Why Dr. Pigliucci is Wrong: There Is an Overarching Theory of Psychology
I have much respect for Professor Massimo Pigliucci, and I have enjoyed and learned from many of his writings over the years. And his Science and Philosophy Medium Essay, Why psychology and history don’t have overarching theories — and probably never will, offers a reasonable synopsis of the field of psychology as I encountered it 25 years ago. Namely, the science of psychology existed then — as it does now in the academic mainstream — as collection of fragmented approaches with “no overarching theory” that enables psychologists to effectively define what the field actually is about.
My goal in this essay is to share with Dr. Pigliucci and others why things have changed. My argument is, admittedly, rather bold. I believe that not only is an overarching theory is possible, but it has already been achieved. Indeed, as this recent series I did with Professor John Vervaeke demonstrates, advances are being made in integrative approaches to human psychology and cognitive science such that we are now in the process of aligning converging approaches that allow us to untangle the world knot of consciousness and start to address the hard problems of mind and meaning.
Although I took over sixty credits of psychology as an undergraduate, I did not become fully aware of just how fragmented the field was until I was a graduate student in the mid1990s. I was being trained as a clinician and was exposed to major competing perspectives for doing psychotherapy (e.g., cognitive behavioral, humanistic, psychodynamic, family systems). I was seeking a more coherent, overarching perspective that would allow me to make music out of the noise that was generated by just jamming the perspectives together into some kind of an eclectic soup.
It made sense to me that, just as modern western medicine is logically organized based on the science of human biology, it would follow that the various approaches to psychotherapy should be based on the science of human psychology. However, when I turned back to the science with this new mindset, I was struck by just how confusing and confused it is. Although I had been dimly aware that the field lacked an overarching theory when I was an undergraduate, its absence had not been particularly salient to me. I had simply bought the mainstream academic justification that the field’s identity was formed by applying the scientific method to questions pertaining to mind and behavior. However, when I looked at the field afresh through the lens of being a clinician facing the problem of operating from a coherent approach to psychotherapy, I was able see much more clearly the extent of its fragmentation.
This oriented me to hunt for a more unified or overarching conception. Between 1994 and 1996, I dove into evolutionary psychology because I found in it an approach that seemed situated to provide a metatheoretical vision. After all, it was clearly consilient with biology in a way that many other perspectives were not. In addition, it seemed to afford a coherent Big History view that was aligned with my sense of cosmic evolution. However, much as Dr. Pigliucci notes in his essay, as I dove deeper into evolutionary psychology during that two-year period, I came to see that it was most definitely not the solution.
The core reason is that it fails to get to the metaphysical root of the problem. The root of the problem is that no one knows how to effectively define what psychology is. This problem must be tackled if one is to seriously engage in the project of developing an overarching theory. It is remarkable to me that many people are not even aware of the nature of the problem. Indeed, it was not clear to me that Dr. Pigliucci’s was aware of the nature of the problem, as he does not say what it is that he thinks psychology is fundamentally about.
To grapple with these issues, it is essential to pay attention to the fact that there is huge ambiguity about what it is that people are referring to when they use the term psychology. To understand my point, let me introduce something I call the “Enlightenment Gap”. The Enlightenment Gap refers to the failure of modernist systems of both science and philosophy to effectively produce a clear descriptive language system for understanding the relationship between (a) matter and mind and (b) social and scientific knowledge. That these are two deep problems that stem from Enlightenment thinking does not need much justification, as they represent some of the most prominent areas of controversy and confusion. Consider, for example, that the “mind-body problem” is central to modern discourse. In addition, the disputes between modernist and postmodernist sensibilities center on interpretations of truth and scientific knowledge relative to the social construction of the knowledge and the linkages of knowledge and power. Together they represent some of the most significant problems with the systems of thought that emerged in during the Enlightenment.
