To Think Human out of the Machine Paradigm: <Emphasis Type="Italic">Homo Ex Machina</Emphasis>

This article attempts to show that the metaphorical conception of human being as a machine takes a very specific epistemological standpoint. To make short the complex task of considering the implication of this paradigm for psychological and behavioral sciences, three important mismatches between the machine and the living human will be considered. Experience, agency and plasticity of human being are excluded in the scientific models and research activities when they are situated in the machine paradigm. For this reason, I claim that the machine paradigm does not offer the relevant frame for integrating results from various domains or approaches within human sciences, even if it can sometimes produce relevant scientific knowledge in certain domain at the scale of detailed investigation. Due to the importance of overcoming the fragmentation of scientific knowledge to solve the crisis in psychology, an “organic paradigm” should be elaborated which provides a new epistemological framework.     

HUSSERLIAN INTENTIONALITY AND THE CHINESE CONCEPT OF "MIND"

The phenomenology of Edmund Husserl is, in one sense, a theory of pure consciousness that aims to set forth an absolute, ultimate, rigorous ground for the sciences based on the field of pure consciousness. Husserl believed that, on the basis of this field of pure consciousness, he could secure eternal significance for the spiritual life of man. Intentionality is the key element in this theory of pure consciousness and it plays a crucial part in the realization of Husserl's philosophical goal. By contrast, traditional Chinese philosophy was not concerned to seek an absolute, ultimate ground for the sciences or to derive a set of moral norms and a theory of value for human life from logical and scientific truths. Rather, Chinese philosophy sought to adjust the relationships between man and nature and between man and man in their ordinary, secular existence. It placed no value in the ideas of pure logic, pure science, or pure consciousness. Traditional Chinese philosophers inquired into the experiential, intuitive 'mind' ( xin ^a). This approach to 'mind'was understood by the Chinese to require rigorous logical proof or scientific theory:— anyone can perceive one's 'mind'in daily life and, by analogy, anyone can 'perceive'other 'minds'. If Husserl's intentionality is the transcendental reason of Western philosophy, the 'mind'is the practical reason of Chinese philosophy. What, then, are the essential features of Husserl's 'intentionality'and the Chinese 'mind'? What are their respective theoretical features? Can they be brought together and compared in a philosophically significant fashion?     

Integrated analysis of indigenous psychologies: Comments and extensions of ideas presented by Shams, Jackson, Hwang and Kashima

The purpose of the present paper is to provide an integrated analysis of indigenous psychologies and to outline the epistemological foundation of indigenous psychologies. In the first part of this paper, the authors provide commentary of the four articles in this Special Issue. In the second section, the epistemological foundation of general psychology is reviewed. General psychology has adopted positivism in search of abstract and universal laws of human behavior and eliminated the subjective aspects of human functioning (i.e. agency, meaning, intention and goals) and the influence of context and culture. In the third section, the authors introduce the transactional model of science. In this approach, human beings are viewed as agents of their own action and are motivated to control and manage their environment. In the fourth section, indigenous psychologies and culture are defined. Cultural differences exist due to the diverse goals that cultures pursue, the methods people use to attain the goals, and the differential use of natural and human resources. In the fifth section, a review of empirical studies focusing on academic achievement is provided to highlight the scientific merits of indigenous psychologies. In the final section, the authors distinguish between the speculative analyses of indigenous concepts from systematic indigenous analyses. Indigenous psychologies represent a scientific paradigm in which the goal is to create a more rigorous, systematic and universal science that can be theoretically and empirically verified.     

Psychoanalysis and academia: Psychoanalysis at the crossroads between exact and human sciences

Abstract

It is proposed that the mental health crisis in “developed” societies is largely due to the fact that psychology is heavily based upon an exact science model academically, and upon a medical model clinically. Indeed, these models favor an apperception of mental pathologies as essential entities with a biological etiology, and this reification facilitates a process of nonimplication of the sufferer as concerns his condition. The progress in brain sciences holds the promise of acknowledging psychology as an autonomous discipline, properly describing mental logics, which are constrained, but not determined, by brain characteristics; moreover, mental logical operations mandatorily need content from the contingent history of the subject's life to become instantiated. Psychology, then, is at the interface between an exact science and a human science epistemology. Consequently, we need psychologists and clinicians in the field of mental health who can apply a particularized approach to mental distress, who can deal with the personal feeling of nonmastery, who can base their clinical thinking on the patient's story, and who thereby systematically stay away from any essentializing temptation, while simultaneously being aware that the theoretical framework they operate from is embedded in a continuous scientific dialogue. Psychoanalysis is at that crossroads.     

