Agency,Chance, and the Scientific Status of Psychology

Psychologists generally reject the reductionist, physicalist, “nothing but” stance of the natural sciences. At the same time they consider their discipline a science and wonder why it does not enjoy the status (and funding) of the natural sciences. Ferguson American Psychologist, 70, 527-542 (2015), Lilienfeld American Psychologist, 67, 111-129 (2012), and Schwartz et al. American Psychologist, 71, 52-70 (2016) are among those who adopt a soft naturalism of nonreductive physicalism which declares, or implies, that when it comes to humans, there is more than what the natural sciences can unravel. They envision psychology as scientific in the epistemological sense of generating reproducible results, but reject the reductive ontology of science which currently points to the undeterminable chance of quantum theory as the closest physics has come to the beginnings and what might loosely be called the foundation of the universe (e.g., Bridgman Harper's, 158, 443-451 1929; Eddington 1948). The case made here is that any science, including a psychological one, must be based on a naturalist ontology. This implies restricting the term science to disciplines which not only meet epistemological criteria like reproducibility, but which also adopt—on the ontological level—the parsimonious assumption that at present it makes sense to think that “there is nothing but time and chance” (e.g., Cox and Forshaw 2011; Crease and Goldhaber 2014; Rorty 1989). From this perspective, psychology emerges as two distinct disciplines, one a natural science, the other a human science in the broad sense of science as scientia.