Modified: 2025-01-07 9:05 AM
Psychology as science has the problem of working on measurable data and on an unmeasurable cognitive component. This split makes psychology unable to produce laws equivalent to those of physical science (e.g., gravity or therodynamics).
Psychology should be a unified way of thinking about the workings of the mind and the behavior of humans and animals. The reality, however, is more complex. As Staats (1991, p. 899) points out, “Psychology has developed the prolific character of modern science, without the ability to articulate its knowledge. The result is a great and increasing diversity—many unrelated methods, findings, problems, theoretical languages, schismatic issues, and philosophical positions.” Since he wrote those words, the problems he cited have worsened. Since 1997 in Staat’s honor the American Psychological Foundation and the Society for General Psychology (APA Division 1) have sponsored an invited lecture on unifying psychology at the APA’s annual convention.
It is difficult to conceive of 21st century psychology as a unified discipline. Still, that has not stopped some psychologists from proposing solutions for making psychology more unified. For instance, Sternberg (2005) believes it time for psychologists to halt the fragmentation of psychology. He suggests that psychologists could reverse course by measuring psychological phenomena using multiple methods rather than relying on one, preferred method, by concentrating more on studying psychological phenomena from a variety of theoretical viewpoints, and abandoning a reliance on narrow theoretical formulations.
Gardner (2005), however, argues that psychology is a young discipline; that it should not be judged against older, more established ones. Furthermore, he points out that psychology and other disciplines interact with each other, often absorbing or relinquishing areas of study. Gardner believes that psychology is losing some of its ground to other disciplines. Thus, unification of psychology, to Gardner, is more than an internal affair. It is, instead, both an internal affair and a set of interdisciplinary affairs. Toomela (2007) echoing Vygotsky argues that unification is more complex than it appears (pp. 452-453):
"Unifying theory should formulate how different subfields of science complement each other, what is common to all subfields and what is specific to every subfield. The question what are the subfields that need to be covered by a general answer is not so simple as it may seem at first glance. The problem is that there different levels of generality of sciences and subfields of science. Overall, three levels of analysis can be distinguished here. Unification is necessary at all these levels of analysis."
Toomela's first level is a unifying theory for science itself. Here, psychologists must determine what topics are psychological per se and not part of other sciences (e.g., physics, biology, or sociology). For psychology, the second level should demonstrate what its subfields have in common. In other words, why are they part of psychology? The third level acknowledges that subfields can be more finely differentiated. Toomela (p. 454) cites cognitive psychology as divided into, “subfields of memory, thinking, attention, perception, emotions, and motivation.” Each of those, too, must be worked into an overall picture of unification.
One of the factors that led Mjøset (2001, p.15) to differentiate social science from physical science was that the latter had succeeded in formulating laws of nature such as the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Such laws are undisputed, universal statements about how nature works. He noted that many early psychologists hoped to formulate similar laws of nature within psychology. Unfortunately, no such laws have yet been discovered, nor may they ever be.
In some ways, the physical sciences have far surpassed the social sciences because of the presence and reality of physical laws. The situation is somewhat similar between the biological sciences and the physical sciences. It is impossible to find biological laws either. In the face of these differences between the sciences, some social scientists, notably Merton (1949), simply decided to continue practicing science and forgo any hope of discovering universal laws. In psychology, a similar story exists. It is impossible to find results that apply in all situations. Instead, results must be carefully couched within disciplinary, sub-disciplinary, or finer-grained contexts. There are no universal laws of psychology.