Abstract
Charges of scientism in mainstream psychology are on the rise among theoretical psychologists, yet not much attention has been paid to the diverse meanings and applications of the term “scientism.” In examining scientism’s relation to such contrast classes as pseudoscience, bad science, and antiscience, I focus on whether allegations of psychology’s scientism are made with the goal of supplementing mainstream ontological and epistemological frameworks and their methodological implications, or supplanting them altogether. The former suggests supplying a mainstream that is seen as thinly conceived with essential missing nutrients, whereas the latter suggests overturning a mainstream that is seen as irreparable and/or irredeemable in its disregard of lived experience. In light of the scientific reform sought by theoretical psychologists, many of whom now turn to the humanities for remedy, I question whether applying the term “scientism” to mainstream psychology is likely to help in achieving theorists’ disciplinary goals, and I suggest alternatives.
Keywords
Charges of a pervasive scientism in mainstream psychology are ramping up again among theoretical psychologists. I say “again” because this view of the mainstream is not new. Decades ago, renowned theoretical psychologist Sigmund Koch used that term to describe the “epistemopathies” of psychological science (Koch, 1961, 1969, 1981, 1993). Well before him, Wundt (1913/2013) expressed concern about a divorce of psychology from philosophy (see Araujo, 2016; Lamiell, 2018; Peterson, 2004; Winthrop, 1959). David Bakan (1967) and Kurt Danziger (1990) famously wrote of psychology’s “methodolatry,” James Lamiell (2019) criticized psychology’s “statisticism,” and Joel Michell (2003) challenged psychology’s “quantitative imperative.” Charges such as these indicate the many problems that theorists find within mainstream work. And they are often applied to psychology monolithically, that is, without much, if any, regard for relevant differences among research programs in the mainstream. In Theory & Psychology’s 2007 special issue, “Critical Engagement with Mainstream Psychology,” Tissaw and Osbeck (2007) cautioned how treating the mainstream as a monolith apart from the diverse research practices placed within that abstraction may contribute to the failure of theorists’ critiques to gain traction (see Held, 2011). Yet, since then, that trend has only intensified.
Advancing Koch’s critique, many theorists now find the use in psychology of natural-science methodologies to constitute a thoroughgoing scientism that has cost psychology what should be its subject matter—the nature of mental life, of lived experience itself. This is hardly a trivial concern, and there is a widely held consensus among theorists that the study of human/mind-dependent kinds in ways designed for natural kinds is at best folly and even dangerous—both to the human “objects” of inquiry and to disciplinary psychology.
Despite this consensus, each theorist adds their own meat to those philosophical bones apropos of their particular slant on the deficiencies and defects they find in mainstream psychology. Although I, like Tissaw and Osbeck (2007), question the existence of a monolithic mainstream, I use the term “mainstream” (also called “contemporary psychology”) nonetheless, in examining critiques that call for solutions that reflect theorists’ own preferences for just what a science of psychology should (and should not) entail. For example, some have turned to the humanities to remedy psychology’s original scientistic sin of applying natural-science methods to studying persons (e.g., Best, 2021; Freeman, 2020; Martin, 2020; Slaney, 2020; Sugarman & Martin, 2020a; Teo, 2017). 1 Others decry the “systematic misuse of statistical methods within mainstream psychology” (Lamiell, 2021, p. 8), along with uncritical/unreflective quantification (Michell, 2003; Slaney, 2021; Tafreshi et al., 2016). Three recent edited books by theoretical psychologists are devoted to scientism and its remedies—one multidisciplinary, Scientism: The New Orthodoxy (Williams & Robinson, 2015), and two expressly psychological, On Hijacking Science (Gantt & Williams, 2018) and Problematic Research Practices and Inertia in Scientific Psychology (Lamiell & Slaney, 2021). What is typically called mainstream, contemporary, or scientific/research psychology is regularly tarred with the broad brush of scientism.
And yet, the term “scientism” has no single agreed-upon meaning and use across or even within disciplines. Although the proffered disciplinary implications of mainstream psychology’s alleged scientism are hardly univocal, there is convergence nonetheless on concerns about its uncritical adoption of natural-science methods and resultant inattention to mental life/lived experience—its failure to “save the phenomenon” (Robinson, 2018, p. xviii). This means it is not a legitimate psychological science.
Upon encountering a term whose meaning is polysemic and whose applications are diverse, I try to understand the message in which it appears. Does use of the term help or hinder, clarify or obfuscate, the intended message? In the case of psychology, theorists who charge the mainstream with scientism often do so because they consider mainstream psychology to be a highly limited science that hubristically overreaches what it can rightly claim to have discovered. Does that make it a bad science, as some theorists maintain? Or even perhaps a pseudoscience, as others indicate? The former suggests its findings are suspect at best; the latter that it is not a bona fide science, at least of psychology.
