A New Approach to the Science of Psychology
Moving from a scientific psychology based on epistemological methods to one based on a coherent ontology of the mental.
Abstract
This blog outlines the current state of scientific psychology, and then explains how the Unified Theory of Knowledge gives rise to a new approach. Mainstream academic psychology currently consists of a marriage between an eclectic blend of overlapping but also incompatible schools of thought that are all coupled to an empirical epistemology, such that the result is an endless array of research programs that vaguely intersect in the ill-defined domain of “behavior and mental processes.” In contrast, the UTOK gives us an ontological approach that provides both a clear descriptive metaphysical vocabulary and a metatheoretical formulation for the “mental behaviors” of both animals and humans. The difference between the two approaches is that one is a science based on methods and the other is a science based on a coherent picture of reality and the nature of the mental.
UTOK, the Unified Theory of Knowledge, makes three key moves to clarify the ontology of the mental that allow for a science of psychology. First, it differentiates the mental behavior of animals from the behavior of other living creatures, both metaphysically and metatheoretically. Second, it differentiates the mental behavior of human persons from the mental behavior of other animals, both metaphysically and metatheoretically. Third, it highlights the crucial epistemological difference between a first person, idiographic, qualitative subjective phenomenological view of the world given by a specific individual living in the real world from a third person, generalizable, quantitative, objective, behavioral theoretical view of the world given by science as set of publicly available propositions justified by the scientific method and institution. The result is a radically different approach to the science of psychology, one that is grounded a well-defined descriptive metaphysical system that gives a clear, coherent ontological picture that makes both mental behavior and subjective conscious experience scientifically intelligible.
To begin, we can start with a summary of the standard mainstream approach to psychological science. If you are not familiar with how mainstream academic psychology is framed or would benefit from primer, I recommend you take 10 minutes, and watch this video providing an overview Psychology 101. In an accessible and easy to follow manner, the video lays out the basic structure, logic, and historical developments that ground modern scientific psychology, especially as it is taught in the United States.
As we move forward in our critique, we should keep in mind that psychology is one of the most important and popular academic disciplines, being the fourth most popular overall major for undergraduates in the States. Moreover, psychology is arguably the most important “hub-discipline” in the academy because, perhaps more than any other discipline, it has direct connections with the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. An obvious reason for this is that “the human mind” plays a role in all knowledge systems, and thus in that regard, psychology is ubiquitous. The unavoidable conclusion here is that the field of psychology plays a crucial role in the landscape of knowledge in the West.
Consistent with this summary, the introductory video starts with the observation that questions pertaining to the field psychology go back as far as people have been asking them. As Morton Hunt notes in The Story of Psychology, five hundred years before the common era, the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers (and the Persian philosophers before them) were grappling with questions along the lines of the following: What is the mind/soul and how should we define it? Where does it come from and how does it relate to the physical or non-mental world? How do we know things? How do we perceive the world around us? How should we act? Why are there differences between people in both their capacities and their desires? Why do some people have “mental” problems? What are the nature of those problems, and how might we alleviate such suffering? What are the mental lives of other animals like, and how are they similar or different from humans?
Although these are very old questions, they regularly arise in both the everyday reflections of lay people and the refined analyses of scholars in philosophy. However, there is something distinct about the way modern psychology approaches the topic. As Devonis notes in his History of Psychology 101, modern psychology is, in many ways defined by the modern scientific enterprise that emerged during the Enlightenment. This body of thought and method was profoundly shaped by the birth of physics (founded by scientists like Galileo and Newton), chemistry (by scientists like Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier and Robert Boyle), and modern biology (by scientists like Charles Darwin).
Although there are debates about exactly what constitutes modern science and the “scientific method,” there nevertheless is a basic epistemological structure that involves systematic measurement and quantification that allows for third person observation, experimentation in controlled settings, and the development of mathematical, logic, and theory that attempt to describe and explain naturalistic phenomena. UTOK defines modern science as a kind of justification system that emerged about 500 years ago in Europe that is framed by four key elements, which include: 1) a modernist sensibility (as opposed to the pre-modern Christian mindset that dominated Europe at the time); 2) an empiricist epistemology (third person, quantifiable observations that can be framed in terms of reliability and validity); 3) a naturalistic (as opposed to supernatural) ontological assumptions; and 4) scientific institutional structures (e.g., methods, programs of research, and institutional aspects like degrees, societies, and journals).
