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Epistemological Diversity in the History of Modern Psychology

Jill G. Morawski
Wesleyan University

Epistemology. Diversity. What better words to complicate a conference from the

very start! They offer an especial challenge when applied to our science of psychology,
which has taken its epistemology to entail an unproblematic given, tacitly assuming that
epistemology is singular, not plural, and certainly not diverse. My aim is simply to locate
some epistemological alternatives in the course of modern psychologys century-long life
and, yes, to engage in what Sigmund Koch referred to as epistemolopathic surgery
(Morawski, 2001). Prior to that task, however, attention needs to be given to our central
organizing terms epistemology and diversity. Rendering these alternatives without
prolixity poses an added challenge to the task. Lets start with relatively clear definitions.
Epistemology: the branch of philosophy that deals with the nature, structure, sources, and
scope of knowledge. The theory of knowledge or, theories of knowledge. Diversity: (in
its current common usage) refers to all of the ways that humans differ from canonical
classifications of difference that include race, gender, age, class, and religion to newer or
less bounded dimensions of language, customs, physical capabilities, needs and so on.

Psychologys Epistemic Choice

What is psychologys epistemic foundation? Perhaps the only uncontestable question
posed today is this one. Adherents and critics alike concur that twentieth century
psychology is an empirical science, deploying exact methods of human perception to
know the world. The world, it is first presumed, exists as a material entity with particular
features. Second, it is determinist or law-governed (thus its causal patterns are universal
and transhistorical) and, third, is best explained by reductionism. The world, then, is
knowable, and the most valid knowledge of that world is acquired by using the scientific
method of controlled, objective, and reliable (repeatable) observation. More specifically,

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modern psychology adheres to a specific brand of positivism that provides a method of
verifying empirical experience: logical deductions, verifiable statements about the world,
and a logical structure of knowledge and discovery. Positivism led us to appreciate and
privilege hypothetico-deductive method, reductionism, quantification, and mathematical
models among other tools. As Ernest Gellner put it,

Reductionism, roughly speaking, is the view that everything in this

world is really something else, and that the something else is always in the
end unedifying. So lucidly formulated, one can see that this is a
luminously true and certain idea. The hope that it could ever bee denied or
refuted is absurd. One day, the Second Law of Thermodynamics may
seem obsolete; but reductionism will stand forever. It is important to
understand why it is so indubitably true. It is rooted ... not in the nature of
things, but in our ideal of explanation. Genuine explanation, not the grunts
which pass for such in "common sense", means subsumption under a
structure or schema made up of neutral, impersonal elements. In this
sense, explanation is always "dehumanising", and inescapably so (1970,
107).
An even more troubling account of reductionism is Sigmund Kochs:
The reduction of man to his present dimension need not be temporary.
When the ability to differentiate among experiences is lost, experience is
lost. When the perception of differential values as they in the quiddities of
experience and action is lost, then value is lost. Nothing says that these
things need return (1970, 130).
Positivism, but not always discernable in logical positivism, has at its historical
origins a commitment to human progress or improvement through science, and this
commitment is wholly compatible with modern psychologys mission. Also in accord
with positivism is psychologys understanding that values such as progress or
improvement (or protection, amelioration, access to health or even diversity) are external
to and, therefore, without effect on, the scientific process.

Gellners half comical depiction of positivism and Kochs totally sober one intimates
several of the problems enumerated by psychologists who have gazed critically at
psychologys master epistemology. For sake of time, I will simply list the central
problems that have been associated with this master epistemology. They can serve as an

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introduction and guide to the alternative epistemologies that have emerged within
psychological science over the last century. The short list:

1. The commitment to quantification as the best means to classify mental life and
behavior and the consequent disregard or rejection of qualitative experience and
related methods for studying the qualitative experience of others. Along with this
commitment is an associated skepticism toward self report or personal
experience (as Gellner describes the denigration of the grunts which pass for
common sense experience).
2. The privileging of reductionism as an explanatory mode and the consequent
neglect of holism, emergence, Gestalt.
3. The exclusivity of the positivist scientific method, taken to be sufficient and, in
fact, the only valid way to know the world of human thought and action.
4. The assumed abstract position of the observer who is taken to stand outside the
observational situation (and with that assumed stance, as Gellner described,
inescapable dehumanizing explanations result).
5. The assumed value-freedom of science understood as the clean separation of
values, beliefs, and ethical commitments from the scientific process.
6.

