Critique

Abstract

Psychologists have spent the better part of this century legitimizing a scientific approach to the study of man, an approach that was supposed to clarify those questions which are answerable and exclude from analysis those which are unanswerable given current technological skills or fundamentally metaphysical. A number of forces both outside and inside the discipline produced this legitimization, such as the operationism of Bridgeman in physics, the philosophical and analytic sophistication of the logical positivists, the application of mathematical formalism to human behavior (for example, Estes’ work), and the theoretical sophistication of learning theorists such as Hull and Spence. By means of a general commitment to empiricism and to thematic physicalism (Brunswick; see Postman and Tolman, 1959), psychology was able to achieve formal, substantive, and institutional independence from philosophy. It is now becoming apparent, however, that the gratifying sense of independence may have been premature. A number of recent events are pushing the community of scientific psychologists into varying degrees of realization that our traditional approaches to problems of theory and method have serious limitations, if indeed they are not fundamentally flawed (see, for example, Levine, 1974). These recent events like those earlier events which led to the legitimization of psychology as a science have come from both inside and outside the discipline.