Alternative assumptions and principles

Abstract

It is well known that the psychological establishment has no taste for debates about problems of a fundamental theoretical nature of the kind, which have proven so essential for the founding and progress of the natural sciences. With a few exceptions, there has been no debate among psychologists and little reflection as to whether the models and conceptual schemes used to account for psychological phenomena and properties are indeed adequate, or as to whether the assumptions about the nature of these phenomena and properties, on which the models and schemes are based, are indeed tenable. Just as unfortunate, there has been little understanding of the necessity of the to-ing and fro-ing between theoretical considerations and interpretation of data from empirical work, which has been so crucial for the progress made within the natural sciences.¹ It is also well know that academic psychology, in order to be accepted as a science on a par with the natural sciences, has attempted to take over the models, assumption and principles from those sciences to describe and explain phenomena of a psychological nature—thereby violating what since Galileo has been considered as criteria for an area of study to attain the status of a science. To understand what is needed for psychology to be a cumulative empirical science on a par with the natural sciences and biology, and yet a science which fundamentally differs from those other sciences, we shall have to turn to those criteria, and to how they originated.