Three paradigms for a scientific psychology

During the last fifty years three major ways of defining a science of psychology have been proposed and tried out.

Psychology is the statistical study of relations between ‘objectively’ and abstractly described in-puts and out-puts to an idealised human individual. This prescription was realised in behaviourism, and is still very much alive in American experimentalism. For some psychologists of this persuasion the concept of ‘mind’ was empty. For others it was identified with what is private or ‘subjective’. For some this meant that it had no part to play in a scientific psychology, but others treated subjective phenomena as subject to the same principles as overt behaviour. For example Skinner (1974) proposed to extend his ‘behaviourism’ to include subjective experiences as behaviours the study of which would be included in his operant conditioning programme.

Psychology is the creation and testing of hypothetico-deductive theories describing unobserved and even unobservable mental processes the nature of which is given for most who adhere to this view by the analogy between the brain and a computer and thinking and the running of programmes. This has sometimes been called the ‘mind behind the mind’ theory. It has been realised in very different forms, for example as Freudian psychology, in which the mind behind the mind is based on a different analogy or metaphor from the metaphor that dominates the Artificial Intelligence or Cognitive science form of hypothetico-deductivism.