Description
Book SynopsisContemporary mainstream psychology has moved toward methodological specificity bounded by instrumental experimentalism. However, this institutional reduction of sanctioned methods has not been fully embraced by all social scientists, nor even by all experimental psychologists. The social sciences are rife with examples of practicing empirical scientists disaffected with the reductionism and atomism of traditional experimentalism.
The empirical theory and practice of four of these disaffected social scientists--Lev Vygotsky, James Baldwin, James Gibson, and Kurt Lewin--is explored in this volume. Each of the scientists considered here argued for a rigorously empirical method while still maintaining a clear anti-reductionist stance. They justified their disaffection with the dominant psychological paradigms of their respective eras in terms of a fidelity to their phenomena of study, a fidelity they believed would be compromised by radical reductionism and ontological atomism.
Table of Contents1: The Problems of Reductionism in the Social Sciences; 2: Sociocultural Paradigm; 3: Creating the Future:Vygotsky as an Experimenter; 4: Baldwin’s Quest:A Universal Logic of Development; 5: Ecological Psychology’s Struggle to Study Perception at the Appropriate Level of Analysis:Examining the Past, Guessing the Future; 6: Kurt Lewin’s Contribution to the Methodology of Psychology:From Past to Future Skipping the Present; 7: A Unifi ed Topological Approach to Umwelts and Life Spaces Part II: Constructing Life Spaces from an Umwelt; 8: Anti-Reductionistic Empiricism in Contemporary Psychological Research; 9: Considering the Foundations for a Holistic Empirical Psychology