And what of calling a generally respected scientific discipline scientistic? I can more easily appreciate considering some work in the humanities scientistic, as have some humanities scholars who disdain ways in which the humanities have been moving toward emulation of the sciences (see Held, 2021; Høyrup, 2000; Scruton, 2015). 2 This, as some theoretical psychologists turn to the humanities for scientific psychology’s salvation.
Philosopher of science Maarten Boudry (2017) defines scientism broadly, emphasizing that “whatever value there is in the notion of scientism, the term’s real meaning all too often boils down to ‘science I don’t like’” (p. 33). To be sure, the reasons for not liking a kind of science (or what is alleged to be a science) help determine whether we accept its denunciation as scientistic. And theoretical psychologists are quick to give their many reasons for not liking mainstream psychological science, including and beyond its use of natural-science methods—for instance, its lamented dehumanizing objectivism (Christopher et al., 2014; Clegg, 2017; Slaney & Wu, 2022), epistemic violence and inattention to subjectivity (Kirschner, 2022; Teo, 2017, 2018), and reductive ontological and epistemological naturalism (Gantt et al., 2022; Wertz, 2018). Their critiques often document ways in which mental life/lived experience has received short shrift in psychology’s physics-envy shuffle.
There is considerable transdisciplinary disagreement about just what the term “scientism” picks out (e.g., de Ridder et al., 2018). Yet those who find mainstream psychology riddled with scientism have not expressed much concern about that conceptual matter. Instead, theoretical psychologists seem to suppose that scientism’s definition is reasonably settled, as they call for philosophical sensibilities and alternative methods developed in the human sciences and/or in the humanities. I find this apparent supposition surprising, since theoretical psychologists have criticized mainstream psychologists for failing to participate in the conceptual analytic rigor they themselves advocate (e.g., Machado & Silva, 2007; Petocz & Newberry, 2010; Racine & Slaney, 2013).
Moreover, different levels of conceptual scrutiny appear in theorists’ critiques, adding to the muddles. For example, Lisa Osbeck (2021) notes how some theorists press the problematic use of “population level statistics to make knowledge claims about individuals. . . . [The descriptors] ignorance, confusion, obstinacy, inertia, comfort, incorrigibility, recalcitrance, disregard [which are used] to characterize psychology as a discipline,” are dispositional “qualities typically used to describe persons.” This tendency “could be taken as indicative of a category mistake. . . . Persons can be described as ignorant or stubborn or confused, but disciplines cannot.” Such critics could be “charged with demonstrating a similar slippage” as that with which they charge psychology: applying aggregate findings to individuals (pp. 123–124).
With an eye toward advancing conceptual clarity in relation to scientism, I review definitions of “scientism” offered by philosophers of science, so as to contextualize the meanings and uses that appear in psychology. These of course depend on understandings of science itself, including common conceptions of psychological science that theorists work to broaden. And to sharpen our understanding of applications of scientism, I deploy such contrast classes as pseudoscience, bad science, and antiscience, which are often implicated in charges of scientism and thereby heighten conceptual disarray. I then emphasize how the term has been applied to mainstream psychology by theorists who advance ways to eliminate psychology’s scientism. Their remedies range from advocating various forms and degrees of repair within mainstream grounding frameworks and practices to eliminating those frameworks and practices. The former entails providing a thinly conceived psychological science with essential ethical, ontological, and epistemological nutrients that inform research practice, whereas the latter entails demolishing mainstream psychological science altogether, on grounds that it is irreparable and/or irredeemable, especially in its misuse of natural-science methods and related disregard of lived experience. These remedies cover extensive territory and may overlap, as theorists call for a critically appreciative approach to understanding the psychological dimensions of personhood. This approach requires reconsidering conceptions and aims of psychological science, as theorists shun conventional searches for causal mechanisms that predict behavior, to put the lived experience of situated persons front and center.
In light of the scientific reform advanced by theoretical psychologists, I question whether calling the mainstream scientistic is likely to help in achieving their disciplinary goals. If not, what might be a more productive way to proceed?