The key point here is that modern psychology gets the core of its identity from its connection with the modern empirical natural sciences. Now, many people have long argued that this epistemology is not well-suited to psychology. There is a set of important arguments that can legitimize this position, but I will not delve into them here. Instead, I will simply note that this critique inevitably suffers from a serious limitation that potentially undermines the core of the discipline. Specifically, if one judges psychology to not be a science, then it arguably looses its core definitional anchor that for being. Absent its anchor in natural science, it blends into all the other ways of thinking about the human mind. Crucially, UTOK preserves psychology’s grounding in natural science; however, it does so in a fundamentally new way that is both coherent and affords clear, constructive relationships between the social sciences and the humanities, as well as commonsense psychology (i.e., the way lay people talk about beliefs, desires, and actions).
Consistent with this point, the Introduction to Psych 101 video highlights that the institution of psychology embraces modern scientific epistemology as a central defining feature. From there, it proceeds to offer the basic outline that defines the field’s place in the academy, at least as it stands in the United States. It reviews how four major schools of thought emerged in the late 19th and early 20th Century that would come to provide highly influential but also massively different approaches to framing its subject matter.
First, there was “structuralism.” Structuralism considers the subject matter of psychology to be the inner life or conscious experience of humans, and it developed the method of introspection as a systematic way for trained observers to observe their own inner lives and their self-reports were the data used. Unfortunately, structuralism ran into the problem of third person, intersubjective agreement. Only one observer can directly see the inner world from the first-person vantage point. We will return to this epistemological puzzle at the end of this essay.
The second approach described is “functionalism.” Founded largely by William James, he defined psychology as the “science of mental life.” The focus of functionalists were on how conscious entities adapt to the world in functional ways. James was heavily influenced by Darwin’s work evolution and mental life for James included many, if not most, animals. As suggested by this description, the functionalists tended to see consciousness as being at the heart of what was meant by “the mental.” However, the next two developments would cast significant doubt on the centrality of consciousness to defining the mental. The exact relationship between the ontology of the mental and the meaning of consciousness remains a tricky point that one must get correct if one is going to untangle this knot of confusion (see here for more on this issue).
The video then brings in Freud and narrates that his interest was on “the unconscious” aspect of human mental life, as well as on the sources of psychopathology and possible modes of treatment. As is well-known, Freud’s thinking gave rise to a whole system of thought called psychoanalysis. Although Freud’s influence was monumental, psychoanalysis broke off from mainstream academic psychology. There are many reasons why, but a major reason was that many philosophers of science and scientific psychologists criticized or rejected psychoanalysis on epistemological grounds. Despite this rift between psychology and psychoanalysis, Freud’s central insight that there was much to human mental life that was unconscious has been woven into the fabric of our modern understanding. And, as the video notes, the psychodynamic approach remains visible in scientific psychology. It is a school of thought that focuses on early developmental processes like attachment, subconscious motivational forces, primary and secondary cognitive processes (aka, System 1 and 2 by cognitive psychologists), and psychological defenses that function to maintain psychic equilibrium.
The fourth major influence discussed was behaviorism. Sparked initially by the work and writings of John Watson, the behaviorists were keen on firmly anchoring psychology to the natural sciences (especially physics), and they focused on observable behaviors that could be objectively measured and experimentally tied to measurable outcomes. In addition, the concept of behavior explicitly goes deep into the animal kingdom. As Watson put it in his 1913 manifesto, “The behaviorist, in his efforts to get a unitary scheme of animal response, recognizes no dividing line between man and brute.” Although Watson’s neuro-reflexive ontological assumptions have largely been rejected, the epistemological aspect of behaviorism has remained a major influence.
The video correctly asserts that structuralism, functionalism, psychoanalysis, and behaviorism are four major schools of thought that attempted to frame the science of psychology at around the turn of the 20th Century. There definitely were others (e.g., Gestaltists, activity theorists, etc.), and the next three decades would see additional perspectives added. Most notably, the cognitive science revolution in the 1950s would add the powerful perspective that the nervous system in general and brain in particular was an information processing system that could be modeled by artificial intelligence and computers.
For the purposes of this blog, this brief narrative of modern psychology’s history suffices to bring us up to date. The current identity of the field can be thought of as a marriage between the methods and epistemology of science with a plurality of schools of thought that emphasize different aspects and framings of behavior and mental processes. As noted in the video, this marriage is justified by the institution via the claim that the human mind/brain is seen as the most complicated thing in the universe and will always require a plurality of approaches to get a handle on it.
