The purposes of descriptive psychology

Abstract

In this paper, I discuss the different views of the founders of descriptive psychology in the 19th century about the meaning and purpose of this discipline and sketch a new plan for connecting descriptive psychology with the language‐critical tradition of analytic philosophy. I will show that the goals Hermann Lotze, Franz Brentano, and Wilhelm Dilthey set for descriptive psychology were too lofty for different reasons. The common problem they faced was how to reconcile the ideal of autonomous philosophical knowledge with the empirical relevance that descriptive psychology should have. Faced with this dilemma, I outline a new plan to conceive of descriptive psychology as a critical project aimed at overcoming the obstacles that language places in the way of our knowledge of mental phenomena.

Qualitative psychology of the Brentano school and its inspirations (another look at empirical qualitative research)

“…It was psychology par excellence, immersed in the consciousness and experience of the subject. Genetic psychology and cause-and-effect relations were of secondary importance; they were simply impossible without introspective data and descriptive psychology (Brandl, 2021; Danziger, 1980; Siewert, 2021). From this point, Wundt’s physiological psychology or that of the later Edward Titchener were at the other extreme, providing different data.…”

“…The key statement here is the conviction that the basis of psychology is inner experience, which is not subject to observation but to inner perception, in which judgements, perceptions, and emotions are revealed. This experience is not also subject to exact replication, although its repetition enables reaching the universal structure and the laws that govern it (Brandl, 2021; Seron, 2017; Taieb, 2021). The introspective report provides a description in the form of personal narratives, from which the researcher reconstructs the experience and its meaning as the participant conceives it.…”