Signs of scientism according to philosophers of science
Boudry (2017) stated that “there is no consensus on the meaning of the term scientism”: It may refer to an excessive deference to science . . ., an unhealthy obsession with Grand Unifying Theories, or a bad habit of denigrating disciplines other than the natural sciences. . . . [Others] use the term to criticize overblown confidence in the future progress of science. . . . The most crucial aspect of scientism [according to Sorell, 1991/2002] is “the thought that the scientific is much more valuable than the non-scientific.” (p. 32)
Prominent philosopher of science Susan Haack (2013) famously delineated “Six Signs of Scientism,” which overlap with Boudry’s gloss: (a) “Honorific Use of Science and Its Cognates,” by way of “generic terms of epistemic praise” (p. 107); (b) “Inappropriately Borrowed Scientific Trappings,” which entail “borrowing scientific tools and techniques . . . for display rather than for serious use” (pp. 109–110); (c) “Preoccupation with ‘The Problem of Demarcation’,” which entails failure to accept that “the term ‘science’ simply has no very clear boundaries: the reference of the term is fuzzy, indeterminate” (pp. 111–112); (d) “The Quest for ‘Scientific Method’,” which misses the point that “there is no single scientific method, but many different scientific methods in different areas of science” (p. 114). Haack (2003) also maintained that science is not “in possession of a special method of inquiry unavailable to historians or detectives or the rest of us” (p. 95); (e) “Looking to the Sciences for Answers beyond Their Scope,” most notably, questions of values, normative questions (pp. 115–118); (f) “Denigrating the Non-Scientific,” such that “not only is it scientism to assume that scientific inquiry is inherently better than other kinds of inquiry; it is also scientism to assume that science is inherently more valuable than literature (or art, music, etc.)” 3 (p. 119).
The all-important demarcation question—the kinds of inquiry that may be rightly called scientific—goes hand in glove with questions about what constitutes scientific methods. In psychology, this entails determining how best to acquire knowledge that deserves the twin descriptors “scientific” and “psychological,” especially as humanities-based methods are incorporated.
Charges of scientism in psychology
Charges of scientism in mainstream psychology enumerate its many worrisome implications, owing to dismissive attitudes of mainstream psychologists toward theorists’ critiques. These attitudes have been described as reflecting ignorance, obstinacy, disregard, and incorrigibility, among other pejoratives (Lamiell & Slaney, 2021; Osbeck, 2021, p. 123), and allegedly perpetuate psychologists’ uncritical application of natural-science methods. This in turn conduces to the reductionism that evades the lived experience of the situated person, which should be the subject of psychology, according to many theorists.
Theoretical psychologist Richard Williams (2015) articulated four transdisciplinary tenets of scientism: (a) “Only certifiably scientific knowledge counts as real knowledge” (cf. Haack’s, 2013, “f”); (b) “The methods and assumptions underlying the natural sciences . . . are appropriate for all sciences, including, prominently, the social and human sciences” (cf. Haack’s “d”); (c) “Scientism exudes and promotes an exaggerated confidence in science” (cf. Haack’s “e”); (d) “Scientism makes metaphysical claims [such that] the world must really be like the methods of contemporary natural sciences assume it to be” 4 (pp. 6–7). He then explains how these “hijack science” in psychology, owing to an “exaggerated confidence in empirical science”; seeking a unified science via the same “grounding metaphysical and epistemological commitments” of the natural sciences; claiming that real knowledge is gained only from “certifiably scientific knowledge”; and maintaining that “naturalistic materialism offers a full account of the nature of the world,” including the human world (Williams & Gantt, 2018, pp. 8–10).
Transcending Haack’s (2013) signs of scientism, Williams (2015) finds unwarranted metaphysical claims and assumptions to be constitutive of scientism: Scientism entails . . . that there is no rational order inherent in the world itself. . . . There is an order to things and events, but an order governed by external laws that determine the behavior of matter from the outside and/or reflect how the rational mind works. For scientism, this lawful order is manifest in cause–effect relationships and in particular types of “hard” determinism. . . . Understanding is not of the order present in the nature of things, but rather of the laws that operate on things. There is likewise no telos in the world. . . . In the human world, commitment to this principle obviates freedom of the will and any meaningful human agency. . . . Scientism thus entails a commitment to mechanism. (pp. 11–12)
“Commitment to mechanism” in turn entails commitment to materialism: “Materialism is the metaphysics of scientism, and metaphysics is really just physics” (Williams, 2015, p. 12). Such reduction of metaphysics to physics (What would Aristotle say!) purportedly obliterates from psychology (and all human sciences) any hope of transcending our materiality, by means of the human agency that Williams champions (Williams & Gantt, 2022).
Many who object to this metaphysical equation also question the (uncritical) application of natural-science practices (e.g., measurement and statistics) to the human sciences (see, e.g., Lamiell, 2019; Michell, 2003, 2020, 2021; Slaney, 2021; Tafreshi et al., 2016; Teo, 2021). Among other problems, these applications are often taken to imply a reduction of mind to matter that obeys the mechanistic laws of the universe, which can, in a circular turn, be discovered by the methods that follow from a naturalistic metaphysics.
This metaphysical reduction (see Note 4) conduces to a different kind of “epistemic violence” than that described by theoretical psychologists who explain how unwarranted psychological claims about othered peoples advance their further oppression (e.g., Held, 2020; Teo, 2017). Reductive metaphysics, by contrast, obliterates everyone’s humanity, in reducing us all to material systems that must be studied in the same ways as matter—we are all dehumanized. Critical theorist Thomas Teo’s (2021) case for an “ethico-onto-epistemology” that does justice to the subject matter of psychology covers both forms of epistemic violence.