As a consequence of this state of affairs, the job of the psychologist is to engage in scientific research in an area of interest. This means psychological scientists are trained in the methods of behavioral science. They learn how to think critically, make inferences based on logic, and analyze data based on statistics. As such, most academic psychologists make their living developing programs of research that operationalize the problem of interest with systematic definitions, and then proceed with studies (experimental or quasi-experimental or descriptive) that yield data about relationships between variables like features of specific situations, a person’s developmental history, various mental states (e.g., feelings, drives, and thoughts), various biological or brain states, patterns of relating (e.g., competition, attraction) and individual, group, or cultural differences.
The technical term for this approach to knowledge generation in scientific psychology is called “methodological behaviorism.” This term refers to the idea that because science must be based in observation available from a third person perspective, data must come from behaviors. Thus, “behaviors” are what the scientific psychologist observes and measures and gathers data about. Mental processes, then, are the hypothetical “intervening variables” that function to play a causal role in the observed behaviors, which usually are then framed as “dependent variables.”
Methodological behaviorism is now deeply ingrained in the institution and dominates American psychology. The only real exception are the 5% or so of psychologists who follow Skinner’s epistemology and philosophy of behavior, which is called radical behaviorism. Although there is much to be said about Skinner’s line of thought which is quite different than methodological behaviorism, it is beyond the scope of this essay. Rather, the point is that methodological behaviorism is now the standard way of doing scientific psychology. This can be seen as far back as 1956, which is when Bergman wrote, “Virtually every American psychologist, whether he knows it or not, is nowadays a methodological behaviorist” (p. 270). Jay Moore (2012) put it this way:
[M]ethodological behaviorism currently underlies mainstream research programs in psychology as well as professional socialization in that discipline. It underlies courses in research methods, experimental design, and statistics in most psychology departments at colleges and universities. It underlies such standardized tests in the discipline as the Graduate Record Examination. Research and psychological explanations that are not consistent with these features are given less weight, if any weight at all, in the scientific community, for example, as reflected in the editorial practices of journals and research support from granting agencies.
In sum, modern scientific psychology is a methods-based approach to an ill-defined and arguably incoherent subject matter. This latter claim is at the heart of UTOK. As this blog recounts, I essentially backed into recognizing the depths of the problem that psychology has with incoherence. As an undergraduate, I had simply bought the institutions “justifications” for what psychology was and why. I now realize this was absurd. I should have been told up front that there is a deep and profound conceptual problem with the field’s subject matter. As an analogy, think about how much attention is physics is given to fact that there is a deep and profound problem in understanding how quantum mechanics and general relativity might be unified. Although some in physics argue that students should just “shut up and calculate,” everyone in physics is at least made aware that there is a conceptual problem. The same should be true in psychology.
Yet, in psychology, almost no one attends to the “problem of psychology” with the degree that is warranted. Rather, much like herd animals, everyone just nods and smiles and says, “Of course the human mind/brain is complicated, so it makes perfect sense that there is no coherent conception of it and that we employ a diversity of approaches.” This is a bullshit justification. The reason is simple. Genuine scientific knowledge requires a clear understanding to advance in cumulative fashion. The theoretical psychologist Arthur Staats, who recently passed away, showed this very clearly in his analysis of the history of physics. The idea that one can simply apply the scientific method and have some kind of guarantee that knowledge will advance is wrongheaded. Thus, the fact that mainstream psychology barely mentions this issue and proceeds to shuttle students and other onlookers passed it with some weak justification about complexity of the mind/brain making this inevitable and that applying the methods of science will save them is as if by magic is, in my professional opinion, basically fraudulent.
A New Scientific Approach Based on Clear Descriptive Metaphysics, Ontological Referents, and Metatheoretical Formulations
UTOK provides a new way to approach scientific psychology. One way to frame the approach given by UTOK to scientific psychology is to describe it as making a fundamental shift from mainstream’s justification that it is a science based on “methodological behaviorism” to a scientific psychology that is based on a coherent ontology of the mental. That is, it is a framework that specifies what the mental is and how to frame it theoretically. We can call this approach “mental behaviorism” to contrast it with both methodological and radical behaviorism.
Mental behaviorism as framed by UTOK gives us an approach to scientific psychology that is grounded in a clear descriptive metaphysical framework, a clear ontology and a clear metatheoretical system for describing and explaining the domain of the mental. More specifically, UTOK provides descriptive metaphysic systems that afford us a vocabulary and networked definitional system of what the mental refers to, it also clearly places the mental in the ontology of the natural world, and it gives metatheoretical frameworks that assimilate and integrate the key insights from the scattered “schools of thought” into a much more comprehensive, coherent, and intelligible whole.
