'psychology is an interface between natural science and social sciences' justify the statement.
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Answer:
SOCIAL SCIENCES
For a generalized statement of this theoretical assumption and of a provisional model for the ... of the historical encounters and interactions between social
Answer:
Is psychology a natural science or a social science? Why?
This question is still unanswered, there seems to be no real consensus. The loose definitions of ‘science’, ‘natural science’ and ‘social science’ don’t help either, seeing how many disagreements there are when this topic is being discussed. So, first, let’s look at ‘Is psychology a science’ part:
Defining science is a difficult task, many works have been written to try and define this concept. Generally though, scientists agree with Sir Karl Popper’s definition, or rather, his standards for a scientific discipline. It should be a framework, a body of knowledge based on empirically testable observations. In ‘proper’ science, theories should be proposed and eventually tested, to see whether they can be disproven (since nothing can be proven by observations - see the problem of induction for more information). So, the most powerful theories aren’t those that explain everything, but those which are falsifiable - offer predictions specific enough to be tested and potentially disproven. This is best achieved not by mere observation, but by isolating relevant factors and effects from irrelevant ones, which is where experimental control comes into play. Now, modern psychology undeniably satisfies these criteria, seeing how many theories there are and how quickly some of them get disproven; so, psychology is A science.
Things get a bit more tricky when we look at the natural vs. social science distinction. Common sense dictates that both of these are subsets of science, they only differ in the subject matter - with physics, chemistry, biology and other fields studying the natural phenomena belonging to natural sciences, and psychology, sociology and other branches falling into the category of social science. However, the Wikipedia article on Social Science includes such fields as History or Political Science. While the subject matter definitely falls into the category of ‘social’, I would argue that history has nothing to do with science. Sure enough, it is a systematic body of knowledge, has to be based on evidence but there are no real, predictable and falsifiable theories out there, no cause-and-effect patterns being discovered via experimental manipulation. So it seems to me that the definition of ‘a social science’ is either incredibly loose, or simply ignored. In fact, out of all the social sciences listed, psychology is definitely the most ‘scientific’ (as in, satisfies most of Popperian criteria). Which creates two blocks - natural sciences on one hand, whose scientific status cannot be disputed, and generally referred to as ‘sciences’, and social sciences on the other hand, which in theory should be scientific, but are often considered ‘non-sciences’.
This seems to bring us to a dead end, and I suspect this is why there is no one definite answer to ‘is psychology a science/social science/natural science?’. Because people use the terms science and natural science interchangeably and well, the subject matter of psychology is arguable more social than natural (or at least equal in both parts). ‘So psychology must be a social science, and thus not a science, right?’
My take on things - psychology falls within this grey area, having some characteristics of both sides but not falling into either category neatly. What we can definitely say is that psychology is a science, and it dabbles in both the natural and social aspect of it.