Fact Making in Psychology

Abstract

Autonomous scientific fact statements, independent of the circumstances in which they were made, are to be found in scientific textbooks, according to Kuhn and Latour. Introductory biology textbooks have few references, little acknowledgement of researchers, and few qualifications of the facts they present. This paper examines introductory psychology textbooks and finds little autonomous fact writing. Instead, when dealing with memory and with social interaction, psychology text-books use experiments to demonstrate generalizations, they qualify claims and refer extensively to the literature. A key feature is that psychology textbooks present experiments and other evidence as the content that the beginner must learn. Psychology presents paradigms of doing, not of knowing. Psychology's struggle to make scientific knowledge is presented in the textbooks, but the knowledge is not autonomous. Psychological knowledge always carries evidence with it, indicating that the possibility of disagreement is ever-present. This raises issues about how psychological knowledge becomes accepted and about the place of academic fact making in the establishment of psychological regimes of truth.