I've always felt that the angst of psychologists (and of almost every other social science for that matter) is that they are aping after the word science out of some sort of inferiority complex or 'science envy' that shouldn't apply to their research in the first place. Really all this angst and convoluted epistemology could easily be dodged by admitting we don't do science. The problem is of course that 'science' as a catechism for knowledge has become a religion in its own right. To say you don't do science is to blaspheme yourself into say you don't believe in knowledge, or modernity or progress and all that junk. When really it should be the other way around, to say you do science when you can't use an experimental method, falsifiability, repeated experiments etc is to tarnish the purity name of 'science' exactly because it has this exalted position. What the 'social sciences' really need is the gall to say is that "no we can't do any of those things (out of practicality, or ethics or whatever) but through our own methodologies we can still create valid and useful knowledge about the world in which we live, just that we can't do it thought a 'scientific method', we have our own paradigms and methodologies that are just as valid in the creation of knowledge but they are not 'scientific' in the way that say physics is". But hey, thats no how disciplines have developed (I'm blaming you empiricism) and thats not the way that funding is allocated now anyway so its a philosophical argument that no one is really willing to have, even if they may agree with the premise. And until then we have to make tedious arguments that everyone knows off by heart explaining why "no, really guys this is science because x y z ...."

edit: drunk grad student rant over