From Selz to Gigerenzer: A thought-psychological research history, which needs a Popperian, fallibilist theory of rationality to effectively develop

Abstract

Two sharply separated traditions in the philosophy of science and in thought psychology began with Otto Selz’s psychology. The first tradition began with Karl Popper; it has been developed by many others. The developers of the second tradition have included Julius Bahle, Adriaan de Groot, Herbert Simon, and Gerd Gigerenzer. The first tradition has ignored empirical studies of thought processes. The second tradition is widely based on Simon’s inductivist philosophy. The first tradition can be improved by integrating empirical studies of rationality into its research. The second tradition can be improved by replacing its inductivist assumptions with a fallibilist framework.

The Würzburg School today: The three—now four—world theory and new psychological research

“…It offers a rather significant enrichment of it. When we reject the failed attempt by thinkers such as Herbert Simon (Wettersten, 2017a, 2017b) and Donald Campbell (Wettersten, 2016) to explain Popperian methodology as a product of evolution, we are faced with new and interesting problems of the limits of psychology, of where the genetically determined thought processes move into the non-genetically determined psychological processes of the second world, which in this paper I call the third world, and more.…”

“…An example of the pervasiveness of Carnapian views in psychology today is found in the school of simple heuristics around Gerd Gigerenzer (Wettersten, 2017a). The research of Gigerenzer and the simple heuristics school is a continuation of the Carnapian view of research found in Simon’s studies of thought processes (Simon, 1981, 1989).…”

“…A previous attempt to explain the relevance of Popper’s three world theory for psychological research today is discussed in the appendix to this essay. Psychological research today is dominated, as it was then, by reductionist assumptions such as those of Herbert Simon (Wettersten, 2017a) and Donald Campbell (Wettersten, 2016). This research blocks out important problems of the relations between the three—or as I will explain below, four worlds—it ignores the theoretical problems that the existence and the characteristics of these four worlds present.…”