Once we see that modern approaches to science and philosophy carry an Enlightenment Gap, we can understand why a science of psychology has been so difficult to develop. To situate ourselves, let’s start with where mainstream academic psychology currently has landed. Most introductory psychology texts define psychology as “the science behavior and mental processes”. This definition comes from the language game of modern science applied to mental phenomena. That is, the concept of behavior is identified as what can be seen and measured by the methods of science. We can see this explicitly in how Spielman defines the field in her introductory text, Psychology:
The root ‘ology’ denotes scientific study of, and psychology refers to the scientific study of the mind. Since science studies only observable phenomena and the mind is not directly observable, we expand this definition to the scientific study of mind and behavior.
In other words, psychologists are interested in the mind or mental processes, but because they approach it via empirical science, they must study “behavior” because that is what is accessible and then infer things about mental processes accordingly. Stated differently, it is the epistemological requirements of the language game of science that result psychology’s split between behavior and mental process. Unfortunately, this approach is nonsensical at the level of deeper understanding. Although there are many reasons why, the core reason is that there is no shared understanding of what behavior and/or mental processes actually refers to in the world. Given the Enlightenment Gap, this should not be surprising.
To see what I mean, consider, for example, that behavior has a broad and general definition that moves across the sciences. Many people consider physics the science of behavior of matter and energy on the fields of space and time. We can also talk of the behavior of molecules or cells. Given this, it is clearly odd that some psychologists define psychology as the science of behavior.
Both living cats and dead cats behave as they fall out of trees. What is it that causes living cats to land on their feet and take off? Most psychologists are mentalists. They argue that there are “intervening variables” that regulate the purposeful behavior of live cats and animals in general. But the problem here is that there are many different definitions of mental processes. For example, notice that we are talking here about cats. Yet Dr. Pigliucci, like so many scholars, places psychology firmly in the domain of the social/human sciences. This raises the issue as to whether the field is about animals in general, about some animals like cats, or is only about humans.
As we pause to consider this question, another even more fundamental question arises. What do we mean by mental processes? Some scholars think that mental processes refer to general “neurocognitive processes”. This corresponds to thinking about the nervous system as an information processing system, and thus would seemingly include things like how a spider weaves its web. Indeed, as this video suggests, some scientists and philosophers argue that a spider’s web should be considered an extension of its mind. So, we can ask, is a spider’s web part of its mental processes?
Other scholars consider mental processes to refer to consciousness or subjective feeling states. But this complicates things because this is a very different definition. As this book on the origins of consciousness notes, it is unclear if creatures like spiders have subjective mental lives. (The authors argue they likely do, but note that it is open to much interpretation and many scholars would disagree). Still other scholars, like Zoltan Tory, think the mind refers to the self-conscious reflection of human beings, akin to what Rene Descartes was talking about with his famous dictum, “I think, therefore I am.”
Note, that these differences in definitions are not minor in the least. Neurocognition, subjective mental experiences like the taste of strawberries, and self-conscious reflective capacities seen in humans are fundamentally different referents in the world. And, unlike the Unified Theory, mainstream psychology lacks a model that maps these different domains in proper relation.
The Enlightenment Gap means we psychologists lack an overarching field of understanding that allows us to talk with the same vocabulary about mental processes. Welcome to the problem of psychology. It is crucial to realize that this problem has been known for almost a century. Back in the mid1920s, the brilliant Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky identified it as the “crisis” of psychology. He lamented that practitioners, researchers and even lay persons interested in the topic noted that the field seemed to refer to fundamentally different things. Some were behavioral psychologists like John Watson, who were concerned with behavioral reflexes and denied any concept of the mental. Others, like Sigmund Freud, were concerned with unconscious mental forces and psychopathology. Others, like Wilhelm Wundt focused on perceptions and inner conscious experience. Still others, like William James, emphasized the functional adaptive properties of mental life. This state of confusion has remained, and I have rechristened as the problem of psychology. It lies at the heart of the discipline, and it refers to the fact that there is no clear definition of the field or its subject matter. I have been dismayed at how little attention this well-known problem receives. It is more important than the problem of “quantum gravity”, and has been lying in plain sight for almost 100 years, but to my amazement very few people are even aware of it.
In the decades that followed Vygotsky’s highlighting of the crisis, the paradigm wars died down. Over time, mainstream psychology gradually evolved into its current state, which can be characterized as an “eclectic” empirical epistemology. The idea of a unified theory of psychology is seen by most researchers as a naïve longing for things to make sense, and the argument usually presented to students is that psychological scientists need to get down to the business of researching phenomena of interest.
