That's the direction a philosophical skeptic might head. But my point is more rooted in language; in 20th century Cambridge rather than 18th century Edinburgh - in Wittgenstein not David Hume.
Once we start talking about consciousness we're outside the realm of Newton's billiards balls and calculus. We're into psychology and navigating a linguistic sea full of terminology that owes more to Chaucer than Roger Bacon. A call for a larger sample size isn't going to give us a mathematical demonstration of any property of consciousness - it's just going to give us a claim on a larger confidence interval. It's going to make us feel better about our beliefs not show why they are correct.
I guess my point is that psychology is disjoint from 'classical science's simply because we cannot abstract its subject matter out of ordinary language and into mathematics. That doesn't mean we can't investigate it, just that we need to recognize the limitations imposed by the tools at our disposal. In programming terms, it's a ball of mud. Standardizing test conditions for investigating consciousness probably requires assumptions about states of consciousness upfront, e.g. sleeping, drowsy, awake, alert, and distracted. It probably relies on our nonscientific intuitions as well - trees and earthworms are right out and we're a long way from having the tools to investigate what it is like to be a bat in a scientific manner that feels continuous with the scientific method as applied in a field such as chemistry.
Once we start talking about consciousness we're outside the realm of Newton's billiards balls and calculus. We're into psychology and navigating a linguistic sea full of terminology that owes more to Chaucer than Roger Bacon. A call for a larger sample size isn't going to give us a mathematical demonstration of any property of consciousness - it's just going to give us a claim on a larger confidence interval. It's going to make us feel better about our beliefs not show why they are correct.
I guess my point is that psychology is disjoint from 'classical science's simply because we cannot abstract its subject matter out of ordinary language and into mathematics. That doesn't mean we can't investigate it, just that we need to recognize the limitations imposed by the tools at our disposal. In programming terms, it's a ball of mud. Standardizing test conditions for investigating consciousness probably requires assumptions about states of consciousness upfront, e.g. sleeping, drowsy, awake, alert, and distracted. It probably relies on our nonscientific intuitions as well - trees and earthworms are right out and we're a long way from having the tools to investigate what it is like to be a bat in a scientific manner that feels continuous with the scientific method as applied in a field such as chemistry.