- 03 Sep 2016 06:53
#14715010
Do you agree with Wittgenstein about the state of psychology? Is it that psychology has been conceptually confused and this confusion is yet to be resolved?
OR
Is the idea it'll sort itself out once we develop some sort of comprehensive and dominant school of psychological thought, that all others will become obsolete true?
And if it is conceptually confused, why is it? Is it because we haven't properly addressed the philosophy of the mind? What do you think this means for the future of psychology? Are you optimistic that these barriers can be overcome in time or will psychology and our understanding of ourselves be thoroughly confused and limited for the distant foreseeable future?
Is psychology limited by the philosophical underpinnings of the hard sciences and in need of a new paradigm to explore the subjectivity of human psychology that is possibly beyond the limits of empiricism and rationalism?
On the concluding page of what is now called ‘Part II’ of the Investigations, Wittgenstein wrote
The confusion and barrenness of psychology is not to be explained by calling it a “young science”; its state is not comparable with that of physics, for instance, in its beginnings. (Rather with that of certain branches of mathematics. Set theory.) For in psychology there are experimental methods and conceptual confusion. (As in the other case, conceptual confusion and methods of proof.)
The existence of the experimental method makes us think we have the means of solving the problems that trouble us; though problem and method pass one another by. (PI p. 232)
http://info.sjc.ox.ac.uk/scr/hacker/docs/Relevance%20of%20W's%20phil.%20of%20psychol.%20to%20science.pdf
1. The Curious State Of Psychology: Empirical Expansion but Theoretical Disarray
Psychology is flourishing. It is a hugely popular subject for study. In application it finds its way into all corners of modern life. In empirical research there seems hardly a topic that the many thousands of research psychologists in departments around the world do not investigate. And the development of varied and sophisticated techniques, from statistical modelling and multivariate analyses, to computer-aided content analysis, to nuclear magnetic resonance imaging, is extending its reach into areas inaccessible just a few decades ago. The sheer volume of research output is enormous, with some 200,000 references added annually to the American Psychological Association’s data base.
Yet, paradoxically, psychology is also struggling. Despite the volume of empirical research, psychology is no grand monolith rising on a foundation of common psychological knowledge and theory. The median readership of those 200,000 references is a mere 1. And alongside the rapid expansion of the discipline there is a morass of conflicting theories together with, for the most part, an insouciance about the matter. Indeed, psychology is not so much one discipline as many, a large, disparate and sprawling enterprise, whose subdomains, ranging from cultural studies to brain science, depend on concepts of mind, action and person so various that they are almost unrecognisable as part of the same venture. In Kuhnian terms, psychology is still as described half a century ago, “pre-paradigmatic”(Kuhn, 1962). And as every student of psychology soon realises,there is little cohesion across the theories that are encountered in psychology's different subdomains. Psychology is a veritable boomtown with scores of rambling unconnected buildings, some once fashionable but abandoned, others planned but never built, some large, many small, in different regions isolated from one another.Perhaps a more apposite analogy would be that of a thriving circus.As P. T. Barnum reportedly said of his “greatest show on earth”: "a good circus should have a little bit of something for everyone". Psychology certainly qualifies.
http://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2098&context=hbspapers
Do you agree with Wittgenstein about the state of psychology? Is it that psychology has been conceptually confused and this confusion is yet to be resolved?
OR
Is the idea it'll sort itself out once we develop some sort of comprehensive and dominant school of psychological thought, that all others will become obsolete true?
And if it is conceptually confused, why is it? Is it because we haven't properly addressed the philosophy of the mind? What do you think this means for the future of psychology? Are you optimistic that these barriers can be overcome in time or will psychology and our understanding of ourselves be thoroughly confused and limited for the distant foreseeable future?
Is psychology limited by the philosophical underpinnings of the hard sciences and in need of a new paradigm to explore the subjectivity of human psychology that is possibly beyond the limits of empiricism and rationalism?
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/For%20Ethical%20Politics.pdf#page90
-For Ethical Politics
-For Ethical Politics