Scientism or hyper-science?
In calling mainstream psychology a “hyper-science,” Teo (2020) does not implicitly deny its scientism. But because his view is particularly nuanced, it is worth a closer look: I submit that psychology is a hyper-science, which is a parsimonious concept that accounts for the many problem appearances in the science and practice of psychology. . . . A hyper-science uses ideal and material techniques to elide the fact that it is not a natural science; inflates and complicates its methodological activities in order to conceal the temporality and contextuality of psychological phenomena; and incessantly refers to itself as a science in order to make up for its lack of substance and content. (p. 761)
This relates to Haack’s (2013) “b”—“inappropriately borrowed scientific trappings [tools and techniques] . . . for display” (p. 110). Yet Teo (2020) maintains that psychology can, in principle, be a science: This is not to suggest that psychology possesses no scientific features (e.g., the systematic study of a topic) . . . but rather that psychology erroneously attempts to emulate traditional sciences like physics, chemistry, and more recently biology and medicine. . . . In reality, given the dualistic nature of psychological objects (cultural-historical and natural), the academic discipline of psychology would need to rely as much on the psychological sciences as on the psychological humanities in order to advance (Teo, 2017). This is not accomplished through the self-deception of a hyper-science. (p. 761)
In considering psychology a hyper-science which entails “concealment” and “self-deception,” Teo questions the integrity of mainstream practice. Yet other theoretical psychologists are more explicitly condemnatory: Fiona Hibberd (2021) describes “psychology’s ongoing insulation [from theoretical work as] an ingrained not wanting to know” (p. 30). This sounds like a willful ignorance, a refusal to know. Richard Hohn (2021) speaks of the mainstream’s “intransigence” (p. 39). James Lamiell (2019) points to the mainstream’s “incorrigibility.”
Mainstream psychology’s critics do not typically call it a pseudoscience (though we shall encounter one such instance). And Teo in particular softens the blow, in maintaining that a fuller attention to subjectivity than can be found in mainstream work does not suggest replacing it altogether: “A theory of subjectivity needs not only the results of the psychological sciences but also of the psychological humanities (Teo, 2017)” (Teo, 2020, p. 764). This could be taken to imply that mainstream psychology has its place, as long as it stays in its lane, as stipulated by its critics—a position that is not new, 5 but that is gaining purchase once again. Can charges of scientism help accomplish that goal?
Uses and abuses of the term “scientism”: What is it meant to accomplish?
According to philosophers of science, two especially prominent reasons for making accusations of scientism are its function as (a) a strategy by which to immunize the accusers’ fields from scientific criticism and as (b) a means to demarcate disciplines widely accepted as bona fide sciences from those seen to proclaim their scientific status wrongly. Reviewing these helps to contextualize the way charges of scientism are meant to function in psychology.
Functions of charges of scientism beyond psychology
Immunization strategy
Philosopher Jonathan Beale (2019) states that charges of “scientism” against a discipline are made to protect or “immunize [the chargers’] domains . . . from scientific criticism or expansion” (p. 83). As Stephen Law (2017) puts it, charges of scientism allow for “criticism to be casually brushed aside. . . . The mantra has become a convenient, immunizing factoid that can be wheeled out whenever a scientific threat to belief rears its head” (p. 141). Theology/religion (Blackford, 2017), alternative-medicine (Edis, 2017), and new-age enterprises (Law, 2017) are often cited as domains that seek such immunity.
Boudry (2017), too, mentions those who accuse others of “scientism” to inoculate their own enterprises against scientific criticism: People of all stripes are quick to trot out the scientism gambit whenever some scientific theory encroaches on their turf or threatens their world view. Mediums and psychics use it to ward off inquisitive minds (Law, 2011). Religious believers hurl it around to protect sacred doctrine from the advances of science (Boudry, 2015; Clark, 2015). Postmodern relativists press it into service to “unmask” the pretensions and imperialist ambitions of science. . . . Even some philosophers and humanities scholars seem overly anxious that zealous scientists are bent on a hostile takeover of their discipline, and have tended to use the word scientism in a defensive or poorly justified fashion (Pinker, 2013; Wieseltier, 2013). (p. 33)
Russell Blackford (2017) advocates eliminating “scientism” from our lexicon: “The word carries too much theological baggage—as seen in its OED definition, its history, and its current weaponizing by theologians and religious apologists” (p. 27). In place of all-too-facilely declaring various forms of inquiry to be scientistic, he calls for a rich vocabulary “to scrutinize unfortunate intellectual trends and their possible connections” (p. 28).
