h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I've just been revising for my psychology exams and something about them is bothering me. For every theory or experiment I learn I also need to learn an average two names and one date.

This bothers me because I am spending more time and energy linking names to dates, where in 90%+ of cases it does not matter, than I do understanding the theories, experiments and how they link into one another. It seems obsence that at what is supposed to be an institute of higher education we are still training our memories rather than trying to understand the subject in a way that has any practial application.

I asked a lecturer about it and they replied that 'people put their whole lives into these things and deserve recognition' so am I to understand that the point of education is not, as I previously thought, to teach people relevant facts but to pay tribute to the people who discovered them?

Psychologists have even shown that this is a harder task - Carik and Tulving (1975) Depth of Processing theory. The more salient a peice of information is the easier it is to recall it. Hands up if you know who Carik or Tulving is. Hands up if you care that the reasearch was done in 1975, not 1965 or 1985. Why do I know these three peices of information where I could instead have learned (for example) an experiments main finding, a good point about it and a bad point about it?

I was just wondering if other scientists put up with this - do chemistry exams consist mostly of who discovered a given substance rather than its properties? Do physasists (sp?) care more about who named a given theory rather than what it tells us about how the world works?

Phew that was a bit of a rant - I didn't realise I had become so irate.

+(in some cases it is necassary to know that one thing happened before another or that two experiments were done by the same person -even then the exact dates and names are still irrelevant)

No, we don't,(being a medic) as far as I know this is a bit of an oddity restricted to pscyhology. I thought it was a hangover from the fact that it's done as a semi arts subject.

This is how you can tell the difference between psychology and neuroscience

Sociology is another 'science' where it seems essential to provide a name and date.

I'll have to ask my little* brother, he's studying joint honours in Psychology and Neuroscience.


*21 and 6'2"

According to Carl Popper (sociologist0 scientists do their subject for love rather than ego and so getting your name in everything is a little infra dig. The real truth is that scientists usually deal in truth and so their theories are usually definitive and can be described by their name rather than the proponents name. Most keen advocates of science could tell you the originator but most people will settle for 'The Big Bang' or 'The Photo-Electric Effect'. Whereas in philosophy and psychology there are few, if any, definitive ideas and it becomes a matter of opinion. Free Will becomes Aristotle's, Heidegger's or..ad nauseum

I can attest to that - having just come from a seminar from a visiting scholar on the factical life in Heidegger. /

Dates and people are important, in particular seeing how different peope treat the same idea like third man said above - but they are not necessarily definitive.

I had a a class on Hegel yesterday discussing the unhappy consciousness in his Phenomenology of Spirit - and it was quiet clear from the way he forumlates the ascent out of the unhappy consciousness that he has in mind medieval catholicism, as that which rescues consciousness from it's irreducable wretchedness of not being able to commune with the infinite as something that is itself purely finite. Instead Hegel argues by giving oneself over to a mediator (priest) communicating in words it cannot undersatnd (Latin) and giving up of worldy possessions. (pay money to the church)
Consciousness achieves a happiness that it could not attain through either a devotional aspect not even gautity.

A slice of knowledge of religious history helps: the domination of church on society, catholicism, the protestent reformation etc. and it is clear that at this stage of hegel's investigations the medival catholic dogma does indeed offer a way out of the current irreconcilable problem of the consciousness under examination but that (if you know anythign about Hegel)this form of consciousness (giving oenself over to a mediator) will meet it's own antithesis later on.

Let me make my point: Hegel is making (what he claims to be) logical progressions in his argument not claims of historical fact. Indeed he does even mention "religion" at all, only a communion with the infinite, so the alusions to historical progress are not intended to illustrate the progression but it is clear that this is what hegel has in mind.

It would not assist his argument (or mine) to commit to memory the dates that protestantism reacted against catholicism, for instance.

gautity = gratuity.

(after all these years, you'd think I'd have learned to preview by now....)

Arg!

<<>>

We had to do that in marine biology, in the end I could only remember all the names and dates in one subject area. Which contributed to me ending up with a useless third. Its useless in that subject anyway.

These exams are a test of memory not ability.

* at Clive's typos, at his philosophy lecture...*

Well, I've just done a Psychology exam (and done it very badly ) and I can see the point about having to remember names and dates that aren't necessarily useful - but I think the main reason is just that you have to refer to them *somehow*. The reason you don't get it in other sciences (and I strongly refute this "Psychology as art" thing; it is and always has been a science) is that you never have to refer to the experiments - you talk about "Planck's constant", but not the paper in which he formulated it. Psychologists have to constantly refer to which experiments support them, which don't, where their ideas come from - and the easiest way of doing consistent citations is by name and year.

What's more, as you go deeper into a specific area (I'm in my third year, so courses are pretty specific) you find that certain researchers have contributed lots of papers on a particular topic - "McDaniel and Einstein" (or occasionally vice versa) for prospective memory, this afternoon; Baddeley and/or Hitch for the Working Memory Model next week. So you know a bit about their approach, their opinions, etc, just from seeing their name. And occasionally they change their mind over time, so having the year on tap can be handy, too.

