Artificial Intelligence Inheriting the Historical Crisis in Psychology: An Epistemological and Methodological Investigation of Challenges and Alternatives

Abstract

By following the arguments developed by Vygotsky and employing the cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) in addition to dialectical logic, this paper attempts to investigate the interaction between psychology and artificial intelligence (AI) to confront the epistemological and methodological challenges encountered in AI research. The paper proposes that AI is facing an epistemological and methodological crisis inherited from psychology based on dualist ontology. The roots of this crisis lie in the duality between rationalism and objectivism or in the mind-body rupture that has governed the production of scientific thought and the proliferation of approaches. In addition, by highlighting the sociohistorical conditions of AI, this paper investigates the historical characteristics of the shift of the crisis from psychology to AI. Additionally, we examine the epistemological and methodological roots of the main challenges encountered in AI research by noting that empiricism is the dominant tendency in the field. Empiricism gives rise to methodological and practical challenges, including challenges related to the emergence of meaning, abstraction, generalization, the emergence of symbols, concept formation, functional reflection of reality, and the emergence of higher psychological functions. Furthermore, through discussing attempts to formalize dialectical logic, the paper, based on contradiction formation, proposes a qualitative epistemological, methodological, and formal alternative by using a preliminary algorithmic model that grasps the formation of meaning as an essential ability for the qualitative reflection of reality and the emergence of other mental functions.

Personality Syndromes in the Light of the Historical Crisis in Psychology, a Cultural-Historical Activity Theory Position

“…In his book "The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book About a Vast Memory," Luria states that "psychology has yet to become a science that is capable of dealing with the really vital aspects of human personality…the development of such a psychology is a job for the future" [29, p.159], by defining how these syndromes are sociohistorically formed is "one important method in the approaches used" [29, p. 160]. However, mainstream psychology drowned deeper in empiricism, fragmentation, and eclecticism, under the historical crisis of psychology [46] that is neglected and remained under-referenced [10; 21], hence, tearing down psychology foundations and threatening its coherence, leading it to be markedly heterogeneous, and witnessing a critical situation along with the entrenchment of realist ontology, quantitative methods, positivist epistemology, and the absence of an axiological frame (see [6; 17; 38; 44]) in addition to the lack of "knowledge of theory, theory methodology, and theory needs with respect to changing from a disunified to unified science" [41, p. 3], which transformed psychology into a mystical and depsychologized domain under two tendencies simultaneously (the naturalistic and the idealistic) governed by its epistemological and methodological crisis [10]. These symptoms as an "extreme expression of solipsism and idealism in psychology" [46, p. 259 object of study, appears also in personality studies (see [7]), same as in artificial intelligence as an applied field of psychology that inherited the crisis [10].…”