Physicist Taner Edis (2017) distinguishes “harmless and harmful scientisms.” Harmful scientisms include “physicists disrespecting philosophy,” which Edis calls “philistine scientism”: dismissing what appears “woolly and nonscientific without a proper appreciation of how a discipline might produce genuine knowledge” (p. 89; see Held, 2019). Harmless scientism “depends on a broad understanding of science, including not just the natural and social sciences but those aspects of mathematics, philosophy, and the humanities most concerned with investigation and explanation” and “seeks connections and coherence, not intellectual conquest” (Edis, 2017, p. 89). The problem is, if scientism can be seen as virtuous, its application to mainstream psychology may be taken as a badge of honor, 6 not a scarlet letter.
Demarcation strategy
Boudry (2017) distinguishes “the normative demarcation between good science and pseudoscience and the territorial demarcation between science and other academic endeavors” (p. 39) that are “valuable in their own right [including] metaphysics and everyday knowledge” (Boudry & Pigliucci, 2017, p. 3). Boudry and Pigliucci aim to “figure out the limits of science itself” (p. 3; see Pigliucci & Boudry, 2013). With calls for epistemological continuity across disciplines (see Note 3), this is no minor undertaking.
Functions of charges of scientism in psychology
When theoretical psychologists use the term “scientistic,” they do so to criticize a range of practices in mainstream psychological science. I see no indications of their using scientism as an immunizing strategy, though the problem of demarcation certainly appears prominently in disciplinary psychology. In recent years, theorists have worked to broaden what is considered scientific, especially by expanding the kinds of methods that may produce valid knowledge about persons. They also continue to draw lines of demarcation between the human and natural sciences, while propounding greater qualification of the claims made by psychological scientists, given their alleged overreach. 7
Theorists have advocated more robust continuity with the humanities not only by treating psychology as a human science but also by the expressly named “psychological humanities” (e.g., Gantt & Williams, 2018; Held, 2021; Slaney, 2020; Sugarman & Martin, 2020b; Teo, 2017). Those who apply the term “scientistic” to the mainstream often find it wrongfully constricted, narrowed, or exclusionary. This, despite its overreach (Gantt & Williams, 2018), in transcending its purview by deploying a flawed epistemology that claims more for scientific discoveries in psychology than are warranted. I find irony not only in accusing the mainstream, broadly construed, of both overreach and constriction, but also in wanting to eliminate many of the methods used therein, thereby engaging in methodological constriction.
For example, Slife et al. (2018) exemplify concerns about constriction, in stating that “scientism . . . is the affirmation of a particular set of method assumptions to the exclusion of other method assumptions. This conscious or unconscious narrowing . . . is what distinguishes scientism from science” (p. 69). Williams and Gantt (2018) state that “scientism demands of a particular circumscribed species of science what it simply cannot provide, namely apodictic comprehension of our human being . . . the origin, substance, and meaning of humanity itself, and all within a restrictive language of naturalistic materialism” (p. 6). And in endorsing Gantt and Williams’s edited book, Mark Freeman (2018) lauded their corrective approach to what he deems the “reigning, largely ‘scientistic,’ view of [i.e., existence of scientism within] psychology”: By alerting us to the parochial nature of the dominant view, [the contributors to this book] pave the way toward fashioning not only a broader more inclusive perspective on what psychological inquiry might be but a vastly expanded, more humanly adequate, vision of the discipline itself.
To be sure, the academy’s traditional disciplinary lines of demarcation have been challenged by the growing list of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary studies. Moreover, Osbeck et al. (2011) demonstrated the many psychological commonalities of natural and human/social scientists in practice. 8 Yet even some humanists have circled their disciplinary wagons, taking the humanities to task for the unwelcome scientism they increasingly find within their midst (see Held, 2021; Høyrup, 2000; Scruton, 2015). In short, there is resistance to boundary-challenging, open-up-the borders change within the very humanities disciplines with which theoretical psychologists seek border crossings most.
Having situated psychology’s scientism within a multidisciplinary context, I turn to concepts that appear regularly in the literature on scientism: these “contrast classes” (as I consider them) are often implicated (if not explicitly mentioned) in charges of scientism, thereby creating muddles about just what those charges entail. Although these concepts overlap, I present them in sequence, with ways they may pertain to charges of scientism within psychology.
Does scientism entail antiscience, pseudoscience, and/or bad science?
When critics make charges of scientism, they sometimes implicate antiscientific attitudes on the part of those charged. And even if not, critics often consider the resulting product to be bad science, if not pseudoscience.
