Psychology’s Fragmentation and Neglect of Foundational Assumptions: An Interview With Fiona J. Hibberd

Europe's Journal of Psychology, 2017, Vol. 13(2), 366–374, doi:10.5964/ejop.v13i2.1403 Published (VoR): 2017-05-31. *Corresponding author at: Department of Psychology, Humanities and Social Sciences Building (E21), University of Macau, Avenida da Universidade, Taipa, Macau S.A.R., China. E-mail: gozli@umac.mo This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

philosophy in psychology, why that role is often neglected, and the consequences of such neglect. The result is what I hope to be an invitation to Hibberd's work and, more generally, to a more philosophically aware Psychology.
Davood Gozli: Thank you for agreeing to this exchange, Dr. Hibberd.

To begin with a general question, what is philosophical psychology?
And is philosophical psychology simply a sub-discipline of Psychology? Fiona Hibberd: My view is that philosophical psychology is a subdiscipline in the trivial sense that we make disciplinary distinctions, in part, for social and institutional reasons. But it is not a sub-discipline in the substantial sense that it involves examining the more general approaches that embrace either all of Psychology or large areas of it.
Its aim is to resolve issues that cannot be resolved empirically and to provide psychologists with the best material for, or approaches to, their empirical work. Ideally, it will go some way to ensuring (i) that a theory is a conceptually robust candidate for explanation, (ii) that research hypotheses derived from a theory will not be asking the wrong kind of question, (iii) that the empirical testing of a theory or model is not futile, in that the data collected will not be irrelevant, (iv) that results are interpreted coherently, and (v) that the theoretical implications of empirical findings are not misconstrued. This means evaluating the conceptual or philosophical presuppositions involved in psychology's research methods, in its theories and models, and in the practice of psychology, through conceptual testing. Dan Robinson (1985) describes this type of research as providing "a conceptual corrective".
Davood Gozli: Your description clarifies the pervasive role of philosophy in empirical research, and yet many researchers (myself included) tend to neglect philosophical issues. In your view, what enables the detachment of empirical psychology from philosophy? What hides the importance of philosophy in psychology?
Fiona Hibberd: I think it is, for many, a case of not knowing what you don't know. Psychology's formative years as an academic discipline (let's say roughly  were marked by the assumption that in pursuing psychology as a science, philosophy generally and metaphysics in particular could be left behind. To a very great extent that view persists. And so generations of graduating students are none the wiser about the sense in which philosophy, and logic in particular, is in psychology and are, therefore, none the wiser about the importance of conceptual testing to psychology. Those that go on to gain a higher degree and become academics themselves naturally perpetuate its omission from the curriculum. It's also easy for psychologists to neglect philosophy because they are prone to psychologism, in this case fusing what is rational to believe with the science of implication, aka logic; they are prone to psychologize that which isn't psychological. Fiona Hibberd: All working scientists are philosophical realists at heart. They investigate various kinds of systems, they take these systems to exist or occur independently of anyone's thinking or knowing about them, and they assume that it's possible to come to know something about those systems, i.e., objective knowledge is possible. All of this presupposes realism. In fact, it presupposes a particular set of realist metaphysical assumptions. However, when you look at what research psychologists actually do and say, their philosophical commitments are often at odds with their realism as working scientists. On certain issues, some are influenced by constructionist themes, whereas others within mainstream psychology allow positivist-empiricist ideas to hold sway. (This is one illustration of the discipline's fragmentation.) Yet, neither constructionism nor positivismempiricism is a realist philosophy. Each has features that cohere with realism but the central tenets of both are anti-realist (Hibberd, 2005). This anti-realism manifests in the research practices and scientific output of both of both sides where certain presuppositions, although often intuitive and widely sanctioned, involve errors of logic.
When, for example, measurement is treated as the task of assigning numerals to the variables of interest, or when the neo-Cartesian assumption that cognition is internal to the brain pervades their research, psychologists contradict the metaphysical assumptions that they are otherwise committed to. As a result they undermine that which they are concerned to achieve (Hibberd & Petocz, 2017).

Davood Gozli: Can you explain the link between one of these examples and a realist metaphysics?
Fiona Hibberd: Scientific psychologists have no doubt that they can discover various aspects of the psychological systems that are of interest to them. This exemplifies their commitment to realism because a central tenet of realism is that reality is not constituted, even partially, by researchers or their activities-reality exists independently of them.
So, these psychologists recognize that coming to know something about a psychological system or sub-system is a cognitive achievement -that to know something about what's real is to be connected cognitively to some aspect of it. This means that they recognise that (i) connections, aka relations, are universal, and (ii) the items connected or related (the researcher and whatever it is that the researcher has discovered) are logically independent of one another. However, if you are also committed to the assumption that cognition is internal to the brain and involves some kind of internal psycho-semantic representation system, you are at the same time rejecting (ii).
You are mistakenly treating a cognitive relation between an organism (specifically, the brain connected to its sensory apparatus) and its environment (everything external to the brain and its sensory apparatus) as a constituent of one of the items standing in that relation (viz., the brain). So, you uphold (ii) and you reject (ii) at the same time.
Davood Gozli: And yet the broad consensus is that experimental psychology is currently thriving without considering philosophical issues.

