Quote:
Originally Posted by Ken G
I'm not telling science what to do-- I'm telling people to do science, and not claim they are doing something more than that. (And ironically, I agree completely with Bohr on that one-- Bohr was telling Einstein to do science too, so it's curious you should choose that example....)
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My point is that perhaps psychology, and sciences in general, have their own pace that we shouldn't interfere with. Maybe the "divergent schools of thought" stage is a necessary phase to get to grander things. We should give scientists some room to explore and to make mistakes.
To give you a different example, simply amassing large amounts of data without attempting to draw any inference from them is not science; yet observation is an important stage in the development of a science. Until the 19th century, most of biology consisted of observing, describing and classifying hundreds of living beings -- a task similar to coin or stamp collection. This was not science yet, but it laid the foundation for Darwin and Mendel's breakthroughs. Another example: at first, chemists grouped the elements according to essentially arbitrary criteria. This was not science, but without that stage it's unlikely that Mendeleev would have discovered the periodic table.
Don't get me wrong, I understand where you are coming from. You are worried that scientists, and other people, have a tendency to infer too much from their data. I agree with this concern entirely. However, in the same spirit, I am cautioning that we shouldn't fall into the opposite extreme of dismissing everything that isn't data, or directly inferrable from physical data.