Scientism and antiscience
Beale (2019) finds common danger in scientistic and antiscientific attitudes, which may not be as opposed as thought: Scientism [excessive deference to science] carries anti-scientific baggage. . . . Putnam (1982, 147) once described scientism as “one of the most dangerous contemporary intellectual tendencies.” Anti-science could be described in the same way. Anti-science is at least as dangerous as excessive science enthusiasm; and if scientism is a means for cloaking anti-science, so much the worse for scientism. (p. 84)
This passage may be read in alternative ways. On one reading, when the enthusiasm for a science exceeds what that science can deliver (it overreaches), its proponents express such excessive enthusiasm (i.e., express their scientistic attitudes) to hide their deep-seated antiscientific attitudes. If so, I find it hard to believe that, to the extent that mainstream psychologists express excessive enthusiasm about their science, they do so to hide their antiscientific attitudes. On another reading, those who make charges of scientism against a discipline implicate their own antiscientific attitudes in so doing. Does this attitude apply to theoretical psychologists who accuse the mainstream of scientism?
Theorists who decry mainstream psychology’s scientism seemingly do so in the name of science. Rather than propounding an antiscientific attitude, they reject any psychological science that strikes them as reductionist: it loses the subject of personhood—of individual subjectivity—and so is scientistic in just that way. Theoretical psychologist Jack Martin (2021) challenges those who criticize his views about mainstream psychology as reflecting an antiscience attitude on his part: I have become quite accustomed to being described and dismissed as “anti-science.” . . . I am not against science. It is pseudo-empiricism and scientism I find misleading and worrisome. In the absence of a bona fide scientific and empirical psychology that speaks to the individual person [emphasis added], I firmly believe that a turn to detailed biographical life studies of persons will tell us more about individual human beings than any scientific posturing. (p. 110)
In defending himself against charges of an antiscience attitude, Martin finds pseudoscience (or what he calls “pseudo-empiricism” and “scientific posturing”) in the scientism of mainstream psychology. Philosopher Sven Ove Hansson (2017) notes that “pseudoscience and anti-science are sometimes difficult to distinguish. Promoters of some pseudosciences (notably homeopathy) tend to be ambiguous about opposition to science and claims that they themselves represent the best science” (p. 12).
Scientism and pseudoscience
Do theorists’ charges of scientism in mainstream psychology mean that the mainstream should be likened to homeopathy, in that it too is a pseudoscience whose practitioners wrongly think their methods constitute the best science? Theoretical psychologist Fred Wertz (2018) said that “the rejection of scientism can free psychology to develop as a genuine science of mental life, rather than being confined to mimicry of physical science, which can only amount to psychology being a pseudoscience of mental life” (p. 111). Wertz does not accuse mainstream psychology of being a pseudoscience in all respects; it is only a pseudoscience of mental life defined in the phenomenological terms he advocates (also see Wertz, 2016).
The term “pseudoscience,” like “scientism,” does not have one agreed-upon meaning and application. Historian of science and Skeptic Society founder Michael Shermer (2013) offered such “pseudonyms for pseudoscience as ‘bad science,’ ‘junk science,’ ‘voodoo science,’ ‘crackpot science,’ [and] ‘pathological science’” (p. 203). These may overlap, yet they are hardly identical semantically. Biologist and philosopher Martin Mahner (2013) wrote that a scientist who follows a sloppy and careless experimental protocol, or who even omits a few data from [their] report to obtain “smoother” graphs and results (which border on scientific fraud), is a bad scientist but not (yet) a pseudoscientist. (p. 31)
And philosopher James Ladyman (2013) similarly stated that “even very bad science that is advocated as good science is not necessarily aptly described as pseudoscience” (p. 46).
Scientism and bad science
I have yet to find any who take mainstream psychology to be scientistic to also apply to it such pejoratives as “junk science” or “crackpot science.” Yet the term “bad science” is surely implied if not used explicitly by theorists, when they refer to mainstream psychology as a “pseudoscience of mental life” (Wertz, 2018) or “pseudo-empiricism” (Martin, 2021). If mainstream psychology fails to study the lived experience of persons that should be the subject matter of psychology, then how can it be a good science of psychology? And if mainstream psychology is not a good science of psychology, it must be a bad science of psychology (if not a pseudoscience). Moreover, if mainstream psychology is a bad science to the point of reflecting the relentless incorrigibility of its practitioners, why would theoretical psychologists who assert mainstream psychology’s scientism even consider working within any of its frameworks?
Lamiell (2019) has written of mainstream psychology’s “incorrigibility” owing not least to its “statisticism.” In this 2018 statement, Lamiell expressly uses the term “bad science”: “In the epistemic domain, contemporary researchers customarily overstate what they may justifiably claim to know on the basis of their research findings. This is bad science” (p. 36).
The question whether contemporary researchers customarily overstate what they can claim with warrant is open to question. Here I turn to solutions that theoretical psychologists have proposed, to remedy the forms of scientism they find in the mainstream.
