Related Terms

Cognition; Constructionism; Hermeneutics; Personhood; Psychology; Science

Description

Theoretical psychology (TP) is a subdiscipline as well as a general orientation to psychology. It has come to fruition especially as an expression of post-positivism beginning in the 1960s. It concerns itself with foundational questions in psychology, the application of the philosophy of science to psychological research, and the critique of the social implications of the discipline. Cognitive science and philosophy of mind clearly form one set of interests in TP. In addition, it has branched widely into historical and critical analyses of psychology including those of a critical realist, hermeneutic, feminist, social constructionist, poststructuralist, and postmodernist variety (Gergen 1985; Richardson et al. 1999). Hence, there is no single orientation that describes TP, but, instead, it is a subdiscipline that concerns itself with the critical analysis of psychology as a theoretical enterprise and as a discipline (Robinson 2007).

More recently, TP has concerned itself with the globalization of psychology, the nature of subjectivity as a broad category of analysis, the question of the place of the neurosciences in psychology and the notion of neurophenomenology, the emergence and limitations of such movements as positive psychology and evolutionary psychology, the contemporary expressions of psychoanalysis, and more.

Characteristics

TP is the one subdiscipline that is directly concerned with an overall analysis of the problems and foundations of psychology. It has from time to time critiqued the mainstream, suggested alternative approaches to psychology, or created new fields of inquiry. It also joins with others in psychology, for example, in cognitive science, to discuss, analyze, or engage working scientists in new work. TP often interests itself explicitly in interdisciplinary work by crossing boundaries and working in adjacent fields of sociology, philosophy, anthropology, and so on.

Relevance to Science and Religion

Theoretical psychologists are, in general, sympathetic to an understanding of the relationship between religion and science. Some of these psychologists take this up explicitly in the guise of a relationship between religious aspirations and ethics or in the form of normative considerations as understood in psychology and the religious impulse in human activity. Given TP’s general critique of positivism in science, it is also sympathetic to alternative forms of investigation of all human phenomena, including religion. However, TP’s critical stance can also apply to religious concerns and the expression of religiosity. In addition, there are many in TP who are not directly interested or concerned with the nature of religious phenomena.

A number of individuals who self-identify as theoretical psychologists hold positions in denominational colleges and universities and hence work explicitly on the relationship between psychology as a science and religious questions, broadly conceived.

Sources of Authority

As a relatively small subdiscipline of psychology, most theoretical psychologists begin their careers with training in another field of psychology. Crucial to TP is the importance of the philosophy of science and either analytic philosophy or continental philosophy of the last approximately 100 years. Some theoretical psychologists take their inspiration from the traditions of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Jean-Paul Sartre, whereas others are more enamored with the traditions of Bertrand Russell through Ludwig Wittgenstein, and forward, to contemporary philosophers of science and mind. In addition, there are others who are clearly either informed by various forms of critical theory inspired by such authors as Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, or Gilles Deleuze; feminists of various orientations; and cultural theorists. All of this is put to the service of understanding, analyzing, critiquing, or rebuilding psychology, subjectivity, or human activity.

Ethical Principles

On the one hand, ethical principles are somewhat less germane for TP than they are for fields that engage in active research with people or nonhuman animals. Normally theoretical work does not encroach on the private lives of those investigated. However, more broadly conceived moral considerations form part of the traditions of theoretical psychology if only because a number of theoretical psychologists believe that psychology is a “moral science” as that term was used in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. That is, essentially human characteristics on this view always entail questions of how we ought to live and hence invoke questions about what constitutes the mores and norms of human life. This is a position that was already well developed in, for example, the work of John Dewey.

Key Values

TP seems to have a critical wing and a more salutary, pedagogic wing. The critical wing of TP has been in existence for some time and, with a long tradition of critique in philosophy and social theory, examines psychology for its covert commitments to individualism and support of the status quo. Sometimes, this wing goes by the name of critical psychology, and it has strong affinities with the Frankfurt School, postmodernism, the work of continental thinkers such as Michel Foucault, second-wave feminism, and the New Left of post World War II. It values criticism and analysis of psychology’s social commitments in the name of an emancipatory psychology.

The pedagogic wing of TP is concerned with the analysis of the philosophical commitments of psychology and generally supports the espousal of “good science.” In that vein, it is more concerned with an elaboration and elucidation of issues in psychology that can be clarified through the judicious use of the philosophy of science, including such issues as reductionism, determinism, the nature of the mental, and so on (e.g., Kukla 2001).

Conceptualization

Nature/World

Theoretical psychologists are not so much concerned with nature per se as they are with the question of just what constitutes a natural category or if, indeed, it is possible to ever know just what is “natural” about human existence. This is a question about whether it is even within our capacity to distinguish that which is “natural” from the long legacy of evolutionary, social, and historical existence and whether such a question even makes sense. Although not always a concern for theoretical psychologists, it is an ongoing feature of many of the debates that constitute the field.

