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The Epistemological Goal of Indigenous Psychology

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Book cover Foundations of Chinese Psychology

Part of the book series: International and Cultural Psychology ((ICUP,volume 1))

Abstract

There have been three waves of large-scale academic movements in attempting to include non-Western cultures into psychological research, namely, modernization theory, research on individualism–collectivism, and the indigenization movement of psychology. In view of the difficulties encountered by most indigenous psychologists who adopted the inductive approach of the bottom-up model building paradigm, the author argued for an epistemological goal of indigenous psychology following the principle of cultural psychology: “one mind, many mentalities” (Shweder et al., The cultural psychology of development: One mind, many mentalities. Handbook of child psychology, New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1998); in addition, the author advocated for constructing psychology theories that may represent universal mind of human beings, as well as the particular mentalities of people living in a specific culture. Due to the fact that theories of modern social sciences have been constructed on the basis of the Western philosophy of science, indigenous psychologists in non-Western countries have to make three levels of breakthroughs for the sake of attaining such an epistemological goal: philosophical reflection, theoretical construction, and empirical research.

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  1. Department of Psychology, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan

    Kwang-Kuo Hwang

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  1. Kwang-Kuo Hwang
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Correspondence to Kwang-Kuo Hwang .

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Hwang, KK. (2012). The Epistemological Goal of Indigenous Psychology. In: Foundations of Chinese Psychology. International and Cultural Psychology, vol 1. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-1439-1_1

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