PSYC 251 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Empiricism, Internal Validity, Falsifiability
Document Summary
Tradition (just what people in the past thought and is still done) None are connected to the way world actually works. Experience (may not be representative of what is actually going on, biased) The tenets of science: determinism: cause and effect, the orderly world, empiricism: we only believe what we can measure, replicability: if it"s real it should be reliable, falsifiability: ideas must be testable. Parsimony (occam"s razor): best bet to go with the simplest explanation. Something that is random is, by definition, unpredictable because its outcome is independent of past outcomes. To study human behavior must recognize the role of chance and make sure the patterns we see could not be explained by chance. To describe, explain, predict, and control some event(s). Temporal precedence the cause must precede the effect. Covariation when the cause varies the effect must also vary be careful of the syllogistic fallacy here.