Human Being

Unlike most of psychology, theoretical psychologists have generally taken a special interest in what it means to be human or with the related question of personhood. The functional orientation of most of psychology, that is, the indeterminate nature of functional categories in psychology (e.g., memory, attention, cognition, personality), does not commit itself to a perspective on what it is to be human. A long history of human science scholarship in philosophy and psychology has led to considerations from Wilhelm Dilthey through Martin Heidegger and into contemporary psychology of just what constitutes human experience, thought, action, and embodied existence. On the other hand, this tradition is also the focus of considerable critique, especially beginning in the 1980s when “liberal humanism” was viewed as Eurocentric and patriarchal. In a related vein, the human/nonhuman distinction has itself been a question of considerable debate as psychology considers just what it is that is unique about the experience of various kinds of species.

Life and Death

The question of life itself is not a special focus of TP, but the nature of death has been a major preoccupation in the existential literatures that have spilled over into psychological debates in the 1960s forward. The manner in which the possibility of death shapes our understanding of life, or even “the denial of death” in Ernest Becker’s words, continues to be a source of concern precisely because it is knowledge of death, argue some scholars, that makes human beings psychologically unique beings in the world.

Reality

Notably forms of realism and antirealism have been the focus of attention for the past two or three decades in TP. Social constructionism in various forms has taken up an antirealist stance that led to a vigorous defense of realism by both cognitivist and post-Marxist scholars. In recent years, these debates have settled into a truce since neither side appears to have been successful in compelling a change of view among its opponents; furthermore, there have been few if any new arguments.

Knowledge

The creation and dissemination of new knowledge has been a focus of considerable investments in TP. Influenced by the sociology of knowledge and the social studies of science, the question here revolves around the nature of empirical knowledge in psychology and its relationship to socially implicit or explicit agendas for knowledge construction. For example, a long-standing issue is the nature of individualism in psychology, the preference for explanations at the individual level, and how this has limited the possibilities of other forms of knowledge that understand psychological accounts as inherently praxical, collective, and linguistic.

Truth and Perception

The question of truth and perception is related insofar as theories of perception can be divided into “representational” or “direct.” Representational theories of perception have constituted the mainstream in psychology and have frequently been taken as the establishment version of psychological perception. Truthful or accurate knowledge is a matter of inference from representational knowledge; in this case, “truth” is not directly knowable. “Direct” theories of perception, however, have a realist cast and make access to a knowable world a standard feature of their take on perception. Elsewhere in TP, discussions of “truth” are not much in vogue if only because they are often seen as leading to intransigence and are viewed as essentially irresolvable.

Time

For some theoretical psychologists, time has a special place in their lexicon because of its place in the work of philosopher Martin Heidegger and his influence on existentialism and humanism. Access to the world is through history, never outside it. This has been taken up in various ways in contemporary theory either through a hermeneutic understanding or indirectly via postmodernism.

Consciousness

That consciousness has returned as a topic to psychology with a surprising vigor is now clear. Having made up the core of psychology in the late nineteenth century, it vanished under behaviorism and mid-twentieth century experimental psychology. With the emergence of consciousness as a biological and philosophical problem in the 1980s and 1990s, psychology has returned to the question of consciousness in order to investigate the problems of cognition in the context of consciousness and brain function. TP has followed suit and is engaged in many of the same debates as philosophers of mind on, for example, such issues as “the hard problem” of first person consciousness.

Rationality/Reason

Neither rationality nor reason has a particularly special location in the work of TP. However, reason remains a feature of cognitive psychology and by association has remained of some interest to theoretical psychologists.

Mystery

With the exception of occasional references to wonder, mystery or the mysterium tremendum in the psychology of religion, TP has shied away from approaching these issues. Although reflecting, perhaps, a lack of genuine concern, it is more likely that it reflects psychology’s long inhibition concerning matters religious other than in the most obvious and superficial way (e.g., as demonstrated in survey research).

Relevant Themes

The problems of language generally and the special case of a discursive psychology have been taken up in a major way by TP in recent years. By this is meant the way in which psychological phenomena can be investigated in discourse. Secondarily, it claims that some topics in traditional psychology (e.g., attitudes, memory) can be reconceptualized as problems of discourse.

The problem of embodiment has also been taken up of late under a range of influences that have seen a return of the body as a vehicle of expression psychological existence, the site of power, or the foundation of a gendered life (Stam 1998).

Cross-References

Emergence, Theories of

Epistemology

Functionalism

Methodology in Psychology

Phenomenology

Psychoanalysis/Depth Psychology

Reductionism

Science and Scientific Knowledge, Sociology of