The resolute search for lawful (universal, trans-historical) features of human

nature and consequent abeyance of dynamic, temporal, and contextual qualities of
nature are considered.

The epistemological diversity of psychology, as much as such diversity exists, has

developed more or less in response to these conditions of psychologys master
epistemology, or what Steven Toulmin and David Leary called its method fetishism
and others have termed psychologys physics envy. In the concise taxonomy that
follows, I take license in selecting among some remarkable epistemic alternatives and
also in associating meta-theories and theorists whose intellectual kinship is marked as
well by notable differences. Omitted, I confess up front, are phenomenological,

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psychoanalytic, and Marxist models that promote an alternative epistemic system (though
not all practitioners of these models advocate an epistemology beyond positivist science).

A. Radical Empiricism
One of those ironies that make life worth living is the fact that William James,
renowned as the champion of a scientific psychology freed from philosophy, also
generated an alternative epistemology. Called radical empiricism, James
modifications of scientific thinking were apparent even in his orthodox Principles of
Psychology (1890) (a textual juxtaposition that one historian called a wild mixture of
many things Reed, 1995,62). Briefly put, James professed the dynamic indeterminism of
the world; the plurality of ways to know that world; the transformation of that world
through human knowledge seeking with its attendant values; and the knowing self as
inescapably present in the production of knowledge about the world. An early statement
brings most of these alternative precepts together: The knower is not simply a mirror
floating with no foot-hold anywhere, and passively reflecting an order that he comes
upon and finds simply existing. The knower is an actor, and co-efficient of the truth on
one side, whilst on the other he registers the truth, which he helps to create. Mental
interests, hypotheses, postulates, so far as they are bases for human action action which
to a great extent transforms the world help to make the truth which they declare
(quoted in Leary, 1995,930). Later in this century, radical empiricism was embraced by a
small group of social psychologists in the 1930s (see Pandora, 199 ) and later yet became
founding premises in ecological psychology (see Heft, 2001). The premises of
pragmatism, transformation, and engagement also are found in action research.

B. Standpoint Epistemologies
In an attempt to synthetically describe a number of epistemic projects, my term
standpoint epistemologies might not be entirely accurate label. What these projects
share is an understanding that psychological knowledge and the scientific method used to
garner that knowledge did not accurately represent the experiences of all human kinds.
They challenged one of psychologys principle conceits, described candidly by G.H.
Ladd as early as 1894 in declaring that the trained psychologists understands not only

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the child, the idiot, the madman, and the hypnotic subject, but also the artist, the scientist,
the statesman, and the thinker, as psychological beings, far better than any of these
classes understand each other, or even themselves (21). Of such privileging, they
suggested that the trained psychologists psychological knowledge reflects his
membership in a particular social group and, as such, comprises only a partial
understanding of human experiences and practices. One exemplar of standpoint
epistemologies is Horace Mann Bond, an African American trained in the 1920s and an
active scholar through the 1950s. In the 1920s Bond wrote a critique of studies of race
differences in intelligence, brilliantly enumerating the many nonscientific assumptions
that white researchers made in the course of intelligence testing research. He called these
the rules of the scientific game then proceeded to break those rules by assuming, for
instance, that if white investigators are able to gain fullest rapport with white children,
the same thing might be true of Negro testers with Negro children (Bond, 1927, 258).
Bond changed, too, the constraints of scientific observation: instead of discounting
environment to begin with, he kept it in mind as a possible factor (257). This critical
parody also questioned psychologys public performance, particularly that vast array of
statistical tables, bewildering vistas of curves and ranges and distributions and other
cabalistic phrases with which we clothe the sacred profession of Psychology from the
view of the profane public (257).
In the 1960s Bonds epistemic stance could be seen in the emerging feminist and
black psychology movements. In one of the key papers of early feminist psychology,
Naomi Weisstein reasoned remarkably like Bond:
In brief, the uselessness of present psychology (and biology) with regard
to women is simply a special case of the general conclusion: one must
understand the social conditions under which women live if one is going
to attempt to explain the behavior of women. And to understand the social
conditions under which women live, one must be cognizant of the social
expectations about women (1968).
Although much of what currently constitutes feminist psychology and black psychology
actually subscribes to the dominant positivist episteme, some research more critically and
creatively addresses the partiality of perspective of positivism. Standpoint both of the
observer and the observed and experience again, of both observer and subject are

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inseparable from the process of knowledge seeking and the very knowledge ultimately
produced. This research at the margins aims toward developing a science of human
kinds not restricted by a singular perspective cloaked as the of objective observer.
Standpoint epistemologies do not taken science to be insulated from values and politics.
Nor do these alternative projects assume that human nature is explicable outside of
culture, history, economics, and material conditions or is reducible to its parts i.e. genes.

