The politics of psychology as a science: Some comments on research for and about the folk

Abstract

In the following, I explore the idea of psychology as a science in Barbara Held’s (2020) reading of Thomas Teo’s (and Klaus Holzkamp’s) distinction of research for and from versus about people. Held argues convincingly that research about people entails aspects for people and vice versa. In her view, to equate mainstream psychology research with research from above and critical/Indigenous research with research from below is an oversimplification. She concludes that Teo’s distinction is fuzzy and thus exhibits limited applicability. I want to argue that Teo’s distinction is useful in a political sense and under the premise of research from the standpoint of the subject.

Keywords

critical psychology epistemic violence mainstream politics subjectivity

An ant colony has as little to do with a human polity as a queen bee with the Queen of England.

(Markard, 2009, p. 101; author’s translation)

To structure my argument in this commentary, I will go over my reading of Held’s (2020) and Teo’s arguments in dedicated sections and add thoughts from the perspectives of Paul Natorp and Klaus Holzkamp.

Held

By taking “the epistemic bull by the horns” (Held, 2020, p. 350), Barbara Held argues that proponents of critical/Indigenous psychology value subjectivity and subjective experience and thus rely on a nonobjectivist epistemology in an attempt to reduce epistemic violence. Such epistemology they see applied, according to Held, if they engage in research of, from, and for instead of about people.

In my reading, Held (2020) argues that the distinction from above/from below does not hold true. Far from suggesting that the so called “critical-cum-Indigenous psychologist[s]” (p. 350) proposed such a distinction in error, however, Held suspects a political argument disguised as an epistemological one. She agrees with Tissaw and Osbeck (2007) that there is “no ‘mainstream’ that exists independent of specific research trajectories” (p. 160). I assume that she concurs with Valsiner (2012) as well when he suggests that,

“Critical psychology” . . . has developed its own contrarian social organization. By creating a new consensus group . . . critical psychology opens for itself a legitimate rhetoric domain of being critical of—while not attempting to change—the discipline. (p. 164)

In other words, Held (2020) seems to read the critical-cum-Indigenous psychologists as a political movement with interests beyond (or different from) the scientific agenda of establishing objective truth in line with a “non-true-for-relativist” epistemology (p. 351). Instead, she diagnoses the existence of “morally infused epistemic criteria [among] critical-cum-Indigenous psychologists” (p. 363).

Natorp

Teo argues that positivism cannot easily be equated with mainstream psychology. In his 2018 book, Outline of Theoretical Psychology, he acknowledges, albeit briefly, the role of the neo-Kantians, specifically Ernst Mach and his view that the subject matter of psychology are sensations rather than the things-in-themselves. I have argued elsewhere (Dege, 2020) that it seems worthwhile to examine the neo-Kantians, specifically Paul Natorp, and how they struggled with the role of psychology. In Allgemeine Psychologie nach Kritischer Methode, Natorp (2013) criticizes the psychology of his time for the same reasons critical psychologists criticize mainstream psychology today: an outdated set of methods, associationist thinking, lack of a proper understanding of the “psyche,” incapability of making statements about higher psychological functions, and so forth.

Instead of rectifying these issues however, Natorp (2013) identifies psychology as a special case: if psychology was a regular science (with “the mind” as its subject matter), its goal would be to establish objective facts about the workings of this mind. Such objective facts would—in adherence to the scientific method—be derived from subjective impressions that would be converted into their objective counterparts through scientific methods. And this is, Natorp attests, where the problem begins: this mind that psychology tries to capture is inherently subjective. If it is turned into something objective, it would be deprived of its central quality, that is subjectivity; the procedure would amount to an “assassination of consciousness” (Natorp, 2013, p. 176, author’s translation). Consequently, Natorp is critical of Dilthey’s (1894) and Windelband’s (1873) dualisms. For him, psychology does not qualify as Naturwissenschaft or Geisteswissenschaft since they both strive for objective statements—which, as Natorp explains, would be the death of consciousness. Instead, consciousness stands at the beginning of psychology.

