Psychologic or Psychological Esperanto

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Abstract

In the last 25 years, there has been a growing body of work in the social sciences that has noticed, given voice to, and expanded on the severe epistemological crisis in the field (see Rabinow & Sullivan, 1979, for an early view; Gergen, 1985, for a conceptual framework; Sampson, 1991, for a current summary). The truth claims of a universal, transhistorical human science have been called into question by a number of hermeneuticists and social constructionists. Their critique is founded on the argument that there is no transcendent, ahistorical realm of truth: All research strategies, collected data, data treatment techniques, and findings are embedded in the cultural frameworks of their time and place and are therefore cultural artifacts, not the methods and products of an objective, universal truth process. Although these critics have differences of opinion, they all object to the fundamental metaphysic underlying psychology's normative research agenda. Jan Smedslund has been an important contributor to this constructionist critique. I have learned from and respected him over the years and cited him on numerous occasions (see especially Cushman, 1991). I think his ideas deserve a more thorough examination from, and a more prominent place within, the field. His emphasis on language and culture in the research setting in particular (featured in the first few pages of his article) has been an important contribution. His proposed psychologic (PL) demonstrates how research could be conducted if empiricists would give up their reliance on normative experimental methodology. PL, depending as it does on self-observations, everyday cultural practices, and Western logic, has no need for the experimental method that Smedslund has criticized so clearly. In this way, PL is a helpful addition to the constructionist critique. However, he appears to attribute the failure of the normative agenda solely to a lack of precise definitions and the application of logic, rather than to conceptual problems of the correspondence theory of truth (Stigliano, 1990) and the modern concept of temporality (Faulconer & Williams, 1985). By labeling psychology's normative agenda pseudoempirism, Smedslund implies that a type of "pure" or "real" empiricism (complete with its traditional uncontested, universal, atemporal truth claims) can be achieved and, indeed, that his PL is just such an achievement. As a result, ultimately, the normative agenda escapes-scathed and battered, but not undone. In the process of developing his critique, Smedslund has come to rely exclusively on the use of logic. His work is thus in danger of being gradually transformed into an attempt to save empiricism from the very constructionist critique to which he has contributed. Perhaps I should have anticipated this turn, considering that he has not thoroughly emphasized psychology's political and historical situatedness in any of the articles with which I am familiar. Because he does not discuss the political function of psychology's normative research agenda or question psychology's normative concept of temporality, Smedslund is left with logic as his lone analytic tool. And decontextualized logic, I fear, without a historical and ontological perspective, will ultimately be inadequate in furthering the constructionist critique.