Subject:
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Re: Personality test vs. Religion
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Sun, 31 Oct 2004 16:01:56 GMT
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Viewed:
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2322 times
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-snippity-
> > If you propose that the testers should make only general observations of the
> > subjects, then you face the problem of correlating these observations with
> > the M/B results, which is another subjective, interpretive process.
>
> Is there anything in psychology that isn't subjective?
-snipity-
I've been following the debate for a bit here, but I'd say this is the core of
the problem.
Psychology is not a pure science like physics, chemistry, etc - and therefore
does not operate on the same basis of scientific absolutes. You can not follow
the scientific method precisely when formulating a hypothesis and testing that
hypothesis, as there are way too many details to try to control.
I asked my wife (who has a BA in Psychology) about M/B and she told me that
amongst the Psychological community, it is a respected tool. She cast a bit of
doubt about how predictive it can be, because it is only a tool. So,
Mr.Schuler, if my wife is correct (1) and M/B has been accepted as a useful tool
within the Psychological community, it is therefore your burden to disprove its
usefullness.(2)
By "tool" - think about questioning the validity of a ruler. My ruler says A
line is 4 inches long. If we treat this as a hypothesis to prove or disprove,
then we need to find a way to independently verify that A line is 4 inches long.
However, by "independently" - it means we must use a device other than a ruler,
because it is the very concept of 'ruler' that we have in question here.
Any ruler arbitrarily denotes a length, and obviously fails to give us any other
pertinent information about A line except its length (like, what if A line is
blue? or wiggly? - all information a ruler can not provide us). It has
limitations as a tool, but it also has usefulness.
-Lenny
(1)= And my wife may not be correct. I'm too lazy at the moment to find someone
with a doctorate in Psychology to verify her opinion, so I'll hope we can all
believe her in this instance.
(2)= As a skeptic, we question a hypothesis until it has reached the point of
general acceptance by experts. Once it reaches that level, it is now the job of
any new opinion to disprove what has been accepted. Quantum Mechanics, for
example, makes some pretty out-there claims, but because it is now accepted by
the scientific community, it is not my place to actively call for proof of it
(we can assume it is true for the time being).
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: Personality test vs. Religion
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| (...) So is it respected, or not? The test is indeed used as a predictive tool, so if it does not function in this capacity, then it should be abandoned. But your wife is correct--the tool has no predictive power because its predictions are so (...) (20 years ago, 1-Nov-04, to lugnet.off-topic.debate)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: Personality test vs. Religion
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| (...) Not really-- because as I've said I've seen what I believe to be evidence of it yielding *correct* results. And, as I've said, it IS (for my part) falsifiable, because if I had measured someone (say) as indecisive, and they took the test and (...) (20 years ago, 29-Oct-04, to lugnet.off-topic.debate)
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