Reflect on whether different epistemological views can help describe the scientific process in psychology.

In the previous step, you were introduced to two views of the scientific process. The table below distills these two “archetypes” and provides examples that Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn used to propose their view of science and its demarcation from pseudoscience.

	Popper	Kuhn
Nickname	“The Logician”	“The Sociologist”
Approach	Normative	Descriptive
Thesis	Scientists must attempt to falsify their theories, without resorting to ad hoc explanations	During “normal science” old scientists engage in puzzle-solving but brush aside “anomalies”, young scientists fight for “paradigm shifts” that clarify the “anomalies”
Positive Examples	Einstein’s General Relativity Theory and the Eddington-Dyson experiment	The discovery of oxygen and the subsequent chemical revolution (by Lavoisier and others)

Before you continue, can you think of other ways of distinguishing scientific and non-scientific knowledge that go beyond falsifiability and puzzle-solving proposed by Popper and Kuhn?

Take a few minutes to write your thoughts down. If you need inspiration, check this chapter in the article “Science and Pseudo-Science”.

What makes psychology a science?

What makes psychology a science? Write down your thoughts on a piece of paper. Can you list examples covered in this course that one could use for, or against, the idea that psychology (or a part of psychology) is a science?

Share your thoughts here on Padlet.

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