On Hijacking Science

Exploring the Nature and Consequences of Overreach in Psychology

Edwin E. Gantt, Richard N. Williams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780367856144
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351062565
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della psicologia

This book examines the origins, presence, and implications of scientistic thinking in psychology. Scientism embodies the claim that only knowledge attained by means of natural scientific methods counts as valid and valuable. This perspective increasingly dominates thinking and practice in psychology and is seldom acknowledged as anything other than standard scientific practice. This book seeks to make this intellectual movement explicit and to detail the very real limits in both role and reach of science in psychology. The critical chapters in this volume present an alternative perspective to the scholarly mainstreams of the discipline and will be of value to scholars and students interested in the scientific status and the philosophical bases of psychology as a discipline.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Contributors
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• Preface: A ‘Science’ of Psychology: The Enduring Aspiration
• Introduction: Science, Scientism, and Psychology
• 1 Epistemology and the Boundaries Between Phenomena and Conventions
• 2 Hayek and Hempel on the Nature, Role, and Limitations of Science
• 3 On Scientism in Psychology: Some Observations of Historical Relevance
• 4 Why Science Needs Intuition
• 5 Scientism and Saturation: Evolutionary Psychology, Human Experience, and the Phenomenology of Jean-Luc Marion
• 6 Psychotherapy and Scientism
• 7 Science and Society: Effects, Reactions, and a Call for Reformation
• 8 Beyond Scientism: Reaches in Psychology Toward a Science of Consciousness
• Index