Clegg - Self-Observation in the Social Sciences

Psychology hasfrom its beginning in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuriesbeen ambivalent as to its primary object of investigationthe psyche (Rosa 2007). It has gone through various fashions of denying that objectand replacing it with othersbehavior, cognition, and even positive psychology. Different -isms have dominated the minds of psychologistsfrom behaviorism to cognitivism to evolutionism and socioculturalism. Who knows what fashionlabeled by an -ismcomes next, but what is clear is that invention and proliferation of such schools of thought distances psychologys research enterprise precisely from what science needs to doto study its object phenomena. If a psychologist claims I take a X-ist (or Y-ian, e.g., vygotskian) perspective on Z one can guarantee that Z will be pushed into a framework of an orthodox belief system, rather than kept as the source for innovative understanding. The -isms fixate the perspective takenrather than enable its flexible move. They try to standardize science, while scientific discovery necessarily runs ahead of any effort toward its fixation. Categorization units of thought systemsschools in science or systems in psychologymay be useful for didactic purposes in teaching beginning undergraduates to navigate through the grand confusion of psychological perspectives. Yet, such systematization fails to capture the essence of scienceto always be striving toward the horizons that we do not know yet. Science is not about sure knowledge that we can proudly present to outsiders, but a discovery process (Valsiner 2012b, viii) of something less than knowledge (of the past) and not yet knowledge (in the presentsee Polanyi 1962, 135).

Psychological evidence does not come in neatly sealed packages. Knowledge is not a consumer productwith dates of usability institutionally printed on the packages. Thus, any science operates on the outer frontier of knowledgerather than collects data by established proceduresstandardized methods. The latter are in vogue in psychology. In tandem with socially obligatory quantification of psychological phenomena into dataan operation proven to be fallacious (Michell 1999)psychology has generated a vast flow of empirical artifacts that do not stand the test of time, or reality. Phenomena in psychology have remained lostas my friend and former colleague Bob Cairns once eloquently pointed out (Cairns 1986). Psychologystriving to show its allegiance with what is supposed to be a sciencebecomes highly effective in that social game. The result of such success in social recognition is the failure in providing solutions to deep, basic, human problemsthat range from the deep privacy of sexuality to the hyperinflated public discourses about genocides, peace, democracy, and those heroic villains of the stock market that are easy to blame for any economic problem.