2. Apparently the first study isn't science. I didn't realize that science was a catch-22 situation.
3. This is so absurd that I feel like I'm being trolled. They have a testable hypothesis: that acetaminophen/paracetamol has a side effect of X.
Nothing in science has meaning before replication. Look at cold fusion for a classic example where this rule was ignored. Of course, you may be speaking of the prevailing standards in psychology, in which case you're right -- but then psychology isn't a science.
> 2. Apparently the first study isn't science.
That's correct -- it isn't.
> I didn't realize that science was a catch-22 situation.
Only if you can't replicate any studies. That's psychology's problem, but not science's problem. In science, studies are replicated regularly, and no one takes a study seriously if it hasn't been replicated, especially where human health is concerned.
> They have a testable hypothesis: that acetaminophen/paracetamol has a side effect of X.
That is not an explanation, it's a description. Science requires testable explanations. The paper doesn't presume to explain its results.
If I say "the night sky is full of little points of light", that's certainly testable -- someone else can go outside the tent and confirm it, but it's just a description -- not a basis for science, which requires that someone have the nerve to suggest an explanation for what has been described.
But if I say "those points of light are actually thermonuclear furnaces like our sun, at greater distances", I have offered a testable, falsifiable explanation. That's science.
If someone correlated a specific biochemical action in individual neurons with later very specific behavior, that might count as science, but that would be neuroscience, not psychology. Psychology doesn't try to analytically connect specific physical causes to effects -- it's satisfied to describe outcomes without pretending to know why they are so.
> See https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/
The fallacy is yours, not mine. You appear to think one study making ten claims constitutes science. In fact, science is ten studies making one claim.
> In fact, science is ten studies making one claim.
If it is a fact, can you provide a source for this definition? I've never heard it before, and it contradicts everything that I've encountered to date.
And your evidence is that we're having this debate?
And I do know people who would use this definition: every single person I know who is a scientist.
I think it's a rather pithy distillation of the process of gaining scientific consensus. The source would be: "learn what the process of science is about, how it works and about the philosophy of science and this quote becomes a rather obvious truism"
A single study is to science what a single TDD test case is to software engineering. Despite what crappy news outlets tell you.
All that said, lutusp is being pretty negative about this study for no obvious reason. Someone needs to do the exploratory work at the beginning and this is interesting work, whether you call it science or the start of science. The rest seems like complaining about the press being the press.
Do you mean the idea that science must craft and then test theories? That's not at all controversial, and every legitimate science is defined by its theories. Without the Standard Model, physics isn't science. Without the theories of evolution, genetics and cell biology, biology is not science. Without theories about geological processes and plate tectonics, geology is not science.
How could we determine whether a field is or is not a science unless the determination was based on its tested, defining theories? We know astrology is not a science because its theories fail when tested. Are you saying that astrology would become a science by not having testable theories?
> When people operating on a different definition of science encounter your definition ...
Not only is this not my definition, it has been expressed in a number of legal decisions that, for example, keep Creationism out of public school classrooms. The reason? Creationism's theories fail when tested.
>> In fact, science is ten studies making one claim.
> If it is a fact, can you provide a source for this definition?
My source is the practice of science. Einstein's relativity theory, as pretty as it was on paper, was not accepted until the corpus of evidence for it was overwhelming, in dozens of confirmations (this required experimental work until the mid-1960s). Plate tectonics was not accepted until the field evidence became overwhelming. Examples abound. All on need do is read some science history to discover that one publication means nothing.
> These are the things that one will naturally wonder about in the context of contempt, even if the contempt is accidental.
Science doesn't care about contempt, it cares about evidence. Contempt is completely irrelevant to the process, and every scientist knows this.
Actually, two labs reported achieving cold fusion before the results were published, and another also claimed to replicate the findings. See http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/fusion_art.html for a comprehensive, well-written examination of this.
The Bayesian approach to assessing the validity of scientific claims, which is quite popular these days, implies that every scientific study has some meaning before replication. However, it requires reasonable priors. Most people who are not in the field won't have reasonable priors, and most people who aren't scientists won't be used to thinking this way at all.
In this case, my prior for this study being true is probably higher than yours because I remember its predecessor (which you can read too at http://dept.wofford.edu/neuroscience/NeuroSeminar/psfSpring2...). It's apparently neuroscience and not psychology by your definition because it has neuroimaging data that links the effects to the behavior of specific neurons, even though it was published in the same journal.