Theorists’ proposed solutions to psychology’s scientism
Despite advancing various solutions, theorists converge thematically in assessing what may be rightly considered scientific in psychology. Expanding the range of methods that can produce valid psychological knowledge is prominent. This entails moving mainstream researchers to cast a critical eye on their own conceptions of psychological science, with its natural-science methodology. Yet theorist Kathleen Slaney (2021) finds a “waning appetite for critical methodology in psychology” (p. 86). She offers three categories that form a spectrum of reform in which a critic could occupy multiple categories: (a) “Some things are broke but just need a tune-up”; (b) “Many things are broke and an overhaul is needed”; (c) “It’s a write-off and should be scrapped” (p. 89).
9
In distinguishing “restitutive versus radical methodological critique,” she laments the “disconnect between methodologists and researchers” (pp. 95–96): Whether due to lack of awareness, apathy, or resistance to enacting methodological change, one sees very little evidence of critical engagement with methodological theory and practice among psychological researchers. . . . There is no denying that persistent critique of certain methods has had minimal measurable impact on researchers’ uses of them and interpretations made on the basis of them. (pp. 86–87)
Although theorists generally agree about the need for philosophically grounded circumspection that informs all aspects of research-psychology practice, apropos of Slaney (2021), opinions vary about how restitutive versus radical reform should be (see Note 9). For instance, Teo and Wendt (2020) recommend methodological “lanes” based on the kinds of questions asked: “To study gender wage gaps, or income or wealth inequality, one needs quantitative studies. In order to study the consequences of those inequalities one can use quantitative and/or qualitative studies. The lived experience of marginalization requires qualitative studies” (p. 373). They maintain that “traditional empirical research [can be] progressive,” if the scientist does not have “an essentialist or absolutist understanding of either quantitative or qualitative research” (p. 373).
Slaney (2021) says she understands mainstream resistance to “more drastic critiques of disciplinary practices—i.e., those that endorse an abandonment of the entire enterprise” (p. 86). But she is perplexed that less radical critiques, those that “retain a general commitment to the forms of empirical inquiry and methods upon which contemporary psychological science is founded[,] have gained so little traction” (p. 86). Filling the explanatory gap are theorists’ charges of mainstream psychologists’ incorrigibility, obstinacy, ignorance, and inertia (see Osbeck, 2021).
Humanities to the rescue
In A Humanities Approach to the Psychology of Personhood, editors Jeff Sugarman and Jack Martin (2020a) state that their “aim is to offer the possibility of greater psychological understanding by encouraging a more sophisticated multiperspectival ethos that legitimizes and incorporates approaches adopted from the humanities” (p. 5). Incorporation suggests a broadening, one in which transdisciplinary harmony—forms of epistemic continuity that invite interdisciplinarity—is said to be attainable. Occupying what seems like the less radical end of reform, they state that “the psychological humanities contrast with, yet complement, psychological science” (p. 1).
Clarification of the epistemic criteria by which psychologists might properly accept or reject the methods and knowledge claims of diverse humanities disciplines would be helpful. After all, there is considerable conflict among humanities scholars about epistemic matters, conflict which reflects problems that are surprisingly similar to the problems in psychology that are showcased by theorists (Held, 2021): whereas some humanities scholars regrettably find proliferating varieties of scientism in their ranks (Høyrup, 2000; Scruton, 2015; see Note 2), others celebrate them as sources of progressive inspiration. 10
Freeman (2020) exemplifies the latter in his so-called “most radical claim”: “Much of the discipline, in its neglect of the literary structure of human life, has been misconceived and . . . consequently, entirely new ways of conceiving the discipline are called for” (p. 30). He maintains that works of psychology [can] become works of literature [which] bring us nearer to life. . . . They will be works of a unique sort—hybrid forms . . . that hover in the space between science and art, perhaps serving to diminish the distance between the two. (p. 46)
How many psychologists could so hover? Sigmund Koch (1961), in asserting psychology’s need for “many individuals having [scientific] sensitivities overlapping with those of the humanist,” regretted that we cannot expect to find this dual talent “in even remotely adequate numbers” (p. 639). In his “hybrid” psychology, Freeman (2020) might seem to hover somewhere between greater and lesser degrees of reform, though his call for “entirely new ways of conceiving the discipline” (p. 30) sounds like he recommends a complete overhaul.
Developmental theorist Anna Stetsenko (2020) calls for a “truly revolutionary and radical agency” in psychology (p. 66). She advocates “bringing together an integrative understanding of our current and potentially catastrophic condition by merging insights from the humanities, sciences, and arts” (p. 66). She deems this move “critical for resisting the dominance of a dogmatic scientism that is a futile quest for universal, value-free, apolitical, and ahistorical knowledge regrettably prevalent these days, especially, and quite ironically, in psychology” (pp. 66–67).
Two questions about this last statement arise. First, can scientism be nondogmatic? Dogmatism seems built into the very idea of scientism, at least for those who see it as impeding science. Second, adding Williams’s (2015) charge of psychology’s futile scientistic search for “apodictic understanding” to Stetsenko’s (2020) charge of psychology’s “futile quest for universal, value-free, apolitical, and ahistorical knowledge” makes me wonder just how these quests prevail in mainstream research. Do they prevail explicitly—or only implicitly, in the use of natural-science methods and/or in the omission of experiential phenomena?