Held (2020) reminds us that “critical-cum-Indigenous” (p. 350) psychologists do not necessarily dismiss objectivity “so long as its form accounts for (socioculturally) situated subjectivity” (p. 354). She also emphasizes that Teo holds on to objectivity as an academic virtue. I, however, believe that the intentions of many critical-cum-Indigenous psychologists are more in line with Natorp’s (2013) original idea: if objectivity is created from subjective impressions and subjective impressions are what psychology aims to study, why not go in reverse order and understand—from the point of departure of what is objectively given—the subjectivities that have led to those objective truths?

The subjective . . . is not relevant for the realization of the object. It is the basis of objective knowledge but it is put aside once it has done its duty. But precisely for this reason does it remain possible to go back to the subjective; it is always possible and always implied to raise the question about the subjective experience from which the objective emerged. (p. 69, author’s translation)

Teo’s understanding of the philosophy of science goes beyond texts from the early 20th century, of course. He is aware of the developments from Reichenbach’s classic distinction of a context of justification and a context of discovery (Reichenbach, 1938, pp. 6–7), to Kuhn (1962), Feyerabend (1993), the sociology of scientific knowledge (Bloor, 1999) and others. Philosophy of science these days does not speculate what psychology should do and what its place might be within a logical framework of responsibilities against which all the sciences are mapped. Instead, philosophy of science largely explores what psychology actually does, that is, how psychological concepts and research unfold political power. To that end, Teo (2018) adds the context of interpretation and the context of application to Reichenbach’s classic distinction and envisions psychology as a praxis of the reconstruction of subjectivity.

Teo

Thomas Teo emphasizes the from below versus from above (2018, p. 90) and for versus about distinctions (2013, p. 8) that Held (2020) takes issue with. Held claims that Teo’s (and Holzkamp’s) distinctions are “conceptually fuzzy” (p. 351) and she thus questions their usefulness/applicability. It appears to me that Teo is aware of such potential fuzziness, specifically if the distinctions are taken as epistemological markers. Teo makes use of such distinctions to start a process of reflection on the political consequences of various (mainstream) concepts. The distinctions, as Teo sees them, are useful in the context of interpretation and the context of application rather than the contexts of discovery or justification. Following Rose (1996), Teo writes:

It remains an important task for critical–theoretical psychologists to develop counter-concepts . . . for a critical evaluation of what is happening in psychology and the psydisciplines. . . . There is not a single method for how to develop such concepts; the only requirement is that they have a resisting and challenging function [emphasis added]. (2018, p. 90)

There is further evidence that conceptual fuzziness is not of much concern—or, to put that differently, conceptual clarity is not at the heart of the distinctions when Teo claims—like others before him—that traditional concepts can be used to serve critical purposes. That is to say: Teo (2018) seems to agree with Held that research from above can be used to serve the interests from below (p. 91). Moreover, Teo seems to emphasize that the real problem consists in the psychologization of individuals, entire folk, institutions, and so forth: instead of investigating the socioeconomic underpinnings of social and/or personal phenomena including power structures, the distribution of material goods, access to knowledge, and so forth, mainstream psychological research, in Teo’s understanding, too often remains on the level of psychological constructions and simulations that exist because psychology has been practiced in the first place; creating a self-perpetuating loop. Teo hopes to interfere with that loop by asking questions such as “Who is this research for?” and “What interests does it serve?” (see Teo, 2018, pp. 90–94).