Fiona Hibberd:
Yes, it's certainly possible for a science to thrive without consciously considering philosophical issues. This would simply require scientific research to be consistent with the realism of working scientists. But we know that alongside human cognitive achievement there is also human fallibility. There are two kinds of error that any scientist can make: empirical and logical-conceptual. Resolving logical-conceptual errors just for their legitimate use. In short, it can enhance the discipline's prospects of generating theories and hypotheses that are coherent and genuinely empirical, and therefore, ready to be tested empirically. Second, I don't think we should assume that all experimental psychology is thriving. There is evidence to the contrary (e.g., Bickhard, 1992;Gigerenzer, 2009;Kagan, 2012;Kukla, 1989;Machado & Silva, 2007;Michell, 1999;Reicher, 2011;Robinson, 2000;Tolman, 1992;Toomela & Valsiner, 2010). This evidence suggests a discipline out of kilter where, across many of its areas, empirical expansion has occurred at the cost of theoretical maturity and conceptual rigor. But mainstream psychology, its gatekeepers in particular, care not to consider this evidence and so perpetuate the status quo. Your instructor tacitly categorized the methods as "scientific" and "not scientific" and was giving expression to the scientism and pragmatism that pervades mainstream Psychology. To overcome the latter, I think we have to keep making the point that not all research questions, problems, or issues in psychology are empirical, which means that they cannot all be answered or resolved through observation and data analysis. But these questions are still scientific in that they need to be resolved because they inform the empirical research process from beginning to end. So, a genuinely rigorous scientific, but not scientistic, discipline will recognize the proper range and diversity of research activities just because not all types of questions or problems are of the same kind. Unfortunately, in certain areas of psychology, scientism is very much alive. What counts as 'science' is tied to empirical research only, and then a line of demarcation is drawn between empirical research and the logical-conceptual, as if the two types of inquiry were not intimately related. The schism wasn't always so pronounced in Europe. A 1934 article published in The Psychological Bulletin exemplifies this and makes for fascinating reading. It revealed substantial theoretical emphases among German psychologists and the absence of scientism (Watson, 1934).
Davood Gozli: So, in effect, the fragmentation gives psychologists a license to pursue empirical projects under mutually incompatible metaphysical systems. Today it is possible to be, as you mentioned, a neo-Cartesian as much as it is possible to be a neo-behaviourist. One can even oscillate between the two within a single research career, which is what Albert Balz (1936) described as "the metaphysical infidelities of modern psychology". Fiona Hibberd: It is surely a mistake to try and estimate the quantity of an attribute if the attribute is not quantitative, i.e., if it is without quantitative structure. In Psychology, whether a particular psychological attribute has quantitative structure is never tested. It is simply assumed from the outset that it is quantitative. Yet, the evidence suggests that no psychological attribute is quantitative (e.g., Michell, 2011Michell, , 2012. Now this is evidence that the very great majority would not want to consider, even though it raises ethical questions. Anyway, the importance of qualitative research in Psychology cannot be overstated, and its role is clearly evident in a realist metaphysical system which, I argue, inheres in reality (Hibberd, 2014a). This makes the best justification for qualitative research ontological, not ideological and not one that comes out of favouring social constructionism and an overly simplified rejection of positivism. It requires psychologists to investigate the substantive character of the attributes that they aspire to measure and not assume a priori that these attributes are quantitative.
Davood Gozli: In your writing (e.g., Hibberd, 2009Hibberd, , 2010Hibberd, , 2014a prescriptive-as a kind of general science where certain logical principles are factual in the sense that they are real, and empirical in the sense that we experience them. This has far-reaching implications because many think either that logic is nothing more than language or semantics, or that logic is something applied to empirical content, instead of being part of it. Not unrelatedly, Anderson defended generality. This is an Please tell us about what motivated this paper.

Fiona Hibberd:
I had been reading about psychology's conceptual disarray and fragmentation and thought that, properly understood, metaphysics and its implications, go a long way in addressing this. I thought it was a risky project if only because the word 'metaphysics' has been a pejorative in psychology for so long (there's no disunity on that point!) but I was asked by the then editor of JTPP to present my philosophical position for a special issue. So that was an opportunity to argue that psychology's ongoing neglect of metaphysics is a mistake, to explain why metaphysics is unavoidable in both the research and practice of psychology, and to try and articulate that metaphysics as the foundations of a process psychology.
Davood Gozli: By the term process psychology, are you referring to a particular form of psychology (one of many possible forms) or are you highlighting a philosophical standpoint that regards all psychology as process psychology (similar to, e.g., how the term embodied cognition is not meant to distinguish itself from disembodied cognition, but to highlight a standpoint regarding the nature of cognition).

Fiona Hibberd:
The latter. It's a metaphysical thesis (following Heraclitus, Plato, Leibniz, Hegel, Peirce, James and others) recognizing that all situations or states of affairs are in process, and so no area of reality can be excluded, not psychology, not geology, nor any other. By 'process', I mean a linked or integrated sequence of changes from one situation to another. Things change in certain respects and at very different rates. As Gibson (1979) noted, persistence or constancy is just change at a very slow rate, but change over time is a ubiquitous feature of reality.
Davood Gozli: As my final question, I want to ask you for some recommended readings. For students who are interested in philosophical psychology, a list of readings that would give us a starting point into the subject would be very useful. What would you include in such a list?

Funding
Davood Gozli is currently supported by a Start-up Research Grants (SRG2016-77-FSS) from University of Macau.