Discovery, intentionality and the constructionist project in psychology

Morris L. Shames

pp. 65-76

in: Stam, Leendert Mos, Warren Thorngate, Bernie Kaplan (eds), Recent trends in theoretical psychology, Berlin, Springer, 1993

Abstract

It is no small irony that psychology has fully entered the epistemological arena in the twentieth century while, at the same time, disengaging itself from the implication of intentionality in the description and explication of psychological phenomena. The irony turns particularly on the analysis of the epistemology of discovery, which Reichenbach (1938/1961) relegated to the realm of psychology, and which, it is argued, implicates intentionality in a very significant way. Discovery has attained to epistemological respectability more recently and its implication of intentionality helps to explain its underlying cognitive substrate. Furthermore, it serves to demarcate the various forms of science as Habermas (1971) and others (e.g. Meehl, 1978, 1990) have delineated them. More specifically, a psychofigurational model of discovery-cognitively underwritten by metaphor as its unit of analysis-and intentionality, understood primarily as either purposive or non-purposive, may facilitate an understanding of the process of discovery in science. Finally, given that much of the psychological project is grounded in constructionism, the process of discovery in this instance implicates intentionality primarily as a purposive process.

Cited authors

Habermas Jürgen