what would be the problems of combining psychological theories?

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Many students and academics think that psychology could progress simply by taking the best aspects of each theory and combining them. Is this possible? What problems would such a program face?

-- Gina Kingdom (vaughton@ozemail.com.au), August 11, 2002

Answers

I think such an attempt would face the immediate problem of determining what are the "best aspects" of each theory. For instance, while a behaviorist might think that psychology should be based primarily on observable behavior, a Freudian would feel we need to lend more attention to unconscious processes. And a humanistic psychologist would disagree with both. All theorists would probably argue that the "best" of their theories involves these aspects, and so getting them to agree on a consolidated theory of some sort I imagine would be tough. In no time, students and academics would be debating over what to include in the "grand" theory, and I doubt we'd be further than we are now.

-- Daniel J. Denis (dand@yorku.ca), August 12, 2002.

In addition to the problems Dan raises, I think there's a question about what actually constitutes a theory here. A theory (at least a good one) isn't just a collection of claims that share nothing more than the virtue of being true (or at least our thinking them to be so). At their best, theories are collection of statement that bear intricate-enough logical relations that we can combine them to generate novel predictions about what we can expect to discover in the future. They often draw on a common ontology of some sort as well, whereas the "best" claims of psychoanalysis, behaviorism, neuropsychology, and cognitive psychology have conflicting ontologies. Perhaps they could be made to cohere in some way, but that would be generating a new theory, not just selecting the "best bits" from previous ones.

An excellent textbook on psychological theory is André Kukla's __Methods of Theoretical Psychology_ (MIT, 2001)

-- Christopher Green (cgreen@chass.utoronto.ca), August 12, 2002.


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