Is Psychology All Bunk?

I would offer linguistics as a potential sub-field of psychology, and I don't believe that anyone would impugne lingusitics's reputation as a science...

Science is just another way of saying "to the best of our knowledge." I think the thing to consider here is, if conclusions of psychology aren't arrived at via the scientific method, what method are they arrived at, and is that method as good?I think psychology has been a science ever since the introduction of statistics.

Not that hard. "Science" is that body of knowledge derived via the scientific method.What's the scientific method? Observation, hypothesis, experiment, analysis, and reporting. Observations and experments should be repeatable or sharable. Hypotheses should be falsifiable.Psychology meets these criteria, as far as I can tell. At least it does these days.

Defining it is easy. It's the application that is hard. Another way to define science is "what scientists do." That's the ones the courts use, I believe.One more way to look at the scientific method would be to answer the question "assuming that there's an objective reality that we all share, what's the best way to come to an agreement about how it works?" Implicit in that question is an idea that, if a bunch of people look and see the same thing, it's probably real - or if it's not, we can't tell the difference.

I appreciate your viewpoint. I for one am glad it's not that complicated, or else scientists would be so busy trying to figure out how to do it that they could never get around to actually doing it.