Of course, scientific knowledge is not just about applying the scientific method willy nilly. Rather the project of science is fundamentally about developing coherent maps and models that justifiably correspond to the ontic reality. A basic requirement of scientific knowledge is that there is some shared understanding about the way the world works. We have achieved that understanding in the physical and biological sciences in the form of ideas like quantum mechanics, general relativity, and cell theory. This bedrock of consensual knowledge is what makes these sciences “hard”. In contrast, psychology and the rest of the social sciences are “soft” because of the Enlightenment Gap and the failure to achieve coherence, such that there is no agreement about the experts regarding the nature of the field’s subject matter.
Indeed, we can directly link the problem of psychology to the Enlightenment Gap in that we can interpret the problem of psychology both as strong evidence for the Enlightenment Gap and a direct consequence of it. This becomes more apparent when we consider the place of psychology in our systems of human knowledge. Specifically, the field of psychology lies at the heart of academic knowledge, residing on the fault lines between the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. Moreover, as suggested by the combination of both the mind-matter problem and the social knowledge versus scientific knowledge, we can see that the idea of a science of behavior and mental processes resides at the very center of these two areas of philosophical dispute. Here is how I defined the problem of psychology in A New Unified Theory of Psychology (p. 41–42):
The problem of psychology is the joint observation that the field cannot be coherently defined and yet it connects more deeply than any other discipline to the three great branches of learning. Taken together, these observations suggest that the problem of psychology is a profound problem in academia at large. This conclusion is bolstered by the fact that as psychology has lumbered along acquiring findings but not foundational clarity, the fragmentation of human knowledge has grown exponentially. All of this suggests that the question, “What is psychology?” is profoundly important, one of the central questions in all of philosophy. Asking the right questions is often the most important step in getting the right answer. My interest in psychotherapy integration ultimately led me to ask the question, “What is psychology?”. Although I had no idea at the time, it turns out that this is the right question. And, as startling as it sounds, because psychology connects to so many different domains, the correct answer to it opens up a whole new vision for integrating human knowledge.
The Unified Theory of Knowledge (UTOK) positions itself as a system that resolves the Enlightenment Gap and solves the problem of psychology. It consists of a set of eight key ideas grounded in a metamodern sensibility that engenders a coherent picture of knowledge and wisdom for the 21st Century.
The first key idea in the UTOK is the Tree of Knowledge System. It is a new theory of reality and our scientific knowledge of it that aligns four planes of existence (Matter, Life, Mind, and Culture) with four domains of science (physical, biological, psychological and social). It links the four planes with “joint points”. It identifies the modern evolutionary synthesis as the “joint point” between Matter and Life, and characterizes Life as a novel, complex adaptive plane of existence. It then makes the novel claim that Mind and Culture are similar novel emergent dimensions of behavioral complexity. And it identifies two new “joint points”. It offers Behavioral Investment Theory as the Life to Mind joint point. This provides a metatheory of the mind, brain and animal behavior sciences. And it offers Justification Systems Theory as the Mind-to-Culture joint point, explaining the processes that resulted in us evolving from primates into persons. The result is a vision of scientific psychology that is conceptually up to the task of effectively defining behavior and mental processes and assimilating and integrating the major paradigms (i.e., evolutionary, behavioral, cognitive, humanistic, psychodynamic and sociocultural) into one overarching theory.
Here is a vision logic depiction of the argument, as it was spelled out in the first paper on the theory in 2003.
There is, of course, much more to be said (see, e.g., here, here, and here). My first book delineate the “metatheoretical” aspects of the argument, and showed how the unified theory assimilates and integrates the key insights from the major paradigms. My current in-progress book, The Problem of Psychology and Its Solution, shows how the UTOK offers a new descriptive metaphysical system that is up to the task of resolving the Enlightenment Gap and effectively defining matter in relationship to mind. The bottom line point is that, contra Dr. Pigliucci’s assessment, by getting both the metaphysical and metatheoretical aspects of the problem in line, we now have at our disposal an overarching theory of psychology for the 21st Century.
