Realism and Psychological Science

By David J. F. Maree

The book provides an argument why realism is a viable metatheoretical framework for psychological science.  By looking at some variations of realism such as scientific realism, critical realism, situational realism and Ferraris’ new realism, a realist view of science is outlined that can feature as a metatheory for psychological science. Realism is a necessary correction for the mythical image of science responsible for and maintained by a number of dichotomies and polarities in psychology. Thus, the quantitative-qualitative dichotomy, scientist-practitioner polarity and positivist-constructionist opposition feed off and maintains a mythic image of science on levels of practice, methods and metatheory. Realism makes a clear distinction between ontology and epistemic access to reality, the latter which easily fits with softer versions of constructionism, and the former which grounds science in resistance and possibility, loosely translated as criticism. By taking science as a critical activity an issue such as the quantitative imperative looses its defining force as a hallmark of science - it provides epistemic access to certain parts of reality. In addition, essentially critical activities characteristic of various qualitative approaches may be welcomed as proper science. Academics, professionals and researchers in psychology would find value in situating their scholarly work in a realist metatheory avoiding the pitfalls of traditional methodologies and theories.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Springer
• Release date: Jun 2, 2020
• ISBN: 9783030451431

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David J. F. Maree

Realism and Psychological Science

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David J. F. Maree

Department of Psychology, University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa

ISBN 978-3-030-45142-4e-ISBN 978-3-030-45143-1

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45143-1

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020

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To Leo David

Contents

1 Introduction 1

References 11

2 The Methodological Division:​ Quantitative and Qualitative Methods 13

Introduction 13

Clarifying the Paradigm Concept 15

Origin of the Qualitative Approach 21

Constructing the Qualitative Approach 24

Mixed Methods 35

Conclusion 38

References 40

3 The Applicative Split:​ The Science-Practitioner Model of Training and Practice 43

Introduction 43

The Boulder Model and Beyond 43

Struggle for Integration 45

Theory and Practice 47

Empirical Evidence and Positivism 49

References 50

4 The Metatheoretical Opposition:​ Positivism and Constructionism 55

Introduction 55

Positivism, Empiricism and Its Ontology 56

Classical Empiricism 57

Logical Positivism 58

Kuhn’s Postpositivism 65

Social Constructionism and Its Roots in Idealism 67

Introduction 67

Modernist Assumptions 69

The Constructionist Image of Science 73

Human Nature Militating Against Positivism 80

Critical Resistance 85

References 90

5 Realism in Psychological Science 93

Introduction 93

Scientific Realism 96

Entity Realism 97

Structural Realism 97

Semirealism 98

Implications of Scientific Realism for Social Science and Psychology 101

Minimal Scientific Realism 102

Mind-Independence 103

Unobservables 105

Commonsensibles 105

Models 107

Conclusion 107

Critical Realism 108

The Transitive Dimension, Epistemic Access and the Epistemic Fallacy 109

The Intransitive Dimension of Science 110

The Nature of Intransitive Reality:​ The Transcendental Argument 112

The Nature of Social Reality 115

The Process of Science 118

Problem with Closure in the Natural and Social Sciences 119

Lessons Learned 120

Situational Realism 121

Nuovo Realismo 126

Real Science 132

References 132

6 The Realist Image of Science 137

Science as Criticism 137

The Mythic Image of Science 139

Quantification and Measurement in Psychology and Social Sciences 142

Doing Realist Science in Psychology 147

References 150

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020

D. J. F. MareeRealism and Psychological Sciencehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45143-1_1

1. Introduction

David J. F. Maree¹ 

(1)

Department of Psychology, University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa

The argument of this book is that the view(s) of science that has been applied to psychology from early in the previous century up to now does not do justice to either psychology or science. Various voices in the past and present were raised against the application of the positivist template to psychological science. In the process this template became the mirror against which suggestions and innovations for new approaches towards studying psychology were reflected. Sometimes this reflection mutated into a straw man but it was still effectively used to forge new approaches, metatheories and methods. The aim of this book is not to provide a comprehensive historical overview of the process of utilising images of science although broad references to some events and developments will made. Others already provided wonderful and comprehensive interpretations of the development of images of science (Danziger, 1994).

