Understanding Science Flashcards
What is Science?
Science is an general approach to understand the natural world.
Why is Psych a science?
Psych takes the same general approach to (as Science) understanding one aspect of the natural world: Human Behavior
Systematic Empiricism
Empiricism refers to learning based on observation, and scientists learn about the natural world systematically, by carefully planning, making, recording, and analyzing observations out of it.
Scientific Approach
-Which follows in a straight forward way from the first-
These are questions about the way the world actually is and, therefore, can be answered by systematically observing it.
The question of whether women talk more then men is empirical in this way.
Creating Public Knowledge
After asking their empirical questions, making their systematic observations, and drawing their conclusions, scientists publish their work.
Why is publication important?
Publication is an essential feature of science for two reasons, one is that science is a social process- a large scale collaboration among many researchers distributed across both time and space. The second is that publication allows science to be self-correcting.
Pseudoscience
Pseudoscience refers to activities and beliefs that are claimed to be scientific by their proponents - and may appear to be scientific at first glance - but are not.
Science
Science is a general way of understanding the natural world. Its three fundamental features are systematic empiricism, empiricism questions, and public knowledge.
Psychology
Psychology is a science because it takes the scientific approach to understand human behavior.
Pseudoscience
Pseudoscience refers to beliefs and activities that are claimed to be scientific but lack one or more of the three features of science. It is important to distinguish the scientific approach to understanding human behavior from the many pseudoscientific approaches.