Because those in the most radical reformist camps reject mainstream psychological science in total, why have they persisted in rehearsing the mainstream’s purported ills? Why not just move on? Perhaps the most separatist among them still hold out hope for mainstream redemption, in presenting increasingly refined critique with increasing alarm.
Conclusions
Having reviewed some of the many meanings and uses of the term “scientism,” I ask theoretical psychologists to consider whether their use of the term has helped or hindered, clarified or obfuscated, their intended message and its impact. Moreover, given the professed scientistic overreach of mainstream psychologists, theorists might also assess different mainstream research programs with the nuanced specificity they themselves prize. Might theorists be overreaching when they tar mainstream psychology in toto with such a broad critical brush, to the point perhaps of hyper-criticality?
To that point, Tissaw and Osbeck (2007) considered whether some theorists’ critiques signaled “an undercurrent of zealotry and possibly even arrogance of which we, too, might be guilty.” They asked the mainstream’s critics to reflect more critically upon their own “assumptions, biases and goals” (p. 157). Osbeck et al. (2007) wondered whether mainstream critics have “reified and emulated . . . a particular view of science against strategies of critiques which, despite worthy efforts, seem to have perpetuated insularity” (p. 259).
Apropos of theorists’ various reformist goals, I offer some overarching positions that reflect different degrees of radicality based on the nature of the reform deemed necessary.
First, if psychology defined as the study of mental life/lived experience is psychology’s only proper subject matter and most psychologists’ investigations do not capture that, then a newly named discipline might be in order—one that reflects the study of mental life defined as such. Perhaps a science of—psychological psychology? Although this may sound flippant, I intend it with all due seriousness, in light of theorists who maintain that mainstream psychology is not psychological in the only sense of “psychological” that makes sense to them. This, even if mainstream scientific psychology captures some (nonpsychological) phenomena legitimately. 11
Second, if mainstream psychology captures the subject matter of mental life/lived experience but only in a highly limited or occasional way, yet pretends to be the whole of psychology, then it may indeed be a pretentious science in just that overreaching way. In that case, it must be amended accordingly.
Third, if mainstream psychology is not capturing anything real, either in behavioral, neuroscientific, or experiential terms, whether owing to its misguided use of natural-science methods or otherwise, then it should perhaps be seen as a pseudoscience in some ways akin to astrology. In that case, it must be completely eradicated and replaced.
All of these possibilities call on mainstream psychologists to engage in the many forms of self-critical, analytical, conceptual work that theorists have advocated for decades, with little to show for their unceasing efforts.
Despite their differences, these options treat the mainstream as the monolithic entity theorists have often construed it to be. If we are not well acquainted with distinct research programs within the allegedly monolithic mainstream, we are unlikely to aim critiques at each distinct program, in all their particularity. This could make critiques harder to dismiss (see Held, 2020, for examples). Critics’ tendency to call out mainstream psychology monolithically may be seen as analogous to the stereotyping of othered peoples, those with whom we are unfamiliar and who may thereby be denigrated for that reason. If we are not looking for virtue—whether in specific peoples or in specific research programs in psychological science—we are less likely to find it.
Moreover, in light of theorists’ calls for broader understanding of science, understanding that transcends reliance on natural-science epistemologies/methodologies, we might well consider taking a more inclusive stance toward the discipline we were drawn to enter professionally—with all its many flaws. Because many psychological theorists initially studied that empirical science and its practical applications, many are well positioned to extend their theoretical work into conducting the kinds of empirical science they propound, as have a number of theorists
12
in recent years. Why sustain in psychological science the divide between theoretical and empirical activity that constitutes the very disciplinary physics from whose underlying metaphysics and epistemologies many theoretical psychologists have been determined to distance psychology (Held, 2019), especially since it is highly likely that theorists’ critiques will continue to be ignored? As Lamiell and Slaney (2021) put it: Problematic beliefs and assumptions have continued to dominate within the mainstream of the field, much as if no critiques had ever been mounted. . . . In short . . . the response within the mainstream to the critiques has been to simply ignore them. (p. 1)
And so we have arrived at a stalemate. Because more than half a century of critiques have not made a dent, I suggest that theorists who are so moved put their prescriptions to work in conceptually enlightened empirical projects that reflect their dual (theoretical/empirical) talents. 13 This would not only be a way to practice the nonscientistic psychology that is preached, but would also constitute another venue in which to broaden and build a psychological science that explicitly investigates lived experience, with preferable methods—along with phenomena that have been shortchanged. Build a better, scientism-free psychological science, by intertwining (meta)theoretical 14 practice and empirical practice tightly and directly. Then others just might come.
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