Generally, I suggest you devote more time to studying the history and philosophy of science before making pronouncements about it :).
Yes, but they were all false and later proven false. A replication doesn't mean two or more labs making the same mistakes. There's a bit more to it than that.
> Generally, I suggest you devote more time to studying the history and philosophy of science before making pronouncements about it ...
I have. Science requires testable, falsifiable theories. Psychology doesn't have any of those. This is not remotely controversial.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability
Quote: "Simply, to be scientific, a theory must predict at least some observation potentially refutable by observation."
> It's apparently neuroscience and not psychology by your definition because it has neuroimaging data that links the effects to the behavior of specific neurons, even though it was published in the same journal.
The measurements were apparently neuroscience, but the claims that followed certainly weren't. It's not uncommon to see an apparently scientific measurement, followed by conjectures that aren't in any way supported by the measurements.
Science proceeds by theories either supported or refuted by empirical evidence. Psychology proceeds by votes.
> Yes, but they were all false and later proven false. A replication doesn't mean two or more labs making the same mistakes. There's a bit more to it than that.
The article I linked to (which was written by David Goodstein, a professor of physics at Caltech and definitely not a crackpot) discusses the situation surrounding cold fusion in a great amount of detail, and illuminates the difference between proof and scientific consensus. If you believe the account, no one ever proved that the experimenters were not observing what they claimed to observe. Instead, the main problem was that the effects were not consistent, that they seemed to good to be true, and that there was no physical explanation at the time they were "discovered."
> > Generally, I suggest you devote more time to studying the history and philosophy of science before making pronouncements about it ...
> I have. Science requires testable, falsifiable theories. Psychology doesn't have any of those. This is not remotely controversial.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability
> Quote: "Simply, to be scientific, a theory must predict at least some observation potentially refutable by observation."
The statement you cite is preceded by the phrase "In falsificationism..." As the article notes further down, "Naïve falsificationism is an unsuccessful attempt to prescribe a rationally unavoidable method for science."
As for psychology not having testable, falsifiable theories, that's probably true for some definitions of "psychology," but it's a huge discipline, and there are some rigorous psychophysics papers out there that test real hypotheses. (I'm a neuroscientist, not a psychologist, but I'd be happy to send you some of my favorites.)
> The measurements were apparently neuroscience, but the claims that followed certainly weren't. It's not uncommon to see an apparently scientific measurement, followed by conjectures that aren't in any way supported by the measurements.
I agree to this to a limited extent. The claim that everyone cares about is that Tylenol has a psychoactive effect, and showing that brain activity changes when Tylenol is administered definitely supports that claim. Trying to draw connections between brain activity and pain is much harder.
> Science proceeds by theories either supported or refuted by empirical evidence. Psychology proceeds by votes.
Both hard sciences and psychology proceed by votes. This is demonstrated by the cold fusion article, and it's also one of the main theses of Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Why do you hate psychology so much?
No it doesn't.
Science aims to characterise phenomena. Normally, this just means describing the outcomes of a repeatable scenario – pretty much what redcircle stated.
It may seem like science can explain some phenomena but that's really only because multiple observable levels below the surface phenomena have been fully characterised. But for any phenomena, if you dwell down through all of the characterised layers, there's always a point at which science can only probabilistically describe what happens, it can't explain why.
> No it doesn't.
Name a legitimate science that is not defined by its testable explanations. Physics has the Standard Model. Biology has evolution, genetics and cell biology, all well-tested theories.
We know astrology is not a science because its theories fail when tested. Is your argument that astrology would become a science by not having testable theories?
Without testing, without evidence, a scientific idea has no standing. It's not science until there is empirical evidence in support of an idea (or that falsifies the idea). Without empirical confirmation or falsification, it's philosophy, not science.
> Normally, this just means describing the outcomes of a repeatable scenario
Every time I go outside at night, there are these little points of light in the sky. I don't know what they are, but they're the same every time I look. So ... I just became a scientist. Yes?
Contrast that description with a proposed, testable explanation -- that those points of light are thermonuclear furnaces like our sun but at a greater distance. We can test this idea, possibly falsify it. Falsifiability is a requirement for science, but one cannot falsify a description -- for that, we need a proposed explanation.
> ... there's always a point at which science can only probabilistically describe what happens, it can't explain why.
That's not science, it's philosophy. Science requires a collision between falsifiable explanations and empirical evidence.