Philosophical Debates in Psychology

5 Key excerpts on "Philosophical Debates in Psychology"

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  Psychology and Its Allied Disciplines

  Volume 1: Psychology and the Humanities

  • M. H. Bornstein(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  5 Psychology and Philosophy Ned Block Massachusetts Institute of Technology William P. Alston Syracuse University INTRODUCTION This essay aims at explaining what philosphers do under the banner of “philosophy of psychology.” Psychology groups together subject matters that but for historical accident might have ended up in different academic disciplines. Philosophy of psychology is similarly fragmented. One could define philosophy of psychology as the study of conceptual problems in psychology, but any really informative account of philosophy of psychology is better conveyed by illustration than by definition. What follows is an overview of the field, plus sixteen “MODULES,” each describing a specific problem area. The overview can be read on its own, but it is also intended to function as a guide to the modules. To use it as a guide to the modules, the reader should start reading the overview, turning to each module as it is mentioned in the overview. PHILOSOPHY OF PSYCHOLOGY OVERVIEW Philosophy of psychology, as understood in this overview, is a subject that includes traditional philosophy of mind plus the foundations of empirical psychology and also various conceptual problems in empirical psychology. Until the 1970s, philosophers who studied the mind worked on the metaphysical problem of mind, namely the mind-body problem, or else on analyses of individual mental concepts, e.g., pleasure or jealousy. (For example, an analysis of jealousy might tell you that in order for someone to be jealous of x, x must exist—so no one can really be jealous of Santa Claus.) Other endeavors were often included in the domain of philosophy of mind, for example, the problem of other minds (How do I know that all the bodies around me are not really the bodies of mindless robots?), but these problems are more closely related to other areas of philosophy—the general problem of justifying knowledge, in the case of the problem of other minds

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  Philosophical Dimensions of Personal Construct Psychology

  • Bill Warren(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  6 Philosophical psychology

  There has been a recent resurgence of interest in the relation between philosophy and psychology, addressed especially to problems common to both and which would ‘yield only to philosophically sophisticated psychologists or to psychologically sophisticated philosophers’ (Block, 1980:I, v). Equally, O’Donohue and Kitchener (1996) find a healthy new interdisciplinary approach in evidence.

  This field of interest is variously described as philosophical psychology, philosophical problems in psychology, or the philosophy of psychology; each perhaps subtly different yet addressing similar issues. Quite early on, Harriman (1946) referred to philosophical psychology as the formulation and analysis of basic concepts of psychology, in particular, mind, self, consciousness and cognition. Block (1980:I, 1) defined this domain as ‘the study of conceptual issues in psychology’, while Corsini’s (1994) Encyclopedia refers rather to ‘philosophical problems in psychology’, summarising these as the problem of the nature of human beings, and the philosophy of science.

  It is possible to identify a number of key issues that emerge in discussions within philosophy of psychology, whether one looks to earlier (for example, Brown, 1974) or more recent (for example, O’Donohue and Kitchener, 1996) discussions. The later volume (O’Donohue and Kitchener, 1996) found interest in: epistemology and philosophy of science, behaviourism, cognitive science and philosophical issues in clinical psychology.

  We take here four issues and examine where personal construct psychology sits in relation to them: philosophy of science, cognitive science, determinism and free will, and, given the origins of personal construct psychology, philosophical issues in clinical psychology.

  Philosophy of science

  The philosophy of science has been a significant field of philosophy by reason of the centring of epistemology since Descartes. Various aspects of the general domain of knowledge were considered in some detail in Chapter 1 and it is not necessary to return to them here. The connection between epistemology and philosophy of science is that science, and a particular conception of science, had become the only way to genuine knowledge. Thus, it became important to mark out the territory of science and this necessarily touches upon the notion of psychology as a science.

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  Re-envisioning Theoretical Psychology

  Diverging Ideas and Practices

  • Thomas Teo(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  To put in different words, the roots of psychology’s “philosophical embarrassments”—to borrow Herbert Feigl’s expression (Feigl, 1959)—lay deep in its past. Due to space constraints, I will take here only the first question. Contemporary debates on the mind-body problem repeat arguments that have been presented centuries before. For example, different proposals of reductions of mental phenomena to brain processes have scared psychologists all over the world, leading them to fear or avoid neuroscience. 13 However, a closer look at previous debates over the mind-brain problem in the nineteenth century suffices to show how this same idea had already been discarded as conceptually untenable. Wundt (1911) and James (1890/ 1981), to mention but two among the most influential psychologists of the past, have offered arguments against such proposals that remain unchallenged. But we can go much further in the past, and recover Aristotle’s claims against similar logical inconsistencies. 14 The list goes on. Despite all this, new representatives of materialism or physicalism, in the absence of consistent empirical evidence, keep repeating the same metaphors and analogies of centuries ago, as if they were new (Searle, Dennett, Churchlands). This is what I have called “materialism’s eternal return” (Araujo, 2012), which involves, although it is not limited to, a lack of historical perspective. When logical and conceptual confusions are involved, no empirical data collection can save them, despite naïve hopes to the contrary. 15 A logical contradiction does not disappear just because we forget it. It does not matter who has identified and when this occurred. It is a persistent problem, unless one assumes that logic itself is a cultural product with no general validity for scientific reasoning. This is the lesson of the history of psychology for theoretical psychology that I want to emphasize at this second level

