Introduction Flashcards
What is The Geocentric Model?
- Aristotle -geocentric model Popular until the 1600s
- 5 Elements: • Air • Water • Fire • Earth • Aether
- Ptolemy • Epicycles (movements the stars make)
- Thought the earth was the centre
What is the Heliocentric Model?
- Copernicus published support for heliocentrism
- Earth around sun takes 1 year
- Earth spin around own axis in 1 day
What are the criticisms of the Heliocentric Model?
- If Earth moves, why is it that if you throw a stone from a tower, it ends exactly at the bottom of the tower?
- If the Earth spins around its axis, why is it that people and objects don’t fly from the surface?
- Would this model not predict that the stars should increase and decrease in size as a function of where the Earth is.
What did Galileo and is telescope find?
- Many more stars
- Moon not smooth
- Sizes of Mars & Venus change
- 4 moons of Jupiter
- Sizes of Mars and Venus change
What is Cartesian tradition?
a logical approach to understanding science
What is Dualism?
the mind is immaterial and independent of the body
What is Mechanistic view?
the universe and all matter in it (including the human body) can be regarded as one big, sophisticated machine
What did Descartes discover?
- Bodies were self-perpetuating machines; Soul and body were separate
- Theory of cognition –Cogito ergo sum
- Animal spirits
- Autonomic reflexes
- Self-awareness
- Attention
- Wakefulness
- Self-observe
What did Sir Isaac Newton do?
- Sir Isaac Newton publishes Principia Mathematica.
- Formulated the physical laws that govern the motions of planets and universal gravitation
What is the Traditional Approach?
- Reasoning
- Observations can be deceptive
What did Bacon discover?
1600s Bacon –developed the scientific method
- Interaction between systematic observation and reasoning will lead to progress
- Conduct experiments to test claims
- Standardise experiments so others can replicate
What is Comte?
- Age of Enlightenment
- 18th and beginning of 19th century
- Knowledge is obtained by using the scientific method and is known as positivism
- Religion and philosophy were considered inferior
What did psychology emerge?
-18th and beginning of 19th century
Darwin’s theory of evolution:
-Natural selection
-Survival of the fittest
What were Kant’s ideas on anthropology ?
- Self-consciousness
- Mental processes
- Emotions
What are the common sense views of science?
- Facts are given to careful and objective observers via the senses
- Facts are prior to and independent of theory
- Facts constitute a firm and reliable foundation for scientific knowledge
What is the issue with Facts are given to careful and objective observers via the senses?
- Problem 1 - Even when we can observe something (or the effects of something)
- How good is our sensory observation?
- Problem 2
- Perception requires interpretation
- A theory may change the perception of facts
- A theory helps us focus on important facts
- Problem 3
- Scientific theories are full of non-observable facts
- Non-observables may become observable
- -Problem 4
- Search for facts needs to be guided by knowledge
- Without preceding theory we don’t know what to look for an where
What is Inductive reasoning ?
- A finite number of specific facts leads to a general conclusion
- Opposite of deductive reasoning
What was science viewed as at the end of the 20th Century?
- Postmodernists - science is not special, not real
- Science has nothing to do with realism
- Scientific knowledge = social construct
- Science is like religion, voodoo, and astrology
- There is nothing to distinguish these enterprises
What are the 2 crucial characteristics of science ?
- Willingness to root out errors in one’s web of beliefs
2. Implementation of procedural safeguards against confirmation bias
What is the middle ground for scientific explanations?
- Facts have an objective basis even if there is a subjective component in their perception
- Scientific claims must be treated with caution, certainly when they are new
- Be critical
- Look for converging evidence
- Theories are subject to continuous improvement
What does psychology use?
- Randomized control group
- Double-blind designs
- Placebo control groups
- Sophisticated statistical techniques
- Psychology cannot yield meaningful generalizations because everyone is unique
Study by Hedges (1987)
- Compare empirical cumulativeness of psychology and physics
- Both sciences use similar statistical methods
- Reviews of both sciences suggest statistical inconsistencies
- Caution: only reviews of one particular physics research domain was used
- One viable criticism
- The ability to generate successful predictions
How is psychology useful for society?
- Road safety
- Boosting brain power
- Beating fear
- Supporting each other
- Overcoming prejudice
- Criminal Justice System
