As I look back on my experiences with psychology and as I read more about psychology, it becomes clear that it isn't as scientific as I thought it was, at least not in the way that I understand science.

Take measurment for example. Measurement in the physical sciences often entails a comparision of an empirically available feature of something being studied to a measurement device. One might measure the mass of an object using a balance or a scale. Or even more simply, one could measure the length of a physical object with a ruler. 

WIth psychology, there is no straightforward kind of measurement like this. Mainly that's because psychology's object of study, the mind, has no empirically observable features. There can be no measurement like what is described above for physical properties when there are no empirically observable features. 

But that doesn't stop psychology. There are what are called measurements in psychology such as results from such scales as "Becks depression inventory" or the MMPI. Neither of these really measure anything but where a test taker decides to place dots on a piece of paper. Still, that doesn't stop psychologists from using these "instruments" as they like to call them, to assign numbers to the results.

The tests of psychology, and I'm talking about psychometric tests here, are not objective. They are scored objectively (e.g. a "true" answer on 5 or more questions means a patient is "depressed") but they do not actually measure anything objectively. In a psychometric test, again, the only objective measurement is of where a person fills in a circcle with a pencil on the test form. Usually these tests involve a number of questions which the test taker, who is actually a person measuring themselves, interprets subjectively and then gives their answer. That's where objectivity is thrown out the window - in ignoring that it is the person taking the test who is measuring some mental attribute and ignoring that there is no standard way of measuring the truthfullness of statements like "True or False, do you feel depressed today."

But like I said, psychologists will point to the fact that they use a system to score the tests, and systems make an otherwise subjective methodology objective, right? Wrong. It's a foolish notion to think the psychological instruments are measuring anything other than where a person wrote on a page. 

It should be obvious to anyone familiar with both psychology and with physical sciences that measurement in psychology is very unlike measurement in physical sciences. Measurement of mass in physics is measuring a natural property of matter. Whereas measurement of depression in psychology isn't a measure of a natural property of mind, but instead it is a way of methodically assigning a numerical value to an individcual which is used to represent some conceptual property assigned to an individual.

In other words, it doesn't seem like measurement in psychology is really measuring any kind of attribute of something as much as it is creating a number from a testing process which is then used to respresent an amount of or degree of some concept. 

But when I was younger and became exposed to psychology, I was naive about it. I assumed that it had a very scientific appearance that it was scientific. When I took an MMPI for the first time, I presumed that it was a measurement device with a lot of theoretical underpinnings and that it would reveal truths about myself that only trained experts could know. Little did I know at the time that it was very unscientific and that it relied on statistical inference to make conclusions rather than rely on any kind of scientific theory to produce its answers.

I'm still learning more about psychology and it's interesting. It's interesting how lacking in rigor it is, but how much accepted it is by the public and even scientific professionals who should know better.