Psychology NOT religion

[Instar]

Anything but Plato's eulogy of the cave
dont ask me the core questions... Ill kill you all if you ask me the core questions...
hehehe
inside joke
(with myself)

[Fyron]

Instar, what are the core questions?

[Erax]

Hello there.

This is one of the more interesting topics I've seen in a loong time.

First, QuarianRex, you have defended / explained the "Heinlein POV" better than anyone else I have seen. Congratulations !

Second, I believe that there is a fundamental difference between the sciences dealing with Man (psychology, sociology, philosophy, even economics) and the 'exact' sciences. This is because 'human' sciences (I do not call them Humanities because that has a separate meaning) cannot really use the scientific method in its entirety and must rely mostly on observation. An attempt to design and run scientific experiments in these fields would probably be illegal.

You cannot build Plato's cave (I mean, you can, but it would be illegal and monstrous too), you can only search for situations that are similar to it and try to draw your conclusions from those.

[Baron Munchausen]

Whoooeeee, what a lot of tangled ideas! These several topics are rather closely related, though.

Krsqk, who do you consider to be the 'founders' of Psychology? Freud was certainly an atheist, being a member of the Positivist movement and the Vienna Circle in particular. But 'psychology' was not his invention. And even his own movement - Psychoanalysis - had some rebels who disagreed with his reductionist views, Carl Jung being the most notable. Certainly there are many psychologists today who want to reduce the human mind to chemical activity in the brain. You can read some frightening things in the works of Thomas Szaz, a leading critic of modern 'industrial' psychology/psychiatry. But the 'reductionists' are not the only school of psychology.

Plato's analogy of the Cave was actually intended to deal with just this sort of mentality. Even in his time there were 'materialists' who discounted anything other than what could be learned through the senses. Being chained up so you can only look at the 'shadows' of things is his image of the sort of person who will only consider the senses as a source of information. Jung's psychology has often been compared to Platonism with 'archetypes' functioning so much like the 'forms' of Platonic philosophy. Like Plato, Jung kept saying there were other sources of information that just the senses. Poor Jung often got tarred as 'anti-modern' for his resistance to reductionism.

[Gryphin]

BTW Vocabulary: Paradigm
I was not sure what it ment.
This arrived in my inbox today:
TODAY'S eTIP(TM): TODAY'S WORD: Paradigm

paradigm (PAYR eh diym)

noun

a) a pattern, example, or model

b) an overall concept accepted by most people in an intellectual
community, as those in one of the natural sciences, because of
its effectiveness in explaining a complex process, idea, or set
of data

To see a paradigm of Art Deco architecture, visit New York
City's Chrysler Building.
this is from:
DUMMIES DAILY: Word of the Day
http://www.dummiesdaily.com
Hope this helps.

[DirectorTsaarx]

For more information on paradigms in general, see "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", by Thomas S. Kuhn. (originally published in 1962 as part of "Foundations of the Unity of Science").

I reserve the right to re-enter this debate later; I'm catching up on the forums from work, and it's almost time to go home .

[Wardad]

Can we have Para-Psychology without Para-Psychotics?

If you can catch Religion, can you also catch Pyschology?

Is a Pair-a-dime the same as two-bits?

P.S. Einstein included God in his theories, but he had to edit the references out.