UTOK works by framing the field of psychology with a new map of natural-into-human science and how it maps the ontic reality from the Big Bang to the present. The reason such a big picture view is necessary is because psychology’s problems with its subject matter stem from the failure of the Enlightenment to produce a coherent metaphysics that could give a comprehensive view of both the material world and the ontology of the mental. That this is the case is obvious if you reflect on it. The mind-body problem is ubiquitous, and we see endless approaches and debates about the nature of consciousness and mental causation in the philosophy of mind (see, e.g., here). UTOK labels the failure to generate a coherent scientific worldview that includes both the material and mental worlds the “Enlightenment Gap.” More specifically, the Enlightenment Gap refers to the failure of the scholars in the Enlightenment to develop a coherent system of understanding the proper relations between (a) matter and mind and (b) scientific and social knowledge (see here for a longer summary). From the vantage point of UTOK, the problem of psychology stems from the long shadow cast by the Enlightenment Gap.
To shine light in the darkness, UTOK’s advances the Tree of Knowledge System, which is the first of the eight key ideas that formally make up the UTOK metapsychology. The ToK System is a new map of big history that provides a new way of thinking about the whole of natural science. It divides the ontic reality (i.e., the reality that exists independent of human knowledge) into four different dimensions of complexification called Matter, Life, Mind, and Culture and aligns those dimensions in nature with four broad classes of science (physical, biological, psychological, and social). The ToK also shows how science is a particular kind of justification system that emerges out of Culture approximately 500 years ago.
Crucially, the ToK gives a descriptive metaphysical system that can map the ontology of Mind and Culture. This is a game changer when it comes to psychology and the social sciences and how they relate to each other and biology and physics, as well as more general human knowledge systems. Specifically, the ToK defines “Mind” as the “animal-mental” plane of complex adaptive behavior, mediated by neurocognitive processes. Furthermore, it defines “Culture” as the “person-culture” plane of existence that is mediated by language and self-conscious justification.
Getting straight to the heart of the matter, this suggests a new ontology that can ground psychology and its need to have a workable map of the mental. Notice that “behavior and mental processes” do not directly map onto the two planes of existence. That is, “behavior and mental processes” would refer to both kinds of activity (Animal/Mental and Person/Culture), nor would not differentiate between them. This is because there is not, in mainstream psychology, a clear, general understanding of how to differentiate the mental processes/behaviors of animals from living creatures, and differentiate the mental processes/behavior of human persons from animals. In addition, because scientific psychology defines “behaviors” as a consequence of methods, it entangles its knowledge methods with the ontology of the subject matter it is attempting to study which results in endless confusion and equivocation of terms. In contrast, the UTOK gives a clear descriptive metaphysical system that allows us a new, coherent ontological map of these two clearly distinguishable domains of the mental (i.e., animal-mental, person-culture).
But it does not end with definitional analyses. Rather, the UTOK also gives metatheoretical formulations for both of these broad domains. This bridge between metaphysics and metatheory is unique and one of the things that makes UTOK a qualitatively different approach to the mind-body problem (see here for more on this). UTOK’s third key idea, Behavioral Investment Theory, provides a metatheory for the Mind (or Animal-Mental) dimension of existence. BIT integrates insights from bioenergetics, neurobiology, ethology and sociobiology, and the behavioral, cognitive, and developmental systems views that have been taken to explain the animal “mind-brain-behavior” relations. BIT posits that the nervous system evolved as an information processing and investment value system that coordinates animal action toward paths of investment based on energy expenditure, cost, risk and framed by broad principles pertaining to evolution, development, learning, and computational control. Adding to is validity is the fact that BIT is highly consistent with recent work in neuroscience on predictive processing and in cognitive science on the core function of cognitive processes being found in what John Vervaeke calls “recursive relevance realization”.
What emerges from this analysis is that one important way to frame the “mental” is to consider it an adjective that first refers to a particular kind of behavior pattern in nature. The category is clearly depicted by the ToK as the Mind dimension of complexification. Mental behavior, then, is an ontological frame for the mental at the level of the animal. This frame aligns with both behavioral approaches in psychology and philosophy (e.g., Ryle), albeit with an important twist. According to UTOK, via BIT, mental behaviors are behavioral investments made by animals mediated by the brain and nervous system that produces a functional effect on the animal environment relationship. Thus, UTOK gives a philosophically sophisticated behavioral approach to the mental that is bridged to a coherent metatheory of why animals act, think and feel the way they do.
