Psychology and the Question of Agency

2. Reductionism in Psychology

17 Chapter Two Reductionism in Psychology THE NATURALISTIC PROJECT that attempts to explain psychological kinds (human experience, understanding, thought, and action) according to empirical regularities and causal laws, is possible only if one holds the belief that psychological phenomena can be reduced to what are thought to be more basic, constitutive phenomena amenable to the methods of natural science. Psychologists have primarily employed five reductive strategies : (a) biological, (b) psychometric, (c) behavioral, (d) neurophysiological , and (e) computational. Various combinations of these have been attempted as well. All of these reductive strategies, as employed in programs of psychological research, attempt to remove psychological kinds from the everyday historical, sociocultural contexts that, in large part, create and maintain them. Once everyday psychological phenomena are reduced, whatever remains is placed in highly controlled, idealized laboratory settings and/or formal psychometric–statistical or logical systems. By the time research psychologists set to work, they no longer are dealing with human psychological activity in its usual historical, sociocultural surroundings; instead, they are dealing with reflexes, personality factors, operant classes, patterns of cerebral excitation and inhibition, semantic and procedural networks, and so forth. As we shall see in chapter 3, such language contrasts sharply with an agentic discourse of beliefs, understanding , reasons, purposes, choices, and actions. In commenting on the history of reductionism in the human sciences in general, Rüdiger Safranski (1998) recently has remarked: 17 18 Psychology and the Question of Agency It is astonishing how, ever since the middle of the nineteenth century. . . there has suddenly been a universal desire to make Man “small.”That is when the thought pattern of “Man is nothing other than ___” began to advance. . . . This [reductionism] of the second half of the nineteenth century would achieve the trick of thinking of Man as “little” but doing great things with him—provided one wishes to describe the scientized civilization, from which we are all benefiting, as “great.” (p. 29) Without necessarily joining in Safranski’s implied diminution of the successes of natural science in areas such as physics, chemistry, and some branches of biology, it is indeed remarkable the extent to which psychologists have chosen to reduce their subject matter so that they can view themselves as “natural scientists of the psyche.” If one is committed to what one regards as scientific methodology above and beyond any concern with understanding focal phenomena as they really are, the seductive power of reductionism comes into focus.What we are calling scientism includes both the misunderstanding, and misapplication of the methods of natural science to phenomena that are not indifferent natural kinds.To make such scientism plausible to psychologists requires a reduction of interactive, psychological kinds to indifferent, natural kinds.This maneuver involves stripping psychological kinds of the historical, sociocultural contexts in which they arise and are constituted and ignoring their agentic capacity to interact with the ways in which they are classified and studied. A HISTORICAL SKETCH Perhaps the first major program of reductionism in disciplinary psychology was the attempt, at the end of the nineteenth century, and the beginning of the twentieth century, to erect a psychological science on a biological basis. As previously mentioned, comparative psychology provided the required link to biology. By using terms such as reflex, instinct, habit, and behavior to refer equally to either the involuntary activity of frogs and rats or to the reflections and intentional actions of adult humans, comparative and other psychologists constructed what they regarded as a seamless continuum spanning the activity of all organisms. For example, early functionalists like James Angell (1913) described the general direction of their work as promoting a “sympathetic acceptance of the behavior concept as a general term under which to subsume minor distinctions in modes of action whether conscious or unconscious” (pp. 258–259). Thus, by the time that Watson began his program of full-scale behavioral reduction, the ground already had been prepared for assuming a common set of concepts and principles that would span biological, social, and psychological levels of human and subhuman activity. In a very short time Reductionism in Psychology 19 after Wundt’s early advocacy of a kind of social psychology based on the analysis of human cultural products and his championing of introspection as a method for experimental psychology, anything mental, historical, social, or cultural was allowed to enter the world of psychological experimentation and research only as a stimulus external to...