Psychology: The Empirical Study of Epistemology and Phenomenology

Abstract

Though psychology is now fractured, it was not always so. Psychology formed as a distinct discipline when researchers tried to use empirical evidence to answer epistemological and phenomenological questions—questions about knowledge and experience. The current subdisciplines of psychology can be understood as putting emphasis on different parts of the answer to those very complicated questions. Even radical behaviorism, long treated as a pariah among approaches to psychology, can be understood as providing insights into nature of mundane, daily acts of knowing and experiencing. This can be seen in the tradition of descriptive mentalism that connects from Charles Sanders Peirce and William James through to the present. This line of thinking has the potential to unify the field, by allowing us to distinguish core from peripheral questions and to understand how the various interests of individual psychologists fit together, in service of an overarching goal.