Beyond free will: The embodied emergence of conscious agency

Is it possible to reconcile the concept of conscious agency with the view that humans are biological creatures subject to material causality? The problem of conscious agency is complicated by the tendency to attribute autonomous powers of control to conscious processes. In this paper, we offer an embodied process model of conscious agency. We begin with the concept of embodied emergence – the idea that psychological processes are higher-order biological processes, albeit ones that exhibit emergent properties. Although consciousness, experience, and representation are emergent properties of higher-order biological organisms, the capacity for hierarchical regulation is a property of all living systems. Thus, while the capacity for consciousness transforms the process of hierarchical regulation, consciousness is not an autonomous center of control. Instead, consciousness functions as a system for coordinating novel representations of the most pressing demands placed on the organism at any given time. While it does not regulate action directly, consciousness orients and activates preconscious control systems that mediate the construction of genuinely novel action. Far from being an epiphenomenon, consciousness plays a central albeit non-autonomous role in psychological functioning.     

知识划界、追赶焦虑与中国本土心理学的理论建构导向

科学心理学以方法为中心的知识建构策略,内在地要求它与常识心理学划界以谋求自然科学分支的学科地位,其代价是对人类心理之情感与意义维度的隔离。在移植西方心理学体系的过程中,科学心理学的争议也内含于中国心理学的发展轨迹中,同时还附加了学术边陲地区特有的学科追赶焦虑。中国本土心理学理论应突破科学至上的观念束缚,致力于发展具有现实解释力和价值引导力的人文主义导向的心理学理论,以切实解决中国现实社会中的心理问题,并在世界心理学界发出真正的中国声音。     

William James and Sigmund Freud: "The Future of Psychology Belongs to Your Work"

Although James and Freud are generally not considered scientific by experimental psychologists, both wrote about their view of what a scientific psychology should look like. Their radically different philosophical epistemologies and historical origins are reviewed, to provide an understanding of their respective visions for psychology. James took his stand on a new metaphysical foundation for the way experiments should be conducted with his formulation of radical empiricism. Freud attempted a neurological explanation of the unconscious in his "Project for a Scientific Psychology." Remarkably, their definitions of psychology as a science had a similar ring. Likely, this is because both took a phenomenological position with regard to how they defined science, which is also probably the primary reason their ideas on the subject have always been rejected by experimentalists. The humanistic implications of the neuroscience revolution, however, have caused a reassessment of their respective positions, as philosophical questions about the nature of consciousness have brought both Freud and James back into vogue, but in new and unexpected ways.     

Psychology of Conversion and Spiritual Transformation

This article provides an overview of the four major psychological approaches used in the study of religious change. A heuristic stage model of conversion consisting of seven stages: context, crisis, quest, encounter, interaction, commitment, and consequences (Rambo 1995) serves as a framework for integrating the research of these four approaches, providing a fuller understanding of the multilayered processes involved in conversion. The authors hope that the phenomenon of spiritual transformation and conversion will continue to draw the attention of psychologists who increasingly appreciate the complexity and dynamism of religious/spiritual transformation. For the psychology of religion in general and the psychology of conversion and spiritual transformation in particular to be viable and valuable, psychologists will need to join with researchers in the human sciences and religious studies to develop methods and theories worthy of this complex subject. Additionally, through collaboration with psychologists in the People’s Republic of China, the authors look forward to exploring together the fascinating and important issues that emerge as we seek to understand the nature of conversion and spiritual transformation in China.     

Turning Men into Machines? Scientific Management,Industrial Psychology,and the “Human Factor”

In the controversy that broke out in 1911 over Frederick W. Taylor's scientific management, many critics contended that it ignored “the human factor” and reduced workers to machines. Psychologists succeeded in positioning themselves as experts of the human factor, and their instruments and expertise as the necessary complement of Taylor's psychologically deficient system. However, the conventional view that the increasing influence of psychologists and other social scientists “humanized” management theory and practice needs to be amended. Taylor's scientific management was not less human than later approaches such as Human Relations, but it articulated the human factor differently, and aligned it to its own instruments and practices in such a way that it was at once external to them and essential to their functioning. Industrial psychologists, on the other hand, at first presented themselves as engineers of the human factor and made the human mind an integral part of management.     

