> you're demanding that science doesn't exist until the final word is known.

No, I never took this position, in fact, the opposite. All theories are tentative, none of them become the "final word", but to be seen as scientific, all of them must be testable in practical experiments and falsifiable in principle. In short, a theory isn't scientific because it cannot be falsified, but because it can -- in perpetuity.

>> This, by the way, is why there is so little science in psychology

> You're also showing prejudice here, and with a profoundly unscientific single anecdotal point used to tarnish an entire field.

What? Recovered Memory Therapy wasn't a single anecdotal point. Facilitated Communications wasn't a single anecdotal point. Prefrontal lobotomy wasn't a single anecdotal point. All of them are symptomatic of psychology's tendency to put unscientific ideas into practice before any effort to establish if there's anything there.

Each of the above therapies became clinical practice without first being studied scientifically, and each of them became a disaster. Recovered memory Therapy, in particular, has been called a "debacle" by psychology insiders, but without anyone suggesting that clinical psychology either adopt scientific standards or be expelled from the field.

> but to say that there's little [good] science in it is just plain wrong.

When theoretical psychology stops clinical psychology from offering pseudoscientific therapies, then you can make this claim. In mainstream medicine, if a practitioner offers treatments that are not vetted in legitimate scientific research, he cannot call himself "doctor" -- it is illegal for an excellent reason (it is why a chiropractor is not a doctor). But a clinical psychologist can ignore both science and theoretical psychology and still call himself a psychologist.

If psychologists want to be known as scientists, they have to stop unscientific psychological practices, just as medical doctors did in the 1920s and 1930s. Until then psychology is not a science -- psychologists can't have it both ways. They can claim to be scientists, but if they do this, they have to reform present clinical practice. And believe me, I'm by no means the only person who is saying this -- Theodore Insel, present director of the NIMH, makes the same argument in his recent Scientific American article "Faulty Circuits":

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=faulty-circ...

A quote:

"In most areas of medicine, doctors have historically tried to glean something about the underlying cause of a patient’s illness before figuring out a treatment that addresses the source of the problem. When it came to mental or behavioral disorders in the past, however, no physical cause was detectable so the problem was long assumed by doctors to be solely “mental,” and psychological therapies followed suit.

"Today scientific approaches based on modern biology, neuroscience and genomics are replacing nearly a century of purely psychological theories, yielding new approaches to the treatment of mental illnesses."

> There are thousands of explainable, testable theories in psychology.

Yes, true, but think about what you're saying. First, these small theories don't lead to an overarching theory that defines psychology, as is true for all truly scientific fields. Physics has the Standard Model, biology has genetics and evolution, chemistry has quantum theory (borrowed from physics), geology has plate tectonics. Any change in the content of these central, defining theories changes the entire field they control (as the Michelson-Morley experiment changed all of physics, as plate tectonics changed all of geology). There is no parallel in psychology, instead there are a great number of small theories, none of which has any chance to define the field as a whole, or lead to a larger theory that could do that.

Second, the small theories in psychology have precisely no effect on clinical practice, and on this basis, psychology is certainly not a science. Psychologists can either reform or expel clinical psychology, or stop pretending to be a scientific field. One or the other.

In the same way, mainstream medicine had no right to call itself a science until this exact step was taken, until "doctor" actually meant something. And this isn't some academic, philosophical distinction with no tangible consequences -- the victims of Recovered Memory Therapy alone number in the thousands.

Clinical psychologists continue to offer anything that comes into their heads, arguing that theoretical psychology doesn't contain anything relevant to their field, anything that might falsify their practices. And guess what? They're right. But if this is true, then clinical psychologists need to stop calling themselves psychologists, so the public won't be misled any more, so no more lives will be destroyed by pseudoscience (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recovered-memory_therapy).

Further reading:

http://arachnoid.com/trouble_with_psychology