Questions

1.  Have you ever encountered people who completely deny that Psychology is a science.  Perhaps you are one of those people yourself.   If you know Deniers, what do they say to explain why they think that psychology is not scientific.   If you know no  Deniers, what argument could you give to justify a claim that psychology is not a science.

2. What argument would you gave to Deniers to defend or support psychology as a science? Which argument (Deniers or Supporters) do you think is stronger of the two? Why?  What, if anything could be done to make psychology more scientific?

3. But even if Psychology is a science, can it ever completely explain the human condition?   Can Psychology really ever account for all of the human experience (including culturally embedded experiences, religious or spiritual experiences, and experiences of free will)

4. Freud's Psychoanalytic and Skinner's Learning theories are examples of theories which used to be very popular in psychology.  Many psychologists in the 1920s and 1930s were proud to call themselves Psychoanalytic Psychologists and even a larger set of psychologists were even prouder to call themselves a Learning Theorists in the 1950s and 1960s.  But today, you would be hard pressed to find any Learning Theorists or Psychoanalytic Psychologists.  What do you think happened to make these theorists?  Are theories in psychology something like fashion -- changing all the time for no good reason as to why one theory or fashion becomes popular and then loses its popularity?  Or in contrast, is psychology something like technology, getting better all the time, so that one theory or technology is replaced by a better or more adequate theory or technology?