Extract From: Koch, S. (1981). The nature and limits of psychological knowledge: Lessons of a century qua "science." Amer. Psychologist, 36, 257-269.
The Nature and Limits of Psychological Knowledge: Lessons of a Century qua "Science."*
Sigmund Koch
ABSTRACT: This article examines certain constraints on the character of the knowledge claims made by the psychology of the past century, as well as some "in principle" constraints. A syndrome of "ameaningful thinking" is seen to underlie much of modern scholarship, especially the inquiring practices of the psychological sciences. Ameaningful thought regards knowledge as an almost automatic result of a self-corrective rule structure, a fail-proof heuristic, a methodology -rather than of discovery. In consequence, much of psychological history can be seen as a form of scientistic role playing which, however sophisticated, entails the trivialization, and even evasion, of significant problems. The article emphasizes the deeper human context of the ameaning syndrome, which is seen to lie in the "antinomal" structure of human experience: the circumstance -described by Kant in his analysis of those "antinomies of pure reason" that disenfranchise dogmatic metaphysics, but not generalized by him- that there is a class of questions which have intense meaning to all human beings but which "transcend the competence of human reason." The pervasiveness of such meaningful yet (strictly) undecidable issues in experience leads, in both informal and disciplinary contexts, to forms of cognitive denial that fuel such ameaningful tendencies as the belief in the coextensionality of the undecidable and the meaningless, and the need to exorcize uncertainty by ensconcing inquiry in a spurious "systematicity." Against a background of such considerations, the article considers whether, after the century-long march of psychology under the banner of "independent, experimental science," the field actually is (a) independent and (b) a science.
Recently I received a communication from APA, dated July 30, 1979, the first paragraph of which ran as follows:
As you may know, there is considerable interest and enthusiasm for a recommendation to the APA Council of Representatives to establish a "Psychology Defense Fund." Supported by voluntary contributions of individual psychologists, State Associations, APA Divisions and others, the Fund would
"... provide funding for legislative and legal activities which focus on the definition, regulation and recognition of psychology as a science and profession, operating in the interest of promoting pubic welfare." -Board of Directors Draft Minutes June 14-15, 1979
The nature and limits of psychological knowledge are so luminously characterized by this quotation that I am tempted to conclude at this point. I hasten to add, only tempted! Throughout the 19th century (and indeed, before) an independent scientific psychology was vigorously invited. Toward the end of that century (in 1879, according to the myth occasioning the current centennial celebration) an independent, scientific psychology was institutionalized in the form of a laboratory and further consolidated some two years later by the founding of the first journal for the "new" psychology which, somewhat ironically, was entitled Philosophische Studien. And, as we are certainly aware, over the next 100 years an "independent, scientific psychology" has been enthusiastically enacted by a burgeoning work force that by now constitutes one of the largest groupings within contemporary scholarship. But the frenetic activity of the past 100 years has apparently left the issue in doubt. We are now impelled to achieve scientific legitimacy by legislation; moreover, we will not pay for any old act of Congress but only for one that burns in the message that we are "operating in the interest of promoting public welfare."
I am not a historian. But I have lived through [p. 258] a 40-year swath of psychological history from the vantage of a participant-observer whose arrogant construal of his calling has been to explore the prospects and conditions for an significant psychology. At some point near mid-career, I began to feel that my calling had rendered me a human and scholarly cipher in all respects save one: I had developed an uncanny connoisseurship concerning the fine structure and dynamics of pseudoinquiry, the seamy vicissitudes of the phony scholarship that has characterized so much of the "activity" in my own field, and indeed others, in this century. I became, in fact, the modest founder of a discipline given to the study of misfirings of the scholarly and creative impulse: the field soon to be widely known as the science of "cognitive pathology," the metatheory of which is "epistemopathologistics."
Perhaps because of the unavailability of a "defense fund," I have been somewhat secretive about this new enterprise -which does have a large bearing on "public welfare." But two years ago, in the course of an intellectual autobiography I had been asked to present to Divisions 24 and 26, I permitted a brief glimpse of the noble architecture of this discipline. The glimpse apparently piqued curiosity, for after the talk representatives of the same divisions asked whether I would consider giving an "advanced course" in the new discipline on another occasion. That occasion has arrived. What could be a more appropriate one than the present centennial?
I shall, of course, have space only for a précis of the advanced course. But I hope to be able to develop the powerful theoretical structure of this new discipline sufficiently to exhibit certain constraints on the character of the knowledge claims made by the psychology of the past century, as well as some constraints on the character of psychological knowledge in principle. After that, I hope to close with a brief confrontation of the theme of the riotous celebratory activities at this convention. I shall ask whether, after the century-long march of psychology under the banner of "independent, experimental science," the field actually is (a) independent and (b) a science.
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*This article was originally the presidential address to the Divisions of General Psychology and of Philosophical Psychology at the meeting of the American Psychological Association, New York, September 3, 1979.