Holzkamp

Held (2020) argues that the natural sciences suffer less from an overlap of folk belief and scientific knowledge compared to the social sciences, the reason of which she sees in the absence of subjectivity in natural kinds. “By contrast,” she argues, “psychologists are always in danger of epistemically violating the subjectivity of those whom we study” p. 352). The problem of epistemic violence as described by Teo (2008) in this view becomes a more or less uncontrollable fact. I think it is possible to argue that such violation does not stem from a certain danger we somehow have to live with but from a conceptual fuzziness of the distinction of folk belief and scientific knowledge. Holzkamp (2013b) acknowledges that all scientific concepts have roots in everyday understandings, incorporate such understandings to a certain extent, and are applied in everyday scenarios. If that is so, we could ask about the function a specific concept serves in everyday life. Following Teo’s argument of an increased psychologization of everyday life, we could argue with Holzkamp that psychological concepts such as personality, the individual, gender (sex), intelligence, and so forth, are applied in everyday interactions to economize conversations: I apply (everyday) psychological concepts precisely because I want to say something about another person. I want to foreclose further conversation and present a verdict about who this other person is—at least for the moment. I use what Holzkamp calls a “personality assumption” (2013b, p. 78). At the same time, I would also express my disinterest in who this other person really is, hence I would display the opposite of any psychological interest in that person. Such a procedure can be problematic and its consequences can be subject to (critical) psychological research. Real problems occur, however—and this is I think what Teo refers to with his distinctions and the concept of epistemic violence—when traditional mainstream psychology adopts such concepts, treats them as scientific, and applies statistical means to make statements about people and what kind of persons they supposedly are.

Holzkamp concludes:

For me, the nature of such (well known) efforts towards scientification cogently implies, virtually as the flipside, that the depicted functional purposes of everyday “personality” assumptions and the interests implied by them are neither reflected nor analysed but, on the contrary, are unquestioningly presumed in the terminological and statistical specifying and testing activities. (2013b, p. 81)

In contrast, a scientific (psychological) investigation of the application of such concepts would ask how individuals live through “specific manifestations of societally typical conflict constellations” (Holzkamp, 2013b, p. 79), and how they are subject to specific living conditions that force them to rely on a foreclosure of intersubjective exchange.

Research/science as political action

The distinctions of research from above versus research from below, alternatively for and from the folk versus about the folk seem to aim not so much at conceptual clarity or anti-objectivist epistemologies. In my reading, Teo argues along the lines of Paul Natorp, Klaus Holzkamp, and others who claim that a psychology without epistemic violence needs to be envisioned in a different fashion. Natorp tried to do this by elevating psychology to a status beyond the social and natural sciences. Others describe psychology as “research from the standpoint of the subject” (e.g., Dege, 2017; Holzkamp, 2013a; Nissen, 2012; Schraube, 2013): Instead of essentializing people’s beliefs and the interpretations of such beliefs with the help of statistical procedures in order to draw conclusions about people, psychological investigations in this fashion acknowledge what Klaus Holzkamp termed doppelte Möglichkeit or twofold possibility (Holzkamp, 1983, p. 352). The potential of this concept is rich (Dege, 2019). In a nutshell, it first designates the ability of human beings to act in accord with social rules and regulations. Mainstream psychology would be research into this ability: it describes how people behave on average in (more or less) well-defined social circumstances. Second, however, doppelte Möglichkeit includes the unforeseeable that psychologists have to constantly reckon with: people tend to disobey, question rules, act creatively, re envision situations, come up with alternative forms of collaboration and meaning making, and so forth. (Psychological) research that denies this fact or fails to take this fact into account is research from above and about people on average and commits epistemic violence. The fuzziness Held argues against, in favor of conceptual rigor, is a deliberate feature of research from the standpoint of the subject. The aim would not be a nonobjectivist epistemology per se, but research that avoids the conversion of something inherently subjective (from the folk) into objective knowledge (about the folk) because that would constitute, as Natorp claims, an assassination of consciousness.

Footnotes

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author biography

Martin Dege is assistant professor of psychology at the American University of Paris. He received his PhD and MA degrees from Clark University, Massachusetts and a BA from Freie Universität Berlin. He is the recipient of various research scholarships, among others the Marie Curie Program of the EU, the Fritz-Thyssen Foundation, and the German Academic Scholarship Foundation. Martin’s research follows three strands. On the theoretical level, he is interested in the historical emergence of psychology as a discipline, more specifically, how various theoretical ideas have been intertwined with political interests and power struggles to form the discipline as it stands today. On the empirical level, he investigates how new forms of technology change our everyday lives, at once unfolding new potentials for inclusive practices across our society and foreclosing particular local traditions and systems of thought. On the institutional level, he explores concepts of digital humanities and how digitalization changes both research and teaching.

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