David F Marks: Psychology - Science or Delusion?

I must admit I was surprised by the mention of quantum mechanics and evolution, both of which are fields where theories have made very precise predictions that have been corroborated, with the alternatives falsified.

There are areas of psychology where testable predictions can be made but there are certainly serious problems in the clinical area relating to causation of illness.

 

The point I'm making is that when you get to a certain level of complexity, there's virtually never a "definitive" experiment that can settle the question one way or another. So people hang onto their theories, and view all new data in a way that best preserves their theory.

I'm not trying to defend Psychology because its my discipline. In any case, my specialty is cognitive neuroscience, which David Marks would probably view as "real science" anyway. But I can tell you that in my specialty area, there's lots of people hanging onto their own theories despite all. You just wouldn't spot it without knowing the specifics.

I think there are two things that affect the persistence of bad theories in a field. The first is the field's complexity, as I've described above (because then people can always save their theories despite apparent evidence to the contrary.). The second is culture. Disciplines with a long cultural history of questioning one another's work have an edge. Usually that's just down historical accident - the influence of key people and how young researchers are trained.

 

Yes, I see the point, but my impression is that quantum theory and evolution do actually turn out to have the definitive experiments. The Large Hadron Collider showed that all the particles predicted by supersymmetry did not show up and something that would do for Higgs did. I am interested in bird evolution and there has been remarkable progress over the last fifteen years in molecular genetics. To the extent that people are no longer arguing about bird lineages. The data now give definitive trees. Arguments about selection pressures continue but the definitive experiments are often doable, even if hard to get funded. For the birds there are cross fostering studies that could test my recent theory very nicely!

I agree that some psychology involves testable theories, but having been exposed to clinical psychological studies through my interest in ME I have been shocked as to how stark the difference is from what I am used to in immunology (however complex and uncertain that can be). The paper by Wessely and Chalder in 1989 could be used as a paradigm for Popperian non-science - it claims to know what the right treatment is even before any trials have been done.

 

In fairness to them they were still studying for further degrees. What I have never been able to establish is who there supervisors were.

 

Wessely was 33. If he was studying for a higher degree he was a bit late and would have been fully clinically trained so should have known exactly what he was about. If he was doing an MD he would not have a had a formal supervisor.

 

lI believe Chalder was just about finishing an MSc. I may have been misled to the various references to study grants, which appear until later.

@Jonathan Edwards were you ever able to locate and read the Wessely, Butler, Chalder, David chapter The Cognitive Behavioural Management of the Post-viral Fatigue Syndrome in the Jenkins and Mowbray book. This restated in greater detail the 1989 paper and gives more references. It does not make it any better.

 

Yes, that sounds familiar.

 

Wasn't one of the gay conversion therapy proponents a mentor of White, Sharpe or Wessely?

 

I think that would have been Sharpe's mentor Gelder who collaborated with Isaac Marks on aversion therapy.