Is psychology a real science?

Psychology doesn't have an agreed upon central body of knowledge

Question: Is psychology a real science?
Position‹2 of 3›: Psychology is not a real science
Argument‹3 of 3: Psychology doesn't have an agreed upon central body of knowledge

Unlike each of the hard sciences, psychology fails to deliver a concrete body of knowledge that is universally agreed upon by professionals in the field.

The argument

The claim here is not that psychologists do poor work but that the discipline lacks the thing that makes a field a science in the first place. What true sciences are built upon is a universally accepted body of knowledge describing how the world works. A physicist and a chemist each inherit a core that is not in dispute among practitioners; disagreement happens at the edges, against a settled centre. Psychology has no such centre. Its major schools proceed from incompatible accounts of what the mind is and how behaviour is produced, and a finding accepted within one framework may carry no weight in another. The discipline also fails to yield a definition of itself that is universally agreed upon, which is a striking absence in a field that has existed long enough to have settled the question. In place of that shared core, the argument runs, psychology relies on method. It follows the scientific method to a fault, observing, measuring, running experiments, and reporting results with the full apparatus of statistical analysis. But method is a procedure for generating findings, not a substitute for the body of theory those findings are supposed to accumulate into. Professionals in the field are focused mainly on gathering data and statistics, and data and statistics do not equal knowledge. A measurement becomes knowledge only when it is placed within an account of why it holds, and it is precisely that account the discipline has not converged on. This is why the objection is structural rather than a complaint about rigour. A field can be scrupulous in its procedures and still fail to be a science if its results never consolidate. Because psychology has no agreed central body of knowledge, proponents of this position argue, it is not a real science.

Premises

[P1]True sciences are built on a universally accepted body of knowledge describing how the world works, which psychology lacks, also failing to yield a universally agreed definition. [P2] Instead psychology follows the scientific method to a fault, focusing on gathering data and statistics, which does not amount to knowledge. [C] Therefore, because it has no agreed central body of knowledge, psychology is not a real science.

Counter-arguments

Psychology is defined as "the study of mind and behavior." Scientists in the field of psychology have generated insights into animal and human behaviors from the data which has been gathered. These insights constitute a body of knowledge upon which many experts in the field agree.

Rejecting the premises

{Rejecting P1] Psychology has built up a repository of insights which are generally agreed upon by scientists in the field. [Rejecting P2] Psychology is defined as "the study of mind and body."

Proponents cited

Gregg Henriques
“In technical terms, I am claiming that the core problem with the field is that it is “pre-paradigmatic," which means that psychology completely lacks agreement from the experts about what it is and what it is about, what its foundational theories or even frameworks are, what its key findings are, and how it fits with the rest of the body of scientific knowledge. The fact that psychology has been around now for almost 150 years and remains pre-paradigmatic is undeniably a very serious threat to the field's status as a real science.”
Paul Meehl
“theories rise and decline, come and go, more as a function of baffled boredom than anything else; and the enterprise shows a disturbing absence of that cumulative character that is so impressive in disciplines like astronomy, molecular biology and genetics.”