C. Postmodernism/Constructivism
Probably best known of the so-called alternative epistemologies is postmodernism.
However, postmodernism is known mostly as a spectacular, way-out philosophy and
not in its serious particulars. Postmodernism is many things, but can be understood to
spring at once from trenchant critiques of western thought (of rationality, scientism,
progress). Another postmodernist perspective posits that modern techno-science and
industrial labor have substantially changed human experiencea chain that intimates the
plastic or protean qualities of human nature (and the products of human nature, including
science). Challenged in postmodernism are the modernist beliefs that there is a singular
foundation of knowledge, a singular route to truth; that our knowledge is cumulative and
progressive; that human experience ultimately stands outside of material conditions and
historical change; and the self of (modern liberal theory) is rational and autonomous
(instead the self is seen as neither autonomous, singular (unified), universal, nor transhistorical).
One fruit of postmodern thinking is constructivism, the epistemic view that we cannot
know the world with certainty. Instead, through active social processes, we construct not
only the world but also ourselves. This construction, despite some constructivist critics
comments, is not freely chosen; it is not an improvisation of whatever one might want
but, instead, a complex process determined, for example, by existing social structures,
rules of knowledge validation, changing worldly conditions, historical understandings of
embodiment, and cultural traditions. Constructivist views are evident in such alternative
psychology ventures as role theory, relational psychology, narrative psychology, and
several recent theories of the self. They can be discerned in a number of post World War

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II psychologists non-conventional theory explorations. For instance, in 1953 William
Bevan described the vital confection of psychological theories.

D. Dynamic Nominalism
The final case of epistemological diversity is not practiced by many psychologists, but
warrants attention because of its affinities with each of the other epistemes presented
here. Dynamic nominalism owes its name to Ian Hacking, a philosopher of science
who shifted his scholarly efforts to studying not how physicists come to know quarks but
how psychologists come to know the psychological. Dynamic nominalism assumes that
human kinds are both found and made in a dynamic, looping process. New kinds of
humans coming into being just as they are observed, calibrated and classified and these
scientific practices, in turn, influence how those kinds subsequently think and act, and so
on.
Dynamic nominalism thus assumes that we engage in constructing ourselves but not
without the press of material, embodied conditions, and that as human kinds are named or
even self-ascribed they act under these new descriptions of their actions and past
experiences. In turn, generate new data for observing, describing, classifying, and
regulating those kinds. This worldview informs us how we, as a particular human kind,
become our statistics and, in turn, how our statistical machinations and indicators,
become us. Human kinds change and change the human sciences. All of the problems of
positivist science are addressed. In addition, dynamic nominalism truly recasts the human
sciences reformist or emancipatory goals of improving the human condition by
indicating how that reforming constituted the very project of the human sciences and reoccurs within the science, not merely in later practical applications of that science.
Although there are no distinct schools of dynamic nominalism within psychology, its
precepts are evident in a variety of projects, including queer psychology, feminist and
race studies, and some intervention research.

Conclusion
This brief exposition of some of psychologys other epistemologies that have been
advanced in the last century is not exhaustive of the experiments in ways of knowing

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human nature. Perhaps more importantly, it does not venture to explain the oddest feature
of psychologys epistemic commitment: the continued dominance of a model of science
that even the so-called more advanced sciences, like physics and the now king of
sciences, biology, do not practice. Uncertainty, indeterminism, pluralism, plasticity, and
complexity are common terms in these advanced sciences, yet such working terms for
understanding nature have found no ready or steady place in mainstream psychological
discourse of predictability, objectivity, determinism, statistical regularity. In our
psychological science, we talk, instead, of risk, predisposition, cognitive structure,
syndrome, disorder, and the like as existing out there in the world as relatively universal,
stable and trans-historical objects; sufficiently knowable through quantitative means (not
qualitative) and without the reports of personal experience; observed, calibrated and
assessed by beings whose subjective experiences and social status are assumed not to
intrude on objective observation. Why, we might ask, do we submit so keenly to this
epistemology well after its transformation in our fellow sciences? What does this
monolithic epistemology give us? What does it deny us?

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