What are the different views held by modernism and postmodernism in relation to empirical psychology? Where can I read more on this subject matter?

-- Sarah Transfield (stransfield@hotmail.com), May 06, 2002

Answers

A wonderful framework for answering this question is "In Over Our Heads," by Robert Kegan of Harvard. His work is a generalization of constructivist/cognitive developmental theories, attempting to answer the questions,"What is it that changes from one developmental 'stage' to another?" The ways the consequences of this question interact with post/modernism are quite amazing and compelling.

-- Andy Wetzel (awetzel@epals.com), May 06, 2002.

This is very hard question to answer. First of all, there really isn't anyone who calls him-/herself a "modernist." It was a term developed by postmodernists to denote a tradition running back to Descartes that is said to have held that there is single, universal kind of reason or scientific method that will lead to objective truth. Very few members of that tradition were quite so dogmatic, but it can be a useful moniker at times. If forced to it, I would say that "modernists" had a wide range of views on the value of empirical psychology. Part of what might be called "Descartes' psychology" was empirical, but part of it was rational. Christian Wolff, a famous 18th-c. Liebnizian, formally distinguished between rational and empirical psychology, writing a separate book on each. This distinction was picked up in Diderot's famous Encyplopedia. Kant, pulling away from his Wolffian training, said that psychology could never be a "proper" science (in the opening to the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science), but then wrote a whole book (the Anthropology) that looks to us quite a lot like a scientific psychology (thought Kant didn't believe it to be so). Since the beginning of the 20th century, it has been common to believe that empirical psychology is the only legitimate form of psychological investigation (though more among research psychology than among psychotherapists), but that consensus has been breaking down somewhat over the past decade or so.

Postmodernists are an even more diverse lot than "modernists." Some are opposed to the empirical study of psychology -- some on epistemological grounds, some on political grounds. Some, by contrast, believe it is perfectly fine, as long as one "recognizes" that it is but one possible way of "narrating" that part of human experience, and has no "authority" over any other style of narration. For a very "soft sell" of postmodernism and psychology, see the work of Ken Gergen -- his book the Saturated Self, or the article of his that came out in American Psychologist just a few months ago.

-- Christopher Green (cgreen@chass.utoronto.ca), May 10, 2002.