Teaching philosophy to psychology undergraduates

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Teaching philosophy to psychology
undergraduates Zoltán Dienes, Sussex
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• Barriers
• Students need to see material as relevant
• Students need to get used to a different style
• (thought experiments vs real experiments!)

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• Relevance
• 1. Choice of material
• A Philosophy of psychology
• B Philosophy of science relevant to being a
  scientist, a research psychologist.
• What concepts can we teach that would be
  practically useful?
• Classic philosophy of science - Popper, Kuhn,
  Lakatos etc
• Philosophy of statistical reasoning
• C Ethics (Is it ethical to require
  undergraduates do experiments for credit?)

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Philosophy of statistical inference Vital
training to conduct and evaluate
research. Psychologists lack of appreciation of
statistical inference is often lamented (e.g.
Oakes 1986) Now is the time we can fix it!
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Learning a different style of thinking 1.
Accessible textbooks. Some good books on history
and more general issues e.g. Bodens new
history of cognitive science mind as
machine Philosophy of psychology, some
accessible books around e.g. Searle, J. (2004).
Mind A brief introduction. Churchland, P. S.
(2002). Brain-wise Studies in neurophilosophy.
Crane, T. (2005). The mechanical mind etc
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But philosophy of science good textbooks for
psychologists scarce Proctor Capaldi (2006)
Why science matters. But there is nothing on the
philosophy of statistical inference The existing
material is quite inaccessible to psychology
undergrads (So I am writing a book on it!)
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Learning a new style of thinking 2. How to
teach to a large class of unselected
undergraduates?
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Assessment. My suggestion Teach 101 Philosophy
material but assess at 301 level! Aim of
assessment is to apply the philosophical concepts
to an area of psychology (e.g. project).
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Example questions In a domain of psychology of
your choice, to what extent does understanding
the mind as representational help understand the
domain? Discuss with particular reference to an
empirical paper published in 2006. Discuss to
what extent your project or an empirical paper
published in 2006 is scientific according to
Poppers demarcation criterion
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Discuss to what extent your project or an
empirical paper published in 2006 would benefit
or be harmed by more closely following Poppers
advice to always seek theories of greater
empirical content and to give up theories once
falsified. Discuss to what extent in a domain
of psychology of your choice, theory choice can
be understood in terms of the sociology of power
struggles and politics and to what extent it is a
rational process. You may approach this by
considering the issues addressed by your
empirical project, and why you, your supervisor,
or others in the field decided to accept certain
theories and not others.
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Discuss to what extent your project or an
empirical paper published in 2006 contributed in
a progressive or degenerating way to research
programme, according to Lakatos account. For a
paper published in 2006, consider the extent to
which the authors strictly followed the demands
of Neyman-Pearson hypothesis testing. Discuss
whether or not substantial conclusions drawn from
the data were compromised by either not adhering
to the Neyman-Pearson approach, or adhering to it
too strictly.
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Perform a Bayesian analysis on a part of the data
from your project or from a paper published in
2006 (consider a test of proportions or of means
see Berry, 1996, below one test will do).
Compare and contrast the conclusions from your
analysis with those that follow from an analysis
using Neyman-Pearson (classic) statistics. I
wanted to avoid regurgitation of material in
textbooks as in a standard essay
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One component of assessment on my third year
option Diary of conceptual change Kept on a
concept like Unconscious mental state Conscious
awareness Volition
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Possible discussion topics What areas of
philosophy should be part of the syllabus for
psychology undergraduates? Teaching methods for
large classes? Assessment methods?