It does come across a bit strange, though, the way psychologists talk about people and papers in the same way: I was amused by the line "For over 30 years, Zuckerman(1994) has..." - I mean, "Hello, Mr. Zuckerman(1994), how are you today? I haven't seen you since, well, since 1994"

[IMSoP]

It's the same in all science.

You need to know both, the details of the theory and who came up with it. Sometimes in science ou have to problem-solve, sometimes you just have to remember stuff. In biology there is a lot of vocabulary that you just have to remember, for me the concepts come with those words.

Understanding the intellectual history of a subject is core to understanding the subject itself. The names that get attached to advances in theory and experimentation are more than just an egotistical thing, though people should be properly credited. Citing correctly labels advances in your head and helps you mentally organise the field. You should concentrate on learning the theory but be aware who did it, and when (*exact* dates are less important than names).

Names and dates are far from irrelevant. Science is a community, and a very social experience (contrary to popular belief). If you don't know the people then you don't know the community. If you intend to continue in your field seriously then you're going to have to name names.

Sorry

Ste

Can I just interject that I'm sick of people putting the word sociology in quotes? 'Social science' be the field that has the best shot at coming up with the ideas that bring about some of the most concrete positive changes for humanity, and yet people won't take it seriously.

*may be the field

you're not the only one, clive

gank Thod.


Oh Bugger.

You shouldn't put sociologist and concrete in the same posting. Inevetably I thought of those tower blocks....

I see there are a few examples of names and dates being helpful, but I maintain that it is enough to know that experiments A, B and C were done in that order by the same person rather than needing to know that that persons name was Steve and the dates were 1982, 1985 and 1989.

So far as referencing experiments go there are much easier ways to annote things if I'm speaking to another student and say 'the bobo doll experiment' more people understand that than Bandura (????) Your taught to give a peice of work a name that is in some way related to the work at primary school so as a mcethod of referencing names and dates are unimportant.

I'm not a philosopher (well I am because everyone is, I mean not academically) but I don't see the relevance of tieing the concept of free will to a persons name - a concept, while it may not be fact still exists a concept and can be refered to as 'the concept of free will' If someone asks for my view on free will v determinism I can give it, but if someone asked my for my view on dave(1987) v chad(1935) I wouldn't have the first clue even if it meant the same thing.

Getting to know the community is a more convincing argument though, I'll need to mull over it more carefully

Philosophers tend to respond to each other's arguments, and a lot of theories related to different philosophical problems are associated with the philosophers who advanced and argued for them. Typically a problem or approach will have a descriptive name, but specific arguments may be identified by the names of their originators, and so may approaches, e.g. Kantian, Cartesian. 'Dualism' is a broad term; 'Cartesian Dualism' is more specific and refers to the originator of the distinctive arguments and formulation associated with it.

In awarding recognition of a discovery in science there are possibly valid reasons for the inclusion of the date. For example, Alexander Fleming 'discovered' penicillin, but it was not particularly useful and antibiotics only became widely used in WW2 and the penicillin was a different variety. Most famously perhaps is the argument between Newton and Liebnitz over the discovery of the calculus. Due to the fact that international communication was very limited joint credit can be awarded even though Newton's version followed Liebnitz's by a number of years.

Back when I was studying it (10 years ) dates for your citations were very important in neuroscience. It was one of those fields that was expanding rapidly, with new discoveries being made all the time. You had to make it very clear that your theories were based on up to the minute information, apart from a few seminal papers it was rare to see citations older than a year or two (and the exceptions were usually your professor's papers from the days when he got his chair ).

*not a scientist, but willing to toss in her anyway*

(In other words, feel free to skip right over this post. )





Anyone still there? Ok, I warned you, so if you're still there you asked for it...



To me it does seem at least moderately important to know the year and the name attached to certain principles and experiments simply because this is part of the historical record of science.

For instance:

Who were a particular scientist's contemporaries? You need the date to know that they were indeed contemporaries, or to be able to conclude that perhaps their studies influenced each other in some way... or perhaps they were even at odds with one another over their methods or results. Maybe the particular topic was studied at one time but fell into disfavor for a decade or a century before someone else came along and thought it had merit and decided to do more study.

Did their experiments come up with similar or wildly different results? Why? If you can only narrow their work down to (for instance) sometime in the 20th century, you have a vast array of data gathering techniques possible depending on exactly when the experiments were performed, because of the advent of computerized gadgets used to measure data during that time period, not to mention scads of other technological developments. Therfore, a scientist doing research using an old fashioned microscope may have come to a very different conclusion with the same basic experiment than one using a computerized electron microscope, simply because the data will be more detailed.

This is what happens with studies using technology which is essentially fluid in it's development - the more they develop new ways of gathering the data the more likely it is to come up with different results, even if the results are only slightly different with vast technological advances.






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