Integrating Psychology within the Globalizing World: A Requiem to the Post-Modernist Experiment with Wissenschaft

Abstract

Since the new beginning in 2007 of Integrative Psychological & Behavioral Science we have brought out to the open both the reasons why the ever-widening research enterprise in psychology has largely failed to produce general knowledge, and to point to promising new directions in the field. The post-modernist turn in psychology is now over, and it is an interesting task to return to creating a universal science of psychology that is context-sensitive, and culture-inclusive. The latter goal entails a renewed focus upon qualitative analyses of time-based processes, close attention to the phenomena under study, and systematic (single-system-based-usually labeled idiographic) focus in empirical investigations. Through these three pathways centrality of human experiencing of culturally constructed worlds is restored as the core of psychological science. Universal principles are evident in each and every single case. Transcending post-modernist deconstruction of science happens through active international participation and a renewed focus on creating general theories. Contemporary psychology is global in ways that no longer can any country's socio-political world view dominate the field. Such international equality of contributions grants innovation of the core of the discipline, and safeguards it against assuming any single cultural myth-story as the axiomatic basis for the discipline.

La situación dialógica microgenética: una estrategia de trabajo en el aula universitaria

“…Significa apropiarse de su inserción en la situación dialógica microgenética, tomar conciencia de que forman parte de esa situación y que tanto como el aprendiz, la pueden modificar y determinar por sus actos de discurso. Desde este punto de vista, el del profesorado, el conocimiento y el aprendizaje también son co-generados (Valsiner, 2009). La co-generación de la situación supone la inserción del enseñante como un actor que planifica y co-ejecuta actos de pensamiento, que son actos del lenguaje, o más propiamente actos discursivos.…”

Is Psychology Based on a Methodological Error?

“…To integrate both, one first has to enter a tabooed noman's-land between historically and institutionally fixed frontlines. In this article we try to answer the question, why empirical science, as the mother of all sciences, obviously flopped in providing a bio-psycho-social model of personality, and how the crisis in psychology (Bühler 1927;Toomela 2007Toomela , 2008Valsiner 2009;Yurevich 2009;Zittoun et al 2009) could sustain more than a whole century without approaching to a solution.…”

“…In the 20th century it reached from the controversy between the First Leipzig School (Wundt 1907) and the Würzburg School (Bühler 1907(Bühler , 1908; the crisis of scientific psychology and psychoanalysis (Bühler 1927); the opposition of behaviorism and cognitivism; till to today's gap between empirical science and psychotherapeutic doctrines. Because this crisis is methodologically silenced rather than understood as a challenge, psychology is characterized by fragmentations, ruptures, and postmodern arbitrariness (Toomela 2007(Toomela , 2008Valsiner 2009;Yurevich 2009;Zittoun et al 2009). …”

“…Intensified by the availability of statistical software packages, "...hyper-empiricism, lack of theoretical rigor, and [the] exclusion of the role of the researchers' minds from the dynamic constitution of our knowledge" (Wagoner and Valsiner 2005, p. 198), made empirical conventionalism to a mass phenomenon, with serious consequences. The axiomatic exclusion of the inherent nature of human judgment not only hardened the old crisis; it also intensified the difficulties for an improved intercultural understanding of diversity, as a requirement for a scientific psychology in a globalizing world (Valsiner 2009). …”

“…Just asValsiner (2009), we use the German notion Wissenschaft in contrast to science, because it addresses basic generalized knowledge and its construction.…”