I should say something about my use of the term image because it will frequently be woven into discussions. When I speak of an image I mainly have the mythic image of science in mind. This is the template I spoke about above, mutating into various straw men. Rather than utilising terms such as template, straw man (it is probably not expedient to be too gender sensitive with a pejorative term involving straw), view, construction or approach, I will be using mythic image to indicate, on the one hand, that this image is the constructed picture people have of what science is. On the other hand, it is mythic and we know that myths usually harbour some truths but due to a long history of interpretation and re-interpretation, it can colour our perception of things severely. However, we do not know that the image is mythic: we take it for the truth. Fortunately, we can uncover the myth by pointing to its lessons and how it was utilised in stories constructed about science. It almost functions as those urban legends and myths: at some stage one may regard the rumour of the claw against the roof of the car as true, but as soon as it becomes clear that it is a myth one’s perception of the situation changes.

There is a lesson in this particular myth; it harbours some truths (stay out of dark alleys!) but it can be used by anybody to manipulate people in believing mythical aspects of a phenomenon. By means of its power as myth it functions as a very effective marketing ploy. If you believe the myth you will be more likely to buy the newest alarm system. Postmodernists are very adept in identifying marketing ploys: they call it rhetorical devices. It is necessary to be deconstructive with some assumptions and beliefs. When scientists, researchers, governing bodies and the public stubbornly hold on to dogmatic beliefs and practices to their own or others detriment, one should initiate a process of change. Not that this is always easy. As can be seen in an era of #metoo, violence against women and children and religious intolerance, it is not easy to change perceptions and practices. Although I do believe that we live in an age where societies tend to be more sensitive to oppressive practices on a global scale and they are able to voice their concerns much better and more publicly than in the past. Despite this freedom and the fruits of a number of intense struggles by among others political-philosophically grounded movements (such as various liberation movements, feminism, ecological movements and the like), myths, fake news and oppression abound.

Applied to the topic at hand, the current image of science prevalent in psychology can be called mythic. The truth of the image is that it at some stage encapsulated some of the problems scientists, philosophers and psychologists had with positivistic metatheory. From the work of Logical Positivists some core tenets were advocated as characteristic of what it means to be scientific. These tenets formed the template for positivism in science and had an enormous influence on psychosocial disciplines. Even a cursory glance at journal articles published since the 1900s will indicate a steep increase in empirical studies in psychology over a period of 50–100 years (Danziger, 1994). The extreme proliferation of empirical studies probably cemented the positivist template in the minds of researchers and its critics. However, I do not think that all empirical studies can unqualified be characterised as positivist. Proponents in the domain of psychosocial research methods realised that the positivist template does not apply to them and much of the work they do cannot easily be fit into positivism despite its empirical nature. This is where the template became murky and the scientific image turned into a myth.

The positivist template and ever strengthening mythic image of science served as a target for a strong postmodernist movement against modernist ideas of progression, individualism and science. It is not our task to explore postmodernism here but one of the central offshoots will concern us in this book, namely, social constructionism. A number of central ideas of social constructionism taken over from various postmodern directions had a fundamental influence on how we view science or at least what is called the received or traditional view. This is the view I call the mythic image of science. Social constructionism and its cousins vehemently opposed the received view of science in order to rehabilitate or regain the important dimension of meaningful human existence. It is no wonder that continental philosophy and its various emphases on meaning of being served as feeding ground for postmodernism. Phenomenology, hermeneutics, critical theory and poststructuralism played their part in challenging received science and its methods.

Unfortunately, the target of attacks was more often than not the mythic image of science. Especially in the arena of methods ammunition were amply available from the sources mentioned above to render the image of science crippled and scorned.

The fallout of the mythic image of science is serious. Beyond the fact that it is responsible for misunderstanding and miscommunication in psychology as science, it is also responsible for maintaining a number of dichotomies in psychology. These dichotomies or contrasts can be found on various levels of analyses, namely, applicative, methodological and metatheoretical. These dichotomies form constant themes in the practise, training, research and theorising of psychology. They pop up at conferences, publications, teaching and in students’ dissertations. While we continue to battle these dichotomies psychology will struggle to move forward as a science. It is an important science, one focusing on the well-being of people and societies and one that is becoming all the more important as we move into the twenty-first century. I am not claiming we can dissolve the dichotomies and polarities by unmasking the mythic image of science. However, by understanding what science is, and what the mythic image of science involves, I think we should be able to make some progress in psychological science. Obviously, this is not a new story but one discussed in various guises for as long as psychology was on the table as a science. As the various debates across decades have shown, agreement does not come easy and villains were identified across the various divides. For instance, in the famous Loughborough debate between relativists and realists, one reaction of the realist to the relativists’ claim that nothing is real but constructed was to hit the table and shout that the table is real, the stone you hit your toe against is real, death and suffering are real and so on. I am taking a different tack. It is easy to pick a fight and point out to a social constructionist such as Kenneth Gergen that because even a social constructionist takes illness seriously it must be real (and not constructed) or causal thinking is part of the constructionist and positivist’s conceptual tools (so suck it up, reality is causally structured). No, I want to pose the argument differently, namely, that we are explicitly or implicitly harbouring a mythic image of science which feeds various oppositions in our field, and if we succeed in unmasking this image, a different view of what science is might help us move psychology as science along.

