This article examines certain constraints on the character of the knowledge claims made by the psychology of the past century, as well as some "inprinciple" constraints. A syndrome of "ameaningful thinking" is seen to' underlie much of modern scholarship, especially the inquiring practices of the psychological sciences. Ameaningful thought regards knowledge as an almost automatic result of a self-corrective rule structure, a fail-proof heuristic, a methodologyrather than of discovery. In consequence, much of psychological history can be seen as a form of scientistic role playing which, however sophisticated, entails the trivialization, and even evasion, of significant problems. The article emphasizes the deeper human context of the ameaning syndrome, which is seen to lie in the "antinomal" structure of human experience: the circumstance-discerned by Kant in his analysis of those "antinomies of pure reason" that disenfranchise dogmatic metaphysics, but not generalized by him-that there is a class of questions which have intense meaning to all human beings but which "transcend the competence of human reason." The pervasiveness of such meaningful yet (strictly) undecidable issues in experience leads, in both informal and disciplinary contexts, to forms of cognitive denial that fuel such ameaningful tendencies as the belief in the coextensionality of the undecidable and the meaningless, and the need to exorcize uncertainty by ensconcing inquiry in a spurious "systematicity." Against a background of such considerations, the article considers whether, after the century-long march of psychology under the banner of "independent, experimental science," the field actually is (a) independent and (b) a science.Recently I received a communication from APA, dated July 30, 1979, the first paragraph of which ran as follows:As you may know, there is considerable interest and enthusiasm for a recommendation to the APA Council of Representatives to establish a "Psychology Defense Fund." Supported by voluntary contributions of indi-
On both historical and principled grounds, the author has long argued that psychology cannot be a single or coherent discipline-whether conceived in scientific or sui generis terms. Instead, the desirability of renaming psychology as the psychological studies has been urged. The present article is a synoptic review of the basis for such a position and its entailments for the future. These are seen to be rather inviting ones for all competent persons engaged in psychological inquiry.
Since its inception as science, psychology has generated a rhetoric of `rigor' concerning the ideal characteristics of its inquirers. An early emphasis on experimental exactitude expanded, by the 1930s, to a conception that saw the first-year graduate student also as a mature theoretical physicist, logician and (when required) carpenter. By the 1960s, the student was expected also to be an expert in `computer science', and an adept in esoteric speciations of probability mathematics. Consistently missing from these autistic job specifications have been such trivial matters as the ability to read, to report reliably on what has been read, and to write. As for the more sophisticated hermeneutic and analytic skills of scholarship, these have apparently been seen as positive threats to scientific purity. This article illustrates the consequences of the divorce between psychology and even minimal requirements of the western scholarly tradition. The doctrine of `operational definition' (or `operationism') has been a central strand in the official epistemology governing psychological method for over 55 years. Despite a large literature of stipulation and pseudo-exegesis of operational procedure, it can be shown that any demand that `variables' or `concepts'-whether of psychological theory or experiment-be operationally defined in the senses advocated would, if literally construed, confine psychological discourse to matters so fragmented and trivial as to be worse than empty. The doctrine of `operational definition' in psychology was presumably based on the methodic thinking of the distinguished Harvard physicist, Percy William Bridgman, who, in many writings over some 46 years, elaborated a way of explicating the meaning-contours of concepts already in place within physics and other contexts-including that of natural language. He called his method `operational analysis' and did not suppose that he was stipulating any canonical schema for definition. The total misconstrual by psychologists of Bridgman's `critical concern', and the evidence suggesting that they had based their `reading' of Bridgman's position on little more than a single slogan taken out of the context of the very paragraph in which it had occurred (at the beginning of his first book on general methodic issues, The Logic of Modern Physics, 1927/1960), provides a dramatic case study of the quality of scholarship that has long prevailed in psychology.
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