From early in this century to the present day, psychology has been characterized by a number of polarities reflecting various conflicts and tensions in the field. These may be variously described as experimental versus clinical, biological reductionism versus humanism, basic research versus applied, scientific versus professional, mentalism versus behaviorism. By the late 1950's voices expressing deep dissatisfaction with the discipline appeared. Most notable was the appearance at this time of the monumental Psychology: A Study of a Science, edited by Sigmund Kock. In that work, one eminent psychologist after another, after many years -- or even a lifetime of research -- admitted to strong doubts about what had been achieved, and some suggested that our most basic assumptions had to be questioned.
Koch's diagnosis was incisive. He argued that psychology was unique insofar as "its institutionalization preceded its content and its methods preceded its problem's.... The 'scientism' that many see and decry in recent psychology was thus with it from the start... From its earliest days of the experimental pioneers, man's stipulation that psychology be adequate to science outweighed his commitment that it be adequate to man" (Vol. p. 783). And even more crucially, Koch went on to point out that "(psychology) still bases its understanding of vital questions of method on an extrinsic philosophy of science which (in some areas) is twenty years or more out of date" (p. 788).
More recently, we find Koch in 1969, Taylor in 1973 and Toulmin in 1978 observing (here in Taylor's words) that "psychology is a vast and ramified discipline" containing "many mansions," yet "intellectually divided against itself" (Taylor, 1973). Moreover, the "busy research" of the past dozen years or so has seen the fragmentation of psychology into "dozens of highly specialized, and largely non-interacting subdisciplines" (Toulmin, 1978). Toulmin attributed this, rightly on our view, to the still dominating neo-positivist theory of the behavioral sciences that succeeded the old positivism of the 1930's and 1940's.
But if as these writers have argued, the root issue remains the very conception of science, of its methods, tasks and limits, then the time may be ripe for a resolution. In the decades since the publication of Psychology: A Study of a Science, there has been, indeed, a virtual Copernican Revolution in the philosophy of science, a radical change that has profound implications for the human sciences. Moreover, currently with this "revolution" there has been an extraordinary convergence on a new heuristic for the human sciences. This heuristic, converging from a wide variety of disparate quarters, from continental hermeneutics, post-Wittgensteinian action-theory and philosophy of mind, phenomenology, structuralism and neo-Marxism, is not merely consistent with the new philosophy of science, but as we shall argue, it can be seen to be grounded in the same fundamental insights (Bhaskar 1975, 1979a).
What follows, then, is an attempt to construct and justify a topology for psychology which seems to be implied by the foregoing developments. This topology and its justification resolves, we believe, many of the tensions and conflicts which have plagued modern psychology from almost its beginnings. But, and this must be emphasized, what we suggest is no mere tolerant ecumenicism. The topology is integrative and results from premises regarding the nature of science and the world as we know it.
If we allow for some arbitrariness and overlapping, what Scheffler (1967) called "the standard view of science" has been undermined from two sides. The more familiar critique is associated, with differences, of course, with Toulmin (1953, 1961, 1972), Feyerabend (1962, 1970, 1975), especially Thomas Kuhn (1962), Michael Polanyi (1964, 1967) and many others. It attacks the "foundationist" epistemology of the standard view and its unhistorical notions about scientific change and development (Brown, 1977). This critique shattered the "myth of the given," entirely recast the problem of meaning and confirmation in science and powerfully argued that science was a social activity. All this was salutary -- as far as it went; but as its critics saw, the "paradigm" account of science precipitously courted irrationalism and failed to make clear how science was to be distinguished from non-science (Lakatos and Musgrave, 1970). The dominating neo-positivist view of science could not thus be entirely exorcized.
Concurrent with this strand, there was, however, another strand, sometimes overlapping and, on the present view, at least as important. It can be associated with Michael Scriven (1956, 1962, 1964), Norwood Hanson and with an effort of great importance by Roy Bhaskar (1975, second edition, 1978).[1] This aspect of the critique of the standard view emphasizes the stratification of science and of the world and develops a conception of theory, experiment and explanation which is far more coincident with the practice of science than could be sustained by the standard view. Moreover it supplements the former strand by making it clear that the social conception of science and the view of fallibilism which attends it, presupposes a view of the world as real, stratified and differentiated.
Since this part of the new theory of science is much less familiar, it will be necessary here to indicate, if all too briefly, its main features.
Perhaps most fundamental, the new conception rejects the orthodox assumption that "the world is so constituted that there are descriptions such that for every event, the simple formula, 'whenever this, than that' applies" (Bhaskar, 1975). This regulative ideal, Laplacean in origin, in turn supports the thesis, derived from Hume, that scientific laws are statements of constant conjunctions between events. This view was developed by Machean theories at the turn of the century and systematically elaborated in later logical empiricist philosophy of science. By saying that science seeks knowledge of laws, it was easily argued (or usually, assumed) that science seeks to explain events by subsuming them under laws, or, what amounts to the same thing, by identifying the necessary and sufficient antecedents of the event to be explained.
But for the new view of science, there may be no description such that for some events the formula, "whenever this, than that" applies. On this view, the world is radically open. The identifying marks of openness are many:
Openness invalidates the standard view, but it does not make science impossible. It means rather that science must aim at something other than laws construed as constant conjunctions of events. As Bhaskar writes, natural science aims at producing knowledge of "real structures which endure and operate independently of our knowledge, our experience and the conditions which allow access to them" (Bhaskar, 1975). On this conception, science aims at discovering laws, but scientific laws are not about events, but about the causal powers of those structures which exist and operate in the world.
Openness involves also the stratification of the world. This means that structures way be part of structures at different levels and that, in turn, because they are complexly related to other complexes, they interact in countless ways, sometimes manifesting themselves in patterns, sometimes manifesting themselves in surprising ways and sometimes not manifesting themselves at all. A simple example may be helpful here.
Ordinary table salt usually dissolves in ordinary water. But ordinary water is not just H2O and table salt is not just NaCl -- the purest of it contains other "things." But at another level, each are complexes of elements -- of hydrogen, oxygen, etc., and at still another level, each of these are complexes, of electrons, neutrons, quarks. The discovery of those novel "things" -- the theoretical things of science, of their causal properties and their causal relations both at the same level and at higher and lower levels is the product of theoretical and experimental work in exactly the sense that science demands the construction of confirmable explanatory theories about such structures and structured processes (Hanson, 1958; Harre, 1970).[2] Thus we have theories about the structure and properties of the atom and going from micro-structure to macro-structure, theories about the structure of space and time.
The problem of achieving knowledge of scientific laws, so construed, allows us to see also the significance and rationale of experiment in science. In the new view, but not the old, the structures and mechanisms which operate in the world never do so under conditions of closure. That is, the formula, "whenever this, then that" applies only in the exceptional case, when the structure (or system) is either isolated from external influences (of other structures, systems, processes, or when those influences are either insignificant (relatively) or (relatively) constant, as e.g., in astronomy.
It is for this reason that science requires experiment. In an experiment, led by our theory of the relevant structures and their causal properties, we intervene precisely to create a partial closure and thus to get access to those enduring mechanisms which if our theories are correct, are constitutive of the world and which operate, willy-nilly, in the world. We experiment because in the everyday world, there are but patterns and probabilities and not uniformities and constant conjunctions, precisely because the laws of nature apply and operate even in the absence of experimental closure.
More generally, the dominating theory of science cannot sustain the distinction, implicit in the practices of the sciences, between the discovery of the structures of nature and the test of our theories about them) and the application of these discoveries to explain, predict and diagnose those particulars in our world which are of interest to us.
Experiment presupposes our ability to artificially establish closure (or to take advantage of partial closures where we can find them), but the explanation and prediction of most events must recognize that the particulars of the world -- continents and their movements, the collapse of a bridge, the predicted storm and the cancerous growth in an organ -- are compounds operating in open systems, that events are historical conjunctures of structured processes, that many different mechanisms, of very different kinds are perpetually combining to produce the effects of the changing world of experience.
The standard view tempts us to forget this, perhaps because we take celestial mechanics or experimental physics as the paradigm. In these domains, the relevant astronomical or laboratory events of interest to us, events predicted by theory, do occur under conditions of relative closure. It thus seems that these events are the result of the manifestations of single laws discovered by a single science. But we cannot generalize on this experience and expect that everything of interest to us can be so explained. Indeed, if we look instead at geology, paleontology, entomology, evolutionary biology or meterology, we are less likely to be misled. These too are sciences but each recognizes that the particulars and events of their concern require a range of disparate data along with an understanding of laws from many domains of inquiry. For example, geology may have its "Platectonic Theory" but this theory is really a mass of data about the changing conditions of rocks and water combined with a host of non-geological laws pertaining to the mechanical and thermodynamic properties of solid and liquid masses, to which is further added, generalizations and hypotheses which are less confidently held.[3] Of course, geological explanations -- not to mention predictions -- of particular events, e.g., the eruption of St. Helena, are tentative exactly because the particulars of concern are open-systemic compounds operating in an open world.
It will be appropriate here to notice one crucial implication of the foregoing regarding psychology. Surely persons are complex particulars and surely the events and phenomena of interest to psychology are open-systemic. But if so, it is surely a vain hope to suppose that individual behaviors can be explained by anything which can usefully be described as the constantly conjoined antecedent of behavior. But let us emphasize: this has very little to do with the special powers which distinguish persons as agents from lower animals -- or indeed, from hurricanes!
It may be that every psychologist has always known this, however persistent has been the hope (fear, on the part of some psychologists) that psychology could, in principle, explain behavior by identifying (under some description) its lawfully conjoined antecedents. Consider here the exactly appropriate remarks by Campbell and Misanin:
Few, if any psychologists now believe that those conditions once labelled basic drives, such as hunger, thirst, sex, and material behavior, are predominately governed by some common underlying generalized drive state, even if there is some activating or energizing state common to many basic drives, it is clear that the specific behaviors elicited by those drives are controlled by a complex of inter-actions among environmental stimuli, hormonal states, physiological imbalance, previous experience, etc. and that the basic drive concept is of little value in unravelling these complexities (Campbell and Misanin, 1969, our emphasis).
The point here is precisely that specific behaviors -- like most events in the world -- cannot be explained as the simple manifestation of some single law. As Bhaskar writes:
Clockwork soldiers and robots do not more nearly observe the laws of mechanics than real people. Rather, their peculiarity stems from the fact that if wound up and left alone their intrinsic structures ensures that for each set of antecedent conditions only one result is possible. But outside the domain of closure the laws of mechanics are, as Anscombe has put it, 'rather like the rules of chess; the play is seldom determined, though nobody breaks the rules" (Bhaskar, 1975).
Indeed, the acts of persons are open-systemic events in which a wide variety of systems and structures are involved. Systems which are physical, biological, psychological and, as we shall argue, sociological as well. As Bhaskar and Ansconbe have it, outside the domain of closure, the laws of these systems are like the rules of chess: The playing of the game is not a foregone conclusion, but nobody breaks the rules.
On the other hand, rejection of a misguided ideal for psychology does not make psycchology as a science impossible. On the contrary, once we are clearer about the nature of the sciences, we can see that psychology is autonomous, and that it is best construed as a family of related sciences with different tasks and different methodologies. To say that psychology is autonomous implies that there is an important difference between the subject-matters of psychological and physical sciences.[4] It is to this question to which we now turn.