Let me put my cards on the table: I believe science is a realist endeavour but before the reader shouts, another positivist! and throws the book in the trash, bear with me for a few moments. Science is a realist enterprise but one that can accommodate a range of epistemological stances. I would like to make an argument that psychological science boils down to a critical enterprise which is not only epistemological or methodological but probably ontological. Thus, I would like to base my claim on a proper metatheoretical view for psychological science. At its core science is critical, a process of claim and counter-claim and even a constructionist can agree with this claim. A constructionist or for that matter a relativist in the proper postmodernist sense is in the business of deconstructing, challenging claims, beliefs, narratives and constructions, yes, and even realities. This essential critical movement is what I regard as science (but I motivate it as fundamental to realism).

It is important to understand what the view of researchers and practitioners is about psychological science. The most obvious position living in the mind of the public is probably the view of psychology as a helping science or an avenue to self-improvement. The latter view differs from what students of psychology believe psychology aims to do, namely, understanding human behaviour and mental functioning with an eye to applicative processes. Our concern in this book is the professional, academic, researcher and practitioner who moved through postgraduate studies in psychological science, knows that psychology is a science and whose work is embedded in the psychological principles taught in academic institutions. By saying that the professional knows that psychology is a science of sorts does not mean that there is one agreed-upon view of what this science involves and how it is practiced. I will, however, be advocating the fact that most of us have a particular idea of what science involves and that this view informs the mythic image of science prevalent in psychology (and probably in related social sciences). Thus, knowing that psychology is supposed to be a science does not mean that we are correctly conceptualising what this science involves!

Psychology as a discipline and science have a relatively short history and some still regard psychology as an immature science, if at all. Although the roots of psychological thought are as old as recorded history ranging from the Greek philosophers to the present, psychology as a discipline’s origin usually is attached to Wundt’s establishment of a psychological laboratory in 1879. This event in itself is significant for the self-image of psychology. Psychology was largely viewed as a scientific enterprise from its inception. What counts as science was modelled on the natural and medical sciences of the day. In the laboratory of Wundt experiments were done involving careful measurements and controlled conditions.

Psychology as an experimental science on par with other sciences infused laboratories and departments established throughout America. The story is relatively well known. In the early 1900s the difficulty of utilising introspection as a measurable and controllable method to investigate mental phenomena led to a shift of emphasis to observable and clearly measurable behaviour. In undergraduate textbooks Wundt is quoted as the father of modern experimental psychology and in the same breath the rejection of his introspectionism is touted as a hallmark of problems with early structuralism in experimental psychology (Coon & Mitterer, 2010; Kalat, 2008; Plotnik & Kouyoumdjian, 2011; Sternberg, Sternberg, & Mio, 2012, p. 8). What Danziger (1980a, p. 244) called the Wundt-myth is perpetuated in textbooks and is a good example of how popular perceptions influence so-called historical facts. According to Danziger (1980a, p. 248), of the 180 studies published between 1883 and 1903, only four studies referred to introspection associated with structuralism later on. The majority of studies utilised behavioural measurements. Clearly Wundt did not employ introspection as some textbooks would have it. His experiments focused on behavioural measurements such as perceiving sensations and reaction time measurements (Danziger, 1980a, p. 248).

Wundt distinguished between two types of introspection, namely, Selbsbeobachtung (self-observation) and Innere Wahrnehmung (inner perception). The first Wundt regarded as unreliable whilst the second, as fundamental to psychology (Danziger, 1980a). The idea was to enable the scientist to get data in a similar way as in natural science, namely, with observing events taking place and reporting on them. The problem with self-observation as an approximation of objective and external observation is that it cannot report on events as they happen. It would always be a mediated and interpreted reflection. Retrospection was proposed as a way to overcome the problem of introspection but memory of the event created distortion so it was no real solution. Wundt rejected self-observation but tried to find a way that immediate experiences can be reported by means of one’s inner perception of events. Understandably, a very circumscribed range of events could be reported in this way by making inner perception accessible to external measurement (Danziger, 1994, p. 35). The latter were thus limited to experiments of sensations.

