Koch, S. (September, 1984). Psychology Versus the Psychological Studies. In Symposium: Psychology in the Future (p. 175). Paper read at XXIII International Congress of Psychology, Acapulco, Mexico.

PSYCHOLOGY VERSUS THE PSYCHOLOGICAL STUDIES

Sigmund Koch

Boston University

USA

During psychology's first century as an "independent, experimental science" significant results have been meagre, despite an immense proliferation of effort modeled upon one or another construal of the methods of natural science. The small band of "pioneers" of the 1880s has expanded into the lavishly institutionalized international work force of over 200,000 members (on one well-informed estimate) of the 1980s. Yet it can be doubted that psychology has produced a single universally accepted law-like statement (much less "theory" however limited) comparable in generality and sharpness even to rudimentary physical laws. Moreover, conceptual, procedural and problematic diversity have increased at a dizzying pace throughout that 100-year period.

The rhetoric of the "new" psychology's "independence from philosophy" has proven to be just that (rhetoric!). It is by now evident to most that psychology has been taking its metatheoretical and procedural marching orders from doctrines within philosophy (especially philosophy of science and epistemology) throughout the century, and many are now concluding that psychology is necessarily the most philosophy-sensitive field in the entire gamut of disciplines that claim empirical status. Many have also begun to suspect that "experiment" has functioned as a deceptive homonym for genuine natural science experiment, even in certain areas (e.g., learning, motivation) in which "experimental" effort has been most assiduously pursued, and that the very concept of experiment is inapplicable in certain complex, history-dependent fields like social psychology. Certain of these views may be minority ones but they are the views of an appreciable minority that is still rapidly growing.

I have sought the conditions of a significant psychology over a forty-year career as an analyst of psychological theory and philosopher of science (and indeed for the first ten of those years as an experimentalist in the field of rat behavior). I have not discovered what those conditions are, but have learned much about what they are not.

For almost twenty years I have argued that psychology has been misconceived, whether as a science or as any kind of coherent discipline devoted to the empirical study of human beings. The 19th-century belief that psychology can be an integral discipline motivated its baptism as an independent science. But both a priori and empirico-historical considerations prove that belief to be autistic.

[Koch continues by quoting and paraphrasing the end of his 1981 article. The additions and omissions are indicative of a darker tone in this 1984 talk than in 1964, 1969, or 1981 -P.B.]:

On the a priori basis nothing so awesome as the total domain comprised by the functioning of all organisms (not to mention persons) could possibly be the subject matter of a coherent discipline. If theoretical integration be the objective, such a condition has never been attained by any large subdivision of inquiry --including physics. When the details of psychology's 100-year history are consulted, the patent tendency is towards theoretical and substantive fractionation (and increasing insularity among the "specialties"), not integration. As for the larger quasi-theoretical "paradigms" of psychology, history shows that the hard knowledge accrued in one generation typically disenfranchises the regnant analytical frameworks of the last --and that any new framework this knowledge is believed to suggest typically survives only until the next.

My position suggests that the non-cohesiveness of psychology finally be acknowledged by replacing "psychology" with some such locution as "the psychological studies." Those "studies," if they are seriously to address the historically constituted objectives of psychological thought, must range over an immense and disorderly spectrum of human activity and experience. If significant knowledge be the desideratum, problems must be approached with humility, methods must be contextual and flexible, and anticipations of synoptic breakthrough held in check. Moreover, the conceptual ordering devices, technical languages ("paradigms," if you prefer) open to the various psychological studies are --like all human modes of cognitive organization-- perspectival, sensibility-dependent relative to the inquirer and often non-commensurable. Such conceptual incommensurabilities will often obtain [[sic. occur, take place?-P.B.]] not only between contentually different psychological studies but between perspectivally different orderings of the "same" domain. Characteristically, psychological events are multiply-determined, ambiguous in their human meaning, polymorphous, contextually environed or embedded in complex and vaguely bounded ways, evanescent and labile in the extreme. This entails some obvious constraints upon the task of the inquirer and limits upon the knowledge he or she can hope to unearth. Different theorists will --relative to their different analytical purposes, predictive or practical aims, perceptual sensitivities, metaphor-forming capacities, preexisting discrimination repertoires-- make asystematically different perceptual cuts upon the same domain. They will identify variables of markedly different grain and meaning contour, selected and linked on different principles of grouping. The cuts, variables, concepts, that is, will in all likelihood establish different universes of discourse, even if loose ones.

Corollary to such considerations, it should be emphasized that "paradigms," theories, models can never prove preemptive or preclusive of alternate organizations. That is so for any field of inquiry, but conspicuously so in relation to the psychological and social studies. The presumption on the part of their promulgators that the gappy, sensibility-dependent, and often arbitrary paradigms of psychology do encapsulate preemptive truths raises a grave issue reflective of a widespread moral bankruptcy within psychology.

Because of the immense range of the psychological studies, different areas of study will not only require different (and contextually apposite) methods, but will bear affinities to different members of the broad groupings of inquiry as historically conceived. Fields like sensory and biological psychology may certainly be regarded as solidly within the the family of the biological and, in some reaches, natural sciences. But psychologists must finally accept the circumstance that extensive and important sectors of psychological study require modes of inquiry rather more like those of the humanities than the sciences. And among these I would include areas traditionally considered "fundamental" --like perception, cognition, motivation, and learning-- as well as such more obviously rarefied fields as social psychology, psychopathology, personology, aesthetics, and the analysis of "creativity" (After Koch, 1981, pp. 268-269).

Much of what I have proposed is grounded on an analysis (which I have pursued for twenty-five years) of definition, which seeks to correct the absurdities of the operationist and logical-positivist treatments, and to reveal the actual complexity of lexical functioning in language. This analysis --which promulgates a perceptual theory of definition-- shows that the psychological studies must, in principle, comprise many language communities speaking parochial and largely incommensurable languages, and thus that "paradigms" however general their intent, must remain local to the participating adepts in given, specialized language communities. But it suggests many other matters which strengthen and develop the present position: e.g., an analysis of the epistemic consequences of such generally neglected matters as leadership within language communities and differential competence in the use of community language; a new view of the problems of community-language or "theory" appraisal; etc.

The analysis suggests, further, that the pattern detection (and disembedding) capacities implicit in the "nice" application of natural and/or scientific language lexicon --and in such processes as the formation of significant metaphor-- are so formidably intricate and subtle as to resist modeling within any conceivable information-processing or artificial-intelligence program. This is not merely a practical constraint but (as I could show given sufficient space) a principled one! It is but one of many grounds on which optimism concerning the prospects of "cognitive science" generating an adequate unifying paradigm for psychology must be sharply qualified.

The future of psychology will of course be anything we make of it. But we cannot make of it that which it cannot be. During our first century as "independent, experimental science," we have come full circle. Let us embrace, then, the modest, particulate, untidy, pluralistic objectives of "the psychological studies." Let us think; not enact imitation science. The human race --which has long suffered the consequences of psychology's redefinition of the person as an object-- would surely benefit from our change of heart.

Bibliography:

Koch, S. (1981). The nature and limits of psychological knowledge: Lessons of a century qua "science." Amer. Psychologist, 36, 257-269.