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  Personality, Human Development, and Culture

  International Perspectives On Psychological Science (Volume 2)

  • Ralf Schwarzer, Peter Frensch, Peter A. Frensch(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  Section IV Conceptual issues in psychology

  Passage contains an image

  18 Psychology and behavior analysis

  The nature of the controversy Ruben Ardila

  Introduction

  Psychology, during the greater part of its development as an area of knowledge, has concentrated on the study of the “soul,” of the “mind,” and later, of “behavior.” The discussions about the nature of psychology have been broad and all-embracing and have been centered on its subject matter, on the most appropriate methodology to research it, on the problem of the universality vs. contextualism of psychological laws, and recently on the science–profession relationship. These have been the “dilemmas” of psychology (Ardila, 2007).

  From the first thinkers who reflected on subject matters that we call psychological, including the non-European cultures, then Greece, and later on European philosophy, the possibility has always been debated of constructing an objective, contrastable psychology, with knowledge that did not depend on subjective points of view but had, rather, empirical referents. This took form in the nineteenth century with the proposal of Wilhelm Wundt of a psychology that used experimental science methods to study the mind. This had been preceded by the ideas of the British empiricists, of Bekhterev in Russia and his objective psychology, and other efforts in many countries. It was a search for a psychology that would be part of the natural sciences.

  We could conclude that the development of psychology in the last centuries has been the search for objectivity, contrastability, valid and reliable knowledge, affirmations based on evidence. What distinguishes psychology from other ways of reflecting about mind and behavior is precisely this: objectivity, the possibility of replicating findings, of putting hypotheses to test, of altering theories, and, in general, of using the methodology of science for the study of phenomena that have traditionally been called psychological.

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  Education and Psychology in Interaction

  Working With Uncertainty in Interconnected Fields

  • Brahm Norwich(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Gage defends the contribution of empirical work from a technical perspective which aims to find out what interventions can improve learning outcomes under what conditions. This is in a different tradition to Harre et al.’s programme, which assumes that ‘systematic, careful, sceptical and rigorous scientific research could be used to extend and correct the domain of common sense psychology’ (Harre et al., 1985, p. 15). This is the fourth possible relationship between common sense and psychology. In this version the task of systematic study is to make explicit the psychologies of every day and then undertake empirical study in the light of this understanding to develop and extend this body of knowledge. Harre et al. summarise this position neatly by referring to common sense as the literature, as that part of the body of knowledge available to the systematic study of psychology. This conception of psychology as a systematic field of study has much to commend it because it retains a critical distance for psychology from everyday notions and assumptions while recognising their interdependence and interaction. However, it does not address issues concerned with what is implied and required by calling a systematic study ‘scientific’. Nor does it provide a perspective on how everyday or folk psychology interacts with the systematic study. These issues arise because everyday psychology is a complex mixture of notions and assumptions which have been developed over the years in response to how people lead their lives on a day-to-day level, but also in response to wider issues about our origins and place in the universe. This inevitably leads to philosophical questions which will be dealt with briefly in the next section.

  Philosophical ideas of psychology as science

  Much has already been said about the lack of theoretical unity in psychology and the aspirations for a scientific treatment of the field. Science has assumed considerable importance in Western societies and is considered to be one of the great human achievements of the last two centuries. There is no doubt about its impact on our understanding of the natural world and therefore our place in it. It has also influenced our technologies and had an immense impact on all areas of our lives. It is hardly surprising that the study of social and psychological affairs should adopt some, if not all, of the hall-marks of this successful endeavour called science. The problems arise because there are uncertainties about whether the characteristics associated with the more successful empirical sciences, such as physics or biology, are applicable to the study of human experience and actions. Central to these sciences are assumptions and methods which are considered to hold the key to explanatory success. One assumption is the autonomy and authority of facts. Facts relate to what is the case and form the basis for deriving and testing explanations of phenomena and predictions of the future. Scientific methods, which are designed to be well defined, systematic, objective and clear, are central to this process of comparing ideas and explanations with evidence. The knowledge derived from these systematic empirical methods is open to revision, and therefore the scientific method is considered to have the power to self-correct and adapt to new circumstances and fields. Though the idea of science is associated with these methods, they have to be judged in terms of their adequacy for the aims of science. These are theoretical aims: to enhance understanding and explanation.

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