In the comments on the episode from the day before yesterday of New Knowledge Class, “How to Scientifically Tease Freud,” our listener RomanaGallifrey said:
A natural science should have only “branches.” If it has “schools of thought,” that means it does not even have a mainstream theory.
I couldn’t agree more.
This is actually a general rule: the more schools of thought there are within a science, the less scientific consensus there is.
The most rock-solid sciences today—mathematics, physics, chemistry, and the like—have no schools of thought.
Mathematics is pure logical reasoning. Unless you’re God and can violate logic, a proof that can convince Mathematician A will necessarily convince Mathematician B. Mathematicians differ only in the fields they study—that is, they have different branches—not in schools of thought.
Physics has no schools of thought anymore, either. For example, the discovery of gravitational waves was not something physicists from one school accepted while physicists from another school denied it. The way the experimental data were collected, and the mathematical models used to test theories against that data, are matters of consensus among all mainstream physicists.
Where are there still schools of thought, then?
Macroeconomics has plenty of schools of thought. Given the same batch of economic data, the Keynesian, Austrian, and Chicago schools can produce completely different, even diametrically opposed, interpretations. We often see prominent economists from these schools airing their views in the media and criticizing one another fiercely.
Look into it, and you’ll often find that two economists who think each other’s views are utter crap are somehow both Nobel laureates—the top economists from different schools of thought may not even agree on the most basic things.
What about psychology, then?
There is one particularly encouraging development in the field of psychology: the number of schools of thought is shrinking. Go back 50 years, and psychologists couldn’t say two words without invoking a school of thought: psychoanalysis, humanistic psychology, behaviorism, and Gestalt psychology.
There was even talk of the seven major schools, as if we were in The Smiling, Proud Wanderer.
Today, mainstream psychologists talk only about what their research field—or branch—is. They themselves don’t even know which “school of thought” they belong to. That means psychology is becoming more and more “scientific”—a truly reassuring step forward.
Note
- This series of “Psychology New Knowledge Mini-Courses” articles was written at the time as popular-science pieces and casual short essays to accompany material related to Zhichao Wei: Psychology New Knowledge Class. They were published on the now-closed platform “Fantuan,” and the original link no longer exists.
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