Editing Philosophy of science (section)

===Philosophy of psychology===
{{Main|Philosophy of psychology}}
[[File:Wundt-research-group.jpg|thumb|[[Wilhelm Wundt]] (seated) with colleagues in his psychological laboratory, the first of its kind]]
Philosophy of psychology refers to issues at the theoretical foundations of modern [[psychology]]. Some of these issues are epistemological concerns about the methodology of psychological investigation. For example, is the best method for studying psychology to focus only on the response of [[behaviorism|behavior]] to external stimuli or should psychologists focus on [[mentalism (psychology)|mental perception and thought processes]]?<ref name="Routpsych">{{cite book|last1 = Mason|first1 = Kelby|first2 = Chandra Sekhar|last2 = Sripada|first3 = Stephen|last3 = Stich|title = Routledge Companion to Twentieth-Century Philosophy|chapter = Philosophy of Psychology|chapter-url = http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~stich/Publications/Papers/PHILOSOPHYofPSYCHOLOGY.pdf|editor-last = Moral|editor-first = Dermot|publisher = Routledge|location = London|year = 2010|access-date = 2014-02-20|archive-date = 2017-05-17|archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20170517012459/http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~stich/Publications/Papers/PHILOSOPHYofPSYCHOLOGY.pdf|url-status = dead}}</ref> If the latter, an important question is how the internal experiences of others can be measured. Self-reports of feelings and beliefs may not be reliable because, even in cases in which there is no apparent incentive for subjects to intentionally deceive in their answers, self-deception or selective memory may affect their responses. Then even in the case of accurate self-reports, how can responses be compared across individuals? Even if two individuals respond with the same answer on a [[Likert scale]], they may be experiencing very different things.

Other issues in philosophy of psychology are philosophical questions about the nature of mind, brain, and cognition, and are perhaps more commonly thought of as part of [[cognitive science]], or [[philosophy of mind]]. For example, are humans [[rationality|rational]] creatures?<ref name="Routpsych" /> Is there any sense in which they have [[free will]], and how does that relate to the experience of making choices? Philosophy of psychology also closely monitors contemporary work conducted in [[cognitive neuroscience]], [[psycholinguistics]], and [[artificial intelligence]], questioning what they can and cannot explain in psychology.

Philosophy of psychology is a relatively young field, because psychology only became a discipline of its own in the late 1800s. In particular, [[neurophilosophy]] has just recently become its own field with the works of [[Paul Churchland]] and [[Patricia Churchland]].<ref name=StanPhilNeuro/> Philosophy of mind, by contrast, has been a well-established discipline since before psychology was a field of study at all. It is concerned with questions about the very nature of mind, the qualities of experience, and particular issues like the debate between [[Mind-body dualism|dualism]] and [[monism]].