Re: Is Psychology A Science?

I will answer your question by using parts of one of my previous answers:
"What is reality according to science?"

There are different schools of thought as to how much we can really "know"
about the world and whether science is inherently a better means of knowing
and  understanding. As a scientist, I think it is an inherently better
means of seeking knowledge than any other system so far devised. 

I don't agree with you when you state that science has to have the capacity
to demonstrate something is "100% provable".  We are never able to do that.  
Also I am not sure what you mean by stating that
 "in the Popperian view [psychology] would seem to be a science in
that it is not falsifiable".  I suppose you mean the opposite, which is
that since it is falsifiable it meets the requirement by Popper that
science should be falsifiable.  If you can not prove your hypothesis false
then it is not scientific according to Popper.
 
I would propose that science lets us understand 
our world better and through models approximates the "truth". For example, 
Newtonian physics was the prevailing model for explaining the universe 
around us for several centuries and it did that well, until relativity and 
quantum mechanics came along. Newtonian physics works well for distances 
that are not subatomic and for speeds that do not approach the speed of 
light. Thus this model approximated how the world works but was incorrect. 
As we learn more about the universe our current models will undoubtedly be 
found to be lacking as well. What science has going for is that it is self 
correcting and models that are shown to be incorrect are replaced. This
lies at the heart of Karl Popper's notion of falsifiability-the idea that
any model which can not be falsified is not scientific. 

Psychology does generate models which can be falsified and does approach
its subject matter in a scientific manner-that is experiments with controls
are done, data are collected and models are refuted if they do not agree
with the data. Thus it is a science.  
In summary, I think that  the scientific method allows us to generate
models which approximate "reality" but do not fully describe it. Reality is
what is achieved when  your models of the universe allow you to predict the
behavior of systems under study. Thus it is theoretically attainable but
rarely achieved.


hope this helps,
gabriel vargas md/phd

References:


Stanford Philosophy Web: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/popper/
 
MICHAEL POLANYI "Science Faith and Society"