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Originally Posted by Disinfo Agent
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.
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Not if the "mistakes" mean not being scientists any more. There is such a thing as backtracking, and if we had made some wrong turn in doing science, I could see that argument-- but it seems that science's progress is accelerating, not slowing, so now is no time to give up on its most fundamental principles.
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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.
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Yes, the former is what I called "google science", and we can agree it is not all science is trying to do. We want to organize, not just predict, to create a sense of understanding. A google engine doesn't really organize, it categorizes and searches. Understanding is an important part of science, and this relates to the concept of "what is an explanation", and that's the interface between science and philosophy. But it's still an interface-- when the two actually permeate each other, science has lost something, not gained it.
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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.
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But what part of what Mendeleev and company did benefited from not dismissing everything that isn't data, inferrable from data, or useful for organizing data and guiding new experiments? To me that is saying that scientists shouldn't dismiss what isn't science. I agree that they shouldn't, indeed I've leveled that exact criticism at Dawkins and self-proclaimed skeptics of his ilk, but I don't think we should try to mix it with science either. It dilutes it, like homeopathy.