The solution to the difficulties of introspection was a focus on measuring behaviour. Here one can quote the work of Wundt or someone similar. Wundt is maybe not the best example because as Danziger (1980b) argued, Wundt had a principled different view of psychological science than his peers and those that came after him. Wundt viewed the psychological as dealing with the mental and the methodological access to the latter is made possible by physiological measurement and experimentation. However, contrary to positivist dogma, data for Wundt was empirical and not loose standing and accumulated facts. Empirical data had to cohere to answer theoretical questions about the psychological, an attitude that was surprisingly postpositivist. However, his contemporaries largely ignored his methodological contributions in favour of positivist approaches to psychological science. Wundt had a very specific view on the psychological experiment. It is a precise and careful manipulation of conditions in order to have a desired psychological effect. The experiment was not merely designed to find correlations between events but to find underlying explanatory causal mechanisms. Although he spoke of psychological or psychic cause as opposed to causality in the natural domain, his aim was to understand and uncover those causal processes underlying psychological events (Danziger, 1980b).

The development of behaviourism with its negation of the mental gained prominence in the first half of the twentieth century. In the 50s and 60s cognitivism developed as a reaction to the wholesale externalisation of behaviourism bringing the focus to the mind and mental operations. Cognitivism under which diverse fields such as cognitive psychology and computer sciences can be grouped, became consolidated as cognitive science. Advances in biology and neurosciences added further impetus to cognitive science and since the 1990s neuroscience became the catch phrase of the early twenty-first century. The prominence of neuroscience, neuropsychology and cognitive science currently dominates much of the empirical endeavours of psychology to such an extent that numerous departments remove the term psychology from their names. Experimental work, controlled trails and precise measurement are essential to its image of science.

However, looking at the development of professional psychological associations in the USA the apparent straightforward line from Wundt to current neurosciences was not so straightforward. The development of psychology in the USA corresponds with the development of the APA and APS. The Wundtian laboratory was central to the image of science of psychologists but slowly since the early 1900s a large practitioner base developed in reaction to the exclusive experimentalist focus. Practitioners also developed in other areas of psychology such as occupational, education and counselling psychology. The balance towards practitioners became so extreme that it was suggested that APA include practitioner in its name. The criticism against APA was the loss of a scientific and research focus (which is not really true) (Ardila, 2007), and a group of research-minded psychologists initiated the establishment of the APS. However, it should be apparent by mere inspection that both associations have applicative and scientific foci.

The pendulum is constantly moving between practitioner and science issues. In the following chapters the issue of the Boulder model of scientist-practitioner will be discussed. The reaction back to a scientific orientation is of course not uncontested. Early in the growth of cognitivism, which incidentally did much for psychology reclaiming the mental, reactions developed against the view of science, research and what developed into a psychological image of humanity. Studies in artificial intelligence, linguistics, computational psychology, cognition, memory, perception and so on multiplied and flourished but along the way their view of the mind was restricted to computational processes residing in the brain. Various reactions developed. An emphasis on humanistic approaches was called for. Psychology should capture the humane and human in its work, something cognitivism struggled to do. Rogers and others turned towards the subject and the importance of the individual to change and function properly in the world. Non-directive techniques along with the primacy of the individual were emphasised.

Psychology following the medical model emphasised training practitioners especially clinicians in diagnosing and treating psychological deficits. The medical model based on empirical research strengthened the empirical scientific image in psychology in addition to establishing the diagnostic and symptomatic approach to treatment. This model, related but independent from psychiatry, culminated in the various DSM diagnostic manuals and played an integral role in the training of clinical psychologists.

The image of science arising from this can be summarised as one focusing on external and measurable behaviour. How does this square with common sense, namely, our intuition that I am feeling things, I have a sense of identity and I am the one that has to stop my bad habits and so on? Social constructionism was a reaction to cognitivism, individualism and the deficit model. Interestingly, positive psychology developed in the footsteps of humanistic approaches and social cognitive approaches also as reaction to the deficit medical model and behaviourism’s one-dimensional treatment of human beings. Currently positive psychology is developing on its own course and subscribes to the empirical scientific image of science. On the other hand, social constructionism reacted much more vehemently to the traditional empirical, practitioner and cognitivist approaches to psychology. Shotter (1993), for instance, who started his career within cognitive psychology, rejected the latter’s view of the self and subsequently developed his social constructionist views (Lock & Strong, 2010). Gergen (1982) who similarly started off in empirical science and statistics is one of the leading figures in social constructionism in psychology. Constructionists think that the only way to understand people is linguistically and that