Abstract
Psychology as part of philosophy and theology came to an end after mid-nineteenth century with Fechner’s and others’ introduction of a psychophysics defining a causal bridge from the physical world to the psyche. Psychology now shared the fate of the other humanistic disciplines, in danger of being eaten through the new gate to mechanistic causality and searching rescue in linguistic discourse without solid basis. Attempts to solve the problem through distinction between lower and higher mental functions, hierarchical systems, complexity, and holism are doomed to failure as long as being embedded in a mechanistic understanding of nature and of the individual’s interaction with nature. A modern understanding of nature going beyond mechanicism is needed but still does not solve the problem of the specificity of psychology in relation to natural science.
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Notes
- 1.
It makes no difference, in principle, whether the organization of the higher mental functions is understood in terms of associations or in terms of “dialectical synthesis,” “affective synthesis,” “abstraction,” or “generalization” (Valsiner, 2015), when the basic interaction between the individual subject and the world is reduced to stimulation, however, “artificial,” “cultural,” or sign mediated. None of these “humanist” or “dialectical” predicates in themselves save you from the procrustean bed of mechanicism.
But like mechanicism, as an approximation, in many ways is a useful tool dealing with inanimate nature, it may as well be useful in relation to humans when utilized within a frame of common sense. And some of Vygotsky’s instrumental concepts, as, e.g., the “zone of proximal development,” have been effective in educational and developmental psychology. But they do not contribute to the more basic solution of “the crisis in psychology.”
- 2.
However, Vygotsky also contributed to theory of motivation, personality, and development with very seminal analyses and concepts, e.g., with the Russian concept perezhivanie, which has no simple translation into English, but rather some combination of emotional experience and motivated interpretation, closer to the German “Erleben.” See editors’ notes in (Vygotsky, 1994) and discussion in (Mammen, 2016b).
- 3.
See my critique of the misuse of the concept of “degrees of freedom” in so-called hierarchical systems in Mammen (1997).
- 4.
These positions have some similarity with classical stances of nominalism and epiphenomenalism.
- 5.
As already mentioned “proximity” is often, in physics literature about quantum mechanics, referred to as “locality” in contrast to “non-locality.”
- 6.
This was predicted by Niels Bohr (1958) but opposed by many contemporary physicists, among them Albert Einstein (Einstein, Podolsky, & Rosen, 1935). The controversy was, however, definitely resolved in Bohr’s favor after his death by some epoch-making experiments (Aspect & Grangier, 1986). In fact the controversy can be seen as being about the general logic of interactions in nature and not tied to theoretical and experimental details only accessible to experts. In Mammen (2016c) I try to explain this logic with a fictive example referring to communication between people which has an analogue structure to quantum mechanical entanglement between distant particles.
- 7.
Bohr tried in many contexts (e.g., Bohr, 1958) to express this by referring to the uniqueness or individuality of quantum mechanical phenomena, perhaps with an inspiration from existentialism, but was apparently not understood by the contemporary scientific community.
- 8.
This is the classical opposition of existence and essence. However, essence should actually be replaced by appearance, as essence is rather the dynamics behind changing appearances of the same matter or existence under changing conditions—as revealed in experiments—or in a process of development, as revealed when following a living individual through time. See later section: “What is Knowledge of Laws of Nature Beyond Patterns of Regularity?”
- 9.
Even the founder of statistical interpretation of thermodynamics Ludvig Boltzmann tried!
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Mammen, J. (2017). The Permanent Crisis of Psychology. In: A New Logical Foundation for Psychology . SpringerBriefs in Psychology(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67783-5_3
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