The Spiritual Task of Religion in Culture: An Evolutionary Perspective

It is quite impossible to consider human nature within an evolutionary perspective if we leapfrog over culture and establish some direct relation between cosmic and human evolution without taking culture into consideration. Culture holds a significant place within the structures of nature, as the "epic" of evolution portrays nature—cosmic, physical, and biological. Religion emerges within culture, and it plays a role in organizing the human consciousness and in generating the stories, rituals, and morality that constitute the organization of consciousness. Since organization of consciousness determines how culture is conducted, and since we face a global crisis today because of the ways we are conducting our culture, religion's role is critical for the future of culture. Wherever it is attempted, whether in terms of traditional or posttraditional modes, the fashioning of adequate worldviews, rituals, and morality is an essentially religious activity. For both traditional and posttraditional modes, the task is to weave structures of meaning with the sciences of evolution so as to effect the most suitable organization of consciousness.     

Neo‐Confucian epistemology and Chinese philosophy: Practical postulates for actioning psychology as a human science

The world is growing more interconnected, and Asian societies are increasingly able to play leading roles in global society. However, Asian psychologists and social scientists have yet to draw from their cultural roots to create social sciences able to make a difference in their home societies. This paper articulates an epistemology for the aspirational practice of Height Psychology as a human science informed by Kantian epistemology in dialogue with other philosophies, especially Confucianism and Taoism. The possibility of ‘intellectual intuition’ (direct knowledge of thing‐in‐itself, or noumenon) is allowed in Eastern philosophical traditions that open a more agentic and human‐centred philosophy of science for action that goes beyond natural science epistemologies originating in Cartesian dualism. Kant's practical postulates are invoked to develop a moral and ethical philosophy that through civilizational dialogue can lead to a philosophy of science robustly incorporating culture and human agency. A thought experiment is offered where practical postulates of Chinese culture are held to be yin‐yang cosmology, human‐heartedness, and relationalism. It is argued that these facilitate an holistic science of practice that complements the sophistication of Western methods. Principles and an approach to theory‐building for human science are proposed.     

A psychotherapist's lessons from the philosophy of science

A number of issues are discussed, but the major themes have to do with the way causation is understood in psychology, the resultant image of humanity as mechanical rather than teleological, and the fact that psychologists can and should be framing people as freely willing agents in their theories even as these views are submitted to rigorous empirical testing in the traditional scientific method. Although the scientific method unavoidably commits the fallacy of "affirming the consequent" in an if-then sequence of logical reasoning, the author opposes adopting substitutes for this approach to knowledge. Teleology needs to be furthered in psychotherapy because it is a genuinely accurate portrayal of human beings and because there is a pressing need for improvement in ethico-moral realms of behavior that mechanical models fail to capture.     

The Air We Breathe: A Critical Look at Practices and Alternatives in the Peer-Review Process

ABSTRACT— Anonymous peer review has served as the bedrock of research dissemination in scientific psychology for decades and has only sporadically been questioned. However, other disciplines, such as biomedicine and physics, have found the traditional peer-review system to be wanting and have begun to test and try alternative practices. In this article, we survey criticisms of the traditional peer-review system and describe several alternatives in the interests of facilitating discussion and debate. We also consider why the natural sciences tend to employ fewer reviewers and have lower rejection rates than do the social sciences. Our two recommendations are that a serious discussion of problems and alternatives to peer review should be started at all levels of psychology and that a science of research communication should be a priority, with psychologists as part of its advance guard because of their relevant substantive and methodological knowledge.     

The Concept of <Emphasis Type="Italic">Krisis</Emphasis> in Husserl’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology</Emphasis>

In The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Husserl argues that the only way to respond to the scientific Krisis of which he speaks is with phenomenological reflections on the history, method, and task of philosophy. On the assumption that an accurate diagnosis of a malady is a necessary condition for an effective remedy, this paper aims to formulate a precise concept of the Krisis of the European sciences with which Husserl operates in this work. Thus it seeks an answer to the question: What exactly, according to Husserl, is “the ‘crisis’ [Krisis] of the European sciences”? There are two different tendencies in the literature on this question. According to the traditional interpretation, the Krisis of the European sciences lies not in the inadequacy of their scientificity but in the loss of their meaningfulness for life. According to an innovative suggestion, the Krisis lies not in the loss of their meaningfulness for life but in the inadequacy of their scientificity. These readings are mutually exclusive because each claims that the other misidentifies the Krisis as something that it is not. The argument of this paper, however, is that, given the many different senses of Krisis in The Crisis, an adequate understanding of the Krisis that Husserl identifies requires not a disjunctive but an inclusive approach. Therefore the paper proposes that Husserl’s Krisis of the European sciences is both a crisis of their scientificity and a crisis of their meaningfulness for life. The relevance of this result to Husserl’s philosophical and historical sense-investigations in The Crisis—as well as to the present critical situation of philosophy—is self-evident.     

