Is psychology a real science?

Psychology gains knowledge through experience

Question: Is psychology a real science?
Position1 of 3›: Psychology is a real science
Argument‹3 of 3: Psychology gains knowledge through experience

Knowledge is the end product which science strives to find. It can be gained not only by logic, but by experience as well.

The argument

Psychologists seek knowledge through experience, and that is what places the discipline among the sciences rather than among the speculative subjects. They conduct experiments, observe behaviours and record their findings, just as a professional in any of the hard sciences does, and their conclusions are held to the same requirement: that they answer to evidence gathered from the world rather than to argument alone. The standing objection is that the object of study cannot be seen. The inner workings of the mind are not directly observable, which is said to leave psychology dealing in something unverifiable. The argument's reply is that direct observation of the object is not what empirical science generally requires. What psychologists can observe is what a person says and does, and that is a real, recordable, repeatable class of evidence. Speech and behaviour stand to mental states as any measurable effect stands to the cause inferred from it. Science routinely proceeds this way. A great deal of what the established sciences describe is reached through its effects rather than by direct inspection, and the inference is accepted because it is disciplined — drawn under controlled conditions, tested against alternative explanations, and revised when the observations do not fit. Psychology's inferences from speech and behaviour are subject to that same discipline. The result is that this empirical approach produces substantial facts and evidence, capable of supporting theories and hypotheses and equally capable of undermining them, just as in any other science. A field whose claims are settled by evidence from experience, and which abandons them when the evidence runs the other way, is doing science whatever the difficulty of its subject matter. Because psychology gains its knowledge through experience in precisely this way, psychology is a real science.

Premises

[P1]Psychologists gain knowledge empirically — conducting experiments, observing behaviour and recording findings as in any hard science. [P2] Although the mind cannot be observed directly, what people say and do can be, providing real evidence. [P3] This empirical approach yields facts that support theories just as in other sciences. [C] Therefore, because it gains knowledge through experience, psychology is a real science.

Counter-arguments

Experience is subject to human error because it is contingent upon the psychologist conducting the experiment or observation. Everyone's experience is different, so the results that one psychologist might get from an experiment could be completely different from what another gets from the very same experiment.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Thoughts and behaviors are poor sources of data because of how unreliably they vary. [Rejecting P2] Psychology can't be considered a science because a psychologist's only source of knowledge (experience) is not fully reliable.