Today, when I went to the academic affairs office to register, I casually asked: aside from math, physics, chemistry, and biology, what else does the “natural science” category of courses required for the philosophy of technology track include—for example, do computer science and psychology count? The answer was: computer science probably counts, but psychology clearly does not.
And yet when I once asked a classmate majoring in psychology, I was explicitly told that “psychology belongs to the natural sciences”!
In people’s minds, psychology is the sort of thing discussed together with philosophy—in Peking University’s general education course center, psychology and philosophy are placed in the same category, and the building where the Department of Psychology is located is called “Philosophy Building” — psychology ought to be some kind of philosophy, or at least some humanities discipline, or at the very least should count as part of the social sciences. But why on earth would anyone say that psychology belongs to the “natural sciences”?
In fact, for modern psychology, classifying it as a natural science is perfectly well deserved! When I say modern psychology, its spokesperson is absolutely not Freud. In fact, Freud’s theory is only a small branch of modern psychology, and one that mainstream psychology scholars have often looked down upon; those who take Freud seriously are more often philosophers and ordinary people.
And in fact, from the research methods of the mainstream schools of modern psychology, they are actually closer to the “experiments” of physics, chemistry, and biology, while differing quite a lot from the research methods of social sciences such as sociology and economics, not to mention the difference from philosophy!
Indeed, the questions psychology studies are also philosophical questions—what is consciousness, what is cognition, what is emotion, how is knowledge formed, and so on. Yet although the questions are the same, the form is vastly different. It is just like philosophy also discusses time, space, matter, origin, and other topics shared with physics, but their appearances are utterly different. From the standpoint of the form of their scientific “activity,” physics is clearly closer to natural sciences such as chemistry and biology, and farther from philosophy. Psychology is similar: one cannot say that because the issues it explores are close to philosophy, it therefore does not count as a natural science.
Strictly speaking, psychology is neither philosophy, nor a natural science, nor a social science. It is not philosophy because it has already quite successfully introduced natural-scientific methods; but because its object of study does not seem to be the natural world, it also does not seem able to count as a natural science; so psychology would seem to count as a social science. Yet both in terms of its object of study and its research methods, there still appear to be many differences… So, just as Peking University’s general education course design has done, psychology has no choice but to be temporarily bundled together with philosophy, its identity ambiguous and unclear.
Of course, one can only say that the research methods of some schools in psychology appear closer to natural science; psychology is an extremely special discipline. Under the name of “psychology,” the activities carried out include not only research in natural science, social science, and philosophy, but also spiritualism, supernatural powers, and “self-help” and the like.
There are many reasons for the conceptual confusion surrounding psychology. First is the special nature of its object of study—it is neither a natural object nor society, but the human “psyche.” Another aspect is that psychology is a very new “science,” because the human psyche and human thought could for a long time only be problems fit for theology or philosophy to discuss, and recognizing psychology as a science was long unimaginable. James, who wrote the hugely influential The Principles of Psychology, even emphasized that “psychology is not a science.” Even today, psychology is undoubtedly one of the sciences most entangled with spiritualism, pseudoscience, mysticism, vulgar entertainment, and the like.
So why is it that today we generally regard psychology as a science? Where is the boundary between science and non-science? How did psychology undergo the transformation from soul to philosophy and then to science? Compared with other sciences, psychology has the shortest history, the available materials for study are relatively complete, and the relationship between psychology and pseudoscience is especially prominent in the present age. It is clear, then, that in exploring what “science” is, what kind of activity can be called science, and in examining current pseudoscientific phenomena, the history and present condition of psychology can provide philosophers of science and sociologists of science with an excellent example.
Of course, when I say that psychology is close to the natural sciences, that is only my own preliminary impression (see “Psychology ‘Different’ from the Crowd,” “The Story of Psychology,” “From Soul to Psychology,” etc.), and there are certainly many who would disagree. However, even if one does not agree that psychology is a natural science, why do so many people recognize psychology as a natural science (or at least as a science)? And why do so many kinds of science, pseudoscience, mysticism, and even youth self-help books like to fly the banner of “psychology”? What is the connection between the rise of psychology and the scientific background and philosophical ideas of the time? These questions can all offer beneficial insights to philosophy of science, history of science, sociology of science, science communication, and other disciplines.
February 24, 2006
Latest comments
- skydream
2006-07-17 02:23:39
Very thoughtful.
I think psychology, philosophy, and science all overlap. But as things stand now—it seems to lean more toward science.
Is psychology a new way for human beings to understand themselves?
Or is it actually pseudopsychology that does not truly treat people as people? Hard to say. - Gu
2006-07-17 13:17:49
I feel that in fact psychological science is precisely the study of human beings without treating them as human beings; as a science, psychology treats people as “objects,” as experimental subjects. In experiments, there is essentially no difference from animal psychology. Of course, human beings are human beings after all, and when psychology eventually rises from data to “theory,” it ultimately still has to reflect the special nature of “a science about human beings.”
It is like how in ordinary physics research, metaphysics is excluded, but once one reaches the highest depths, to the level of Einstein or Bohr, those great physicists inevitably begin discussing philosophical questions. Similarly, ordinary psychological research is entirely in the mode of the natural sciences, but when one reaches the masters of psychology, the philosophical flavor becomes very obvious.
Psychology is one of the newest independent sciences, and it has many distinctive features. Traditional analytic philosophers sneer when they hear the term “psychologism”; on the other hand, Continental philosophers often despise psychology on the grounds that issues of consciousness cannot be incorporated into experimental science. And the “science” that current philosophy of science focuses on is mainly physics, with biology receiving relatively little attention, let alone psychology. The significance of psychology’s rise has long been overlooked by philosophy. I personally think that the field of the philosophy of psychology has broad, unexplored prospects.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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