有关进化心理学局限性的理论思考

进化心理学是现代西方心理学的新取向之一。这一新取向吸引了众多的追随者,但是它自身的核心假设、方法论和认识论方面却存在着局限性。文章从三个方面分析了这种局限性：第一,进化心理学的核心假设是心理的模块性观点。依据这种观点,心灵由大量功能各异的心理模块组成,但是来自于心理学和生物学的研究都表明这种观点是缺乏科学依据的。第二,进化心理学从过去的角度理解现在,所依据的事实大多是推测性的,更多的是一种历史叙事,从方法论的角度来说,这种研究不具备可证伪性,不符合科学方法论的基本原则。第三,在认识论方面,进化心理学继承了社会生物学的传统,有意或无意地夸大了基因的作用,贬低了个体发展过程中其它因素,现代生命科学的研究已经证明了基因决定论的虚假性     

Christfried Jakob's late views (1930-1949) on the psychogenetic function of the cerebral cortex and its localization: culmination of the neurophilosophical thought of a keen brain observer

This article follows the culmination of the scientific thought of the neurobiologist Christfried Jakob (1866-1956) during the later part of his career, based on publications from 1930 to 1949, when he was between 64 and 83 years of age. Jakob emphasized the necessity of bridging philosophy to the biological sciences, neurobiology in particular. Thus, we consider him as one of the early protagonists in the emergence of neurophilosophy in the 20th century. The topics that occupied his mind were the foundations for a future philosophy of the brain, and the 'neurobiogenetic', 'neurodynamic', and 'neuropsychogenetic' problems in relation to how consciousness emerges. Jakob's views have many elements in common with great thinkers of philosophy and psychology, including Immanuel Kant, William James, Edmund Husserl, Henri Bergson, Jean Piaget and Willard Quine. A common denominator can also be discerned between Jakob's dynamic approach and certain aspects of cybernetics and neurophenomenology. Jakob propounded the interdisciplinarity of sciences as an indispensable tool for ultimately solving the enigma of consciousness.     

Reasoning in the social sciences

In 1981, A. C. Crombie identified six styles of scientific thinking in the European tradition that constitute our ways of reasoning in the natural sciences. In this paper, I try to show that these styles constitute reasoning in the social sciences as well, and that, as a result, the differences between reasoning about the physical world and about human beings are not so different as some interpretevists have supposed.     

Hume and the enactive approach to mind

An important part of David Hume’s work is his attempt to put the natural sciences on a firmer foundation by introducing the scientific method into the study of human nature. This investigation resulted in a novel understanding of the mind, which in turn informed Hume’s critical evaluation of the scope and limits of the scientific method as such. However, while these latter reflections continue to influence today’s philosophy of science, his theory of mind is nowadays mainly of interest in terms of philosophical scholarship. This paper aims to show that, even though Hume’s recognition in the cognitive sciences has so far been limited, there is an opportunity to reevaluate his work in the context of more recent scientific developments. In particular, it is argued that we can gain a better understanding of his overall philosophy by tracing the ongoing establishment of the enactive approach. In return, this novel interpretation of Hume’s ‘science of man’ is used as the basis for a consideration of the current and future status of the cognitive sciences.

In search of the unifying principles of psychotherapy: conceptual, empirical, and clinical convergence

The search for the principles of unified psychotherapy is an important stage in the advancement of the field. Converging evidence from various streams of clinical science allows the identification of some of the major domains of human functioning, adaptation, and dysfunction. These principles, supported by animal modeling, neuroscience, and developmental psychopathology, along with new theoretical constructs, are demonstrating that human functioning is best conceptualized as holistic and highly interrelated at all domain levels of the total ecological system. Incorporating these findings with evidence accrued over the past century of psychotherapy practice and study allows psychologists to begin to explore the development of a unified system of psychotherapy that is rooted in the clinical sciences. One such attempt to develop a unified framework is presented as a starting point. ((c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved).