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Psychological phenomena mirror9/1/2023 The most conspicuous example of mental substance today consists of the so-called cognitive processes as information processing.Ĭognitive processes are mental activities postulated by cognitive psychology as top-down and bottom-up, cognitive routines, change-of-task modules, and many others, some of which are already popular, such as central executive and working memory. Even if behavior is an indispensable reference, a basic dualism still persists between two substances: a mental, incorporeal, unobservable, hypothetical, latent and another behavioral, material, topographical, observable. Turning psychological realities into physicochemical realities would also be a problem of reductionism and the consequent mereological fallacy of explaining what the whole does through one of its parts (Bennett and Hacker 2003) or the double-subject fallacy “me” and “my brain” (Mudrik and Maoz 2014). But this would only pose new questions, beginning with the problem of their connection, which Descartes believed to already have resolved with the pineal gland. It might be said that mental processes associated with neural processes may be observable depending on whether evermore refined technologies are available. While behavior refers to observable, factual activities in the outside world, mental processes refer to cognitive or neurocognitive activities that occur in the subject’s interior, in his mind, cognitive system or brain (Schacter et al. 2) means at least an inner-outer dichotomy. The definition of psychology as the “scientific study of the behavior of individuals and their mental processes” (American Psychological Association 2016 Gerrig 2014, p. The Cartesian dualism does not find better version than in “the view of mind like software running on a physical hardware” (Everett 2016, p. Dualistic Ontology: Mental Processes and Behavior as Inner/Outer DichotomyĮven when a duality does not imply dualism, in the case of the mind and behavior in the definition of psychology, it entails traditional dualism no matter how much it is dressed in new terms and metaphors. Anyone who rejects philosophy is himself unconsciously practicing a philosophy" (Jaspers 1954/2003, p. The question is only whether is good or bad, muddled or clear. "There is no escape from philosophy-Jaspers says. The supposed aseptic methods of empirical research as the typical distinction between “dependent / independent variables” have their implicit metaphysics beginning with the axiomatic acceptance of linear causality (Valsiner and Brinkmann 2016). Adoption of the positivist scientific method of the natural sciences did not free it from philosophical problems, as already warned by Wundt (Lamiell 2013). This refers to the metaphysics implicit in ontological and epistemological philosophical assumptions which still rule in psychology. The scientific method itself may constitute an “epistemological obstacle” in the sense of the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, as a trap for scientific knowledge and concepts set by ‘thought-habits’ (Bachelard 1938/2002), in this case derived from routine teaching of the “method” as “something in itself” (Costa and Shimp 2011 Machado and Silva 2007). But the natural scientific method adopted by the mainstream psychology (Toomela 2007), far from being exempt and in itself a guarantee of better science, structures our way of understanding and studying psychological subjects, for example, in a more analytical than holistic manner, mechanist than contextual, causal than mutualist, etc. One obstacle is already the implicit dual reasoning that may be influencing psychological research, as much as it believes itself to be well-fortified by the natural scientific method. However, psychology as a natural science for the sake of the positivist scientific method, which although up to now has represented progress, may have become a limitation if not an obstacle. 2).Īdoption of the natural scientific method contributed to the prestige of psychology as a science. say, “no practice of inquiry is ruled out a priori multiple goals of inquiry are rendered plausible and multiple pathways may claim a situated legitimacy” (Gergen et al. Both assume an open pluralistic turn toward the Psyche as “complex, subjective, meaningful, and mysterious” (Valsiner et al. 2015) and the other in the European tradition with The Yokohama Manifesto for a Psychology as the Science of Human Being (Valsiner et al. Two important movements have arisen independently, one in the heart of the American Psychological Association itself with Division 5 recently renamed Quantitative and Qualitative Methods, including the Society for Qualitative Inquiry in Psychology and the Journal of Qualitative Psychology (Gergen et al. A certain spirit of the times seems to require a review of psychology as a science of the mind and behavior as most established definition (American Psychological Association 2016 Gerrig 2014 Schacter et al.
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