Missing the point

variable psychology's blindness to the problem's inherent coherences

Klaus Holzkamp

pp. 60-74

in: Klaus Holzkamp, Psychology from the standpoint of the subject, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Abstract

Every basic scientific conception contains, in some way or another, notions of how its concepts differ from pre-existing everyday assumptions about a particular issue and how one can move from the level of these everyday assumptions to scientific ones. Such notions also exist in traditional academic psychology, where they quite definitely take the form of exclusion criteria. Although phenographic circumscriptions of the problem to be investigated, concept analyses, and general theoretical considerations are not exactly ruled out, they are mostly regarded as mere preliminaries to actual scientific work. This begins when hypotheses of the empirical connection between conditions and events have been derived from theoretical assumptions and been "operationalized" as if-then-statements (i.e. conceptualized as independent and dependent variables) within a research design which allows the hypotheses to be tested according to the rules of inferential statistical procedures. Only in this way, the general reading runs, is it possible to scientifically decide upon the empirical tenability of the preceding theory.