The pretense of psychology as science: The myth of mental illness in Statu Nascendi

If I was profoundly shocked by the Varieties [of Religious Experience, by William James], that was not because some of the facts described in it were such as I would rather not hear about. They were, on the whole, amusing. Nor was it because I thought James was doing his work clumsily. I thought he did it very well. It was because the whole thing was a fraud.... Psychology... regarded as the science of the mind, is not a science. It is what “phrenology” was in the early nineteenth century, and astrology and alchemy in the Middle Ages and the sixteenth century: the fashionable scientific fraud of the age.... There were, I held, no merely moral actions, no merely political actions, and no merely economic actions. Every action was moral, political, and economic.     

Folk psychology as science

There is a long-standing debate in the philosophy of action and the philosophy of science over folk psychological explanations of human action: do the (perhaps implicit) generalizations that underwrite such explanations purport to state contingent, empirically established connections between beliefs, desires, and actions, or do such generalizations serve rather to define, at least in part, what it is to have a belief or desire, or perform an action? This question has proven important because of certain traditional assumptions made about the role of law-statements in scientific explanations. According to this tradition, law-statements take the form of generalizations, and the laws we find in well-established sciences are contingent and empirical; as such, if the kinds of generalizations at work in folk psychological explanations of human action act like definitions, or state conceptual connections, then such generalizations could not play the kind of explanatory role we find in mature sciences. This paper argues that the aforementioned way of framing the debate reflects a still powerful but impoverished conception of the role laws play in scientific explanations, a conception that, moreover, cannot be reconciled with a good deal of actual scientific practice. When we update the philosophy of science, we find the concerns that are raised for folk psychological explanations largely evaporate or are found not to be specific to such explanations.     

The myth of science education

It is argued that the manner in which we teach science in the high schools represents an outdated positivistic conception of science. The standard presentation of a year of each of chemistry, biology and physics should be replaced by an integrated science plus history, philosophy, and sociology of science which would take a total of three years to complete. A proper appreciation for the true nature of science is essential to the continued health of the scientific enterprise.     

The Cinderella of psychology: the neglect of motor control in the science of mental life and behavior

One would expect psychology--the science of mental life and behavior--to place great emphasis on the means by which mental life is behaviorally expressed. Surprisingly, however, the study of how decisions are enacted--the focus of motor control research--has received little attention in psychology. This article documents the neglect and considers possible reasons for it. The hypotheses considered include three that are raised and then rejected: (a) no famous psychologists have studied motor control, (b) cognitive psychologists are mainly interested in uniquely human functions, and (c) motor control is simply too hard to study. Three other hypotheses are more viable: (d) cognitive psychologists have been more interested in epistemology than in action, (e) psychologists have disfavored motor control because overt responses were the only admissible measure in behaviorism, and (f) psychologists have felt that neuroscientists have the market cornered when it comes to motor control research. There are signs that motor control's Cinderella status is changing.     

Historical relations of psychology as an object-science and a subject-science: toward psychology as a human science

Textbooks and other teaching of psychology's history oversimplify to the point of presenting it as the evolution of an exclusively object-science--despite general familiarity with integral extrascientistic practices and assumptions. Representative examples are presented, along with an overview of object-psychology's cultural/practical routes to dominance. The purpose of highlighting these facets of psychology's development is to call for psychology to take explicit account of humans' subjecthood as well as objectness, on the way rereading our history toward an integrated science.     

The politics of mental illness

What is needed today is a biologically grounded explanation of behavior, one that moves beyond the so‐called mind‐body problem. Yet no solution will be found by philosophers who refuse to learn about how brains and bodies work, or by neuroscientists pursuing experimental research based on outmoded or blatantly anti‐biological theories. Churchland's book proposes a solution: to come by a unified theory of the mind‐brain philosophers have to work together with neuroscientists. Yet Churchland's vision of a unified theory is based on an assumption that, while widely held, may not adequately reflect brain functioning in the production of behavior, namely, the assumption that brain processes represent. The present paper proposes an alternative view, suggesting that patterns of neural activity do not ‘represent’ anything, that brains do not ‘read’ or ‘transform’ representations, and that brains do not require representations to produce goal‐directed behavior. Representations are replaced by self‐organizing neural processes that achieve a certain end‐state of interaction between the organism and its environment in a flexible and adaptive manner. Some of the implications of this view for neuroscientific research and the philosophy of mind are outlined.     

Jung's mediatory science as a psychology beyond objectivism

In this paper, the author argues that Jung's non-objectivist--yet scientific--epistemology and his empirical/hermeneatic methods of inquiry situate him within a psychological tradition that, in many respects, began with William James and, today, is finding expression in the work of many non-Jungian cognitive scientists. In an effort to encourage dialogue between Jungians and scholars within related intellectual traditions, the author presents evidence from the corpus of Jung's work that demonstrates that, like William James, Jung intentionally rejected the absolutist claims of objectivism and the opposite position on 'anything goes' relativism, emotivism, or subjectivism. Instead, Jung forged a path that led to the meta-psychological position similar to internal realism (Putnam 1981) or experientialism (Lakoff 1987) and to a theoretical psychology that gave a central place both to unconscious cognitive structure and to imagination. This he labelled a 'mediatory science'. The psychological theories developed within this mediatory science framework represent an early articulation of key constructs that are currently used by a number of cognitive scientists seeking to understand how we make sense of experience.     

Status of psychology as a science in northeast Brazil: undergraduate students' perceptions

The Psychology as Science scale was used to assess whether Brazilian students believe psychology is a science. 190 undergraduates from four universities in Brazil participated. Analysis showed that 54% of students strongly agree that psychology is a science, 26% strongly agree that psychological research is necessary and that training in methodology is important, and 25% strongly agree that behavior is predictable.