminate well are revised or discarded. The reason a test asks the same question so many times is simply to ensure consistency in responses (that even if they have different ways of answering a single question, they might respond to the gist of all of the questions combined in a consistent and predictable way). Content validity (what you're referring to) is only one part of it all. How well do test results predict theorized/hypothesized behavior? How well does it match current or future data? How does it compare to other tests and similar constructs (e.g., does a "depressed" individual score lower on "happiness" scales as we might expect)? We can also do interviews and case studies (to examine, specifically, the individual). How do these match up with their test results? We combine this with biological and neurological studies to get a more comprehensive picture. When your "depressed" group keeps appearing predictably "different" across all of this data, I think it's safe to say that you have a somewhat valid and stable construct on your hands.

No researcher worth their salt says they "prove" anything. That's not how science works. Just because popular press misconstrues it doesn't mean it's the fault of the field. Blame the need to sensationalize everything for money. Also, funny that you bring this up when earlier someone linked a blog post talking about an equally sensational article about how psychology had a CRISIS of replicability.

You're seriously oversimplifying the methods of an already reduced conceptualization of the entire field. If you care to know further, then I recommend you read up on psychometrics and statistical validity to start:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Validity_(statistics)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychometrics

Also have this for good measure:
psychologytoday.com/blog/under-the-influence/201308/the-psychology-the-psychology-isnt-science-argument

It's not like the field doesn't have problems. There are tons of problems and a lot of them can be blamed on establishment nonsense like needing grants and needing to get published. But you're not arguing this.

Easy now. Science isn't always a blessing either. It gave us the threat of nuclear war, which rapidly developed into an increasingly serious threat, all because some of the scientists had been exposed to an ideology that boiled down to "lol fug gommies :DDD nugem all"

What irks me about these /lit/ threads is when they boil down to word games and whining about measurement. "Circles aren't real, you platonists" and "you can't have perfect measurement" etc.

We can't go back. Science has created problems that only science can solve. Seriously, we could really use some thorium reactors right about now so we don't nuke each other over oil.

Just further proof you don't know what you are talking about. The platonists would be the ones to say circles can't be found in the physical world, not the other way around.

Of what? Of mass? Of longitude? Velocity? Time? Oh no, you mean people! Seriously, people? Wow, that's totally the same!

etc. indeed

this is getting ridiculous, m8

What makes you think that two people can have the same symptoms?

the hell am I reading?

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see

(not that user)

The three organisms interact, i.e. their ecosystems overlap - and the degree to which this is true depends on non-biological factors.

Posting a paper a wrote for my class on Marxism called "Science and Class Struggle" where I try to analyse a lot of the questions discussed here. I wrote it when I took my masters in political economy and was given a high distinction for it by the prof, who happened to be the based Erik Swyngedouw, so I do hope it's of a high enough quality for people here to enjoy.

Sounds cool, thank you for posting.

what class?

I fully agree with you about the significance and educational value of methodology as well as history and philosophy of science. So many people today—and even professional scientists—seem to me like somebody who has seen thousands of trees but has never seen a forest. A knowledge of the historic and philosophical background gives that kind of independence from prejudices of his generation from which most scientists are suffering. This independence created by philosophical insight is—in my opinion—the mark of distinction between a mere artisan or specialist and a real seeker after truth. (Einstein to Thornton, 7 December 1944, EA 61-574)

if you faggots don't get into the 21st century when it comes to the advancements of science, specifically neuroscience, you're going to quickly find yourselves obsolete

epic!

What advancements of neuroscience are we ignoring ITT, in your opinion?

also
2deusex4me

It was just called "Marxist Political Economy", but since Swyngedouw is not only a geographer and a political economist but a bioengineer (!) he encuraged the class to read Biology Under the Influence; a treaty of the use of dialectics in biology specifically but also the natural sciences in general.

It was a great read and I highly recommend it, though it might be hard to understand everything for someone with no natural scientific background,

You're arguing against the guy who was vehemently arguing against positivism in this very thread. Ridiculous indeed.

By displaying the same convergence of behavioral, neurological, biological, psychological (e.g., emotional, cognitive), and social-contextual trends and by responding to the same treatment. You can never be absolutely sure, just like you can't ever be 100% in a medical diagnosis. But contrary to what you seem to believe, people are not actually that unique.

Looking at how ineffectual (and often times harmful) modern psychology is I'd say it is not hard to see that their basic model is wrong and that this basic conceptual error concerns the status of the patient. A psychological diagnosis shouldn't be like a medical diagnosis. It's not an organ you are supposed to be treating but an individual.

From:

(It is a machine tailored for serving big pharma. People present on the DSM's board have stocks in the very companies which will push out the "medicine" for the "diseases" they create.)

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Another user here thanks for mentioning Swyngedouw whom I didn't know before as I'm interested in getting to read Henri Lefebvre some day.

Will check him out! Have you seen the Adrian Johnston lecture on Engels & Biology? If so, wut think?

He was not talking about a moot nietzchian "knowing." He was talking about systems in nature.

societyandspace.com/material/interviews/interview-with-adrian-johnston-on-transcendental-materialism/

Interesting, do you have any links to these lectures?

youtube.com/watch?v=VOLTlKpzdh0

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gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=4D781037FFDFA763641142E845C2E314

gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=1C0F716E6BAF8EB67BACEFDBD2E959DC

bump

Forget epistemology, teach my how to get the puss.

You need to take care of the puss.

So did you look at it?

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jesus