The UTOK’s second key idea provides the metatheoretical understanding of how our hominid ancestors evolved into modern human persons. Justification Systems Theory explains how the evolution of propositional language created the “problem of justification” and this was an evolutionary adaptive problem that shaped the design features of the human ego (see here for a definition). This allows us to understand Culture with a capital “C” as consisting of the large-scale systems of justification that coordinate the activity of persons and generate a collective sense of what is and ought to be. When JUST is added to BIT, we now have an ontological frame for human mental behavior. Moreover, UTOK shows how we can understand both how human mental behavior is simultaneously continuous with animal mental behavior via BIT and at the same time discontinuous via JUST.
These insights greatly advance the picture and show just how massively confused the concepts “behavior” and “mental processes” are in the mainstream literature. The UTOK drives this point home with two additional maps, one specifying how to understand the concept of behavior writ large and the other specifying the major kinds and domains of mental processes. Specifically, the Periodic Table of Behavior shows that behavior is a central concept in science. That is, modern empirical natural science is about mapping the behavioral patterns in nature that occur at different levels and dimensions. As this blog frames it, the PTB gives a 3 levels by 4 dimensions analysis of natural behavioral kinds that effectively maps key domains of science, from quantum mechanics to sociology, on 12 different floors of analysis.
The Map of Mind1,2,3 highlights that there are very different domains of mental processes, and depend both on the ontological referent and the epistemological vantage point one is operating from. The Map of Mind1,2,3 shows how to understand mental processes as a combination of three ontological layers (neurocognition, subjective conscious experience, self-conscious verbal justification) by two epistemological vantage points (first and third person). The resulting map of mental processes gives five different domains, including neurocognition (Mind1a), overt animal activity (Mind1b), subjective conscious experience (Mind2), private narration (Mind3b) and public narration (Mind3b).
These new descriptive metaphysical tools allow us to define behavior and mental processes with qualitatively greater precision. When they are combined with the metatheoretical insights given by BIT and JUST, a new coherent ontology of the mental is given. The result is the conceptual groundwork for a fundamentally new approach to scientific psychology.
The fact that we are talking about a scientific psychology brings us to final point that must be made to achieve full clarity. One of modern psychology’s great struggles always has been the relationship between science’s commitment to an “objective” epistemology and the fact that a key domain of its subject matter is the “subjective” perspective each unique person has on the world. However, the methods of science seem to be blind to specifying the nature of that subjectivity. Several moves are necessary to solve this problem effectively. We already shown the need to develop a scientific ontology that affords us a way to generally understand the evolution of the mental that includes scientific frames for animal subjective experience and human self-conscious narrative reflection.
The next move pertains to recognizing the epistemological distinction between the language game of science and idiographic subjective experience. Scientific knowledge is, well, qualitatively different from idiographic subjective knowledge. It is quantitative, observable “from the outside,” and focused on framing and explaining the world in terms of lawful generalizations that stem from scientific theories and understandings. In contrast, subjective knowledge is your first-person, unique phenomenological, qualitative experience of being in the world. It is filled with colors, tastes, meanings, and so forth. It is unique, specific, grounded in the empirical-real (as opposed to generalized theory), and massively contingent. Much of what is idiographic is, to science, “error” that is a function of contingency.
How does the UTOK deal with this? It introduces a psychotechnology called the iQuad Coin, which is differentiated from scientific ontology, as framed by the Tree of Knowledge. The coin functions as a symbolic placeholder for the unique idiographic knower, whose experience is subjective, qualitative, contingent, specific, and particular. The UTOK argues that the language of science is largely blind to this aspect of reality, similar to the way science is blind to the language of ethics.
Thus, the full picture of a coherent scientific psychology must include the three steps of (1) differentiating animal-mental from living behaviors; (2) differentiating the mental behaviors of human persons from other animals; and (3) differentiating the objective, quantitative, scientific, third person behavioral language of science and its theoretical description of the world from the subjective, qualitative, idiographic, first person perspectival language of the subjective agent living in the “real” world.
Conclusion
The failure to achieve a coherent picture of the ontology of the mental has been psychology’s dirty little secret that has been hiding in plain sight for more than 100 years. It is time we face up to this fact. By clearly identifying the ontological distinctions between (1) animal-mental and (2) the cultural-person planes of behavior in science, and (3) by differentiating the epistemology of the language game used by science from the idiographic, subjective language game used by individuals, the Unified Theory gives rise to a new approach to scientific psychology that is based on a clear ontology of the mental.
After more than a century of confusion and endless debate circles about the mind-body problem, the time is now for a fundamental shift toward a consilient naturalistic worldview that can revitalize the human soul and spirit in the 21st Century.
