American Psychologist
American Psychologist
5 years ago

The problem of choosing between irreconcilable theoretical orientations: Comment on Melchert (2016).

Joseph S
Melchert (2016) argued that knowledge of psychological processes is now grounded in experimental tests of falsifiable theories that support a unified, paradigmatic understanding of human psychology. Although his argument for leaving behind our preparadigmatic past of competing theoretical orientations is welcome, Melchert (2016) presented a perspective in which the degree to which this is currently possible is overstated. In this comment, it is argued that scientific research does not replace paradigmatic assumptions but takes place within them. As such, it is not possible to take the theoretical orientations out of the practice of psychology, which is inevitably an expression of one's philosophical assumptions of first principles. (PsycINFO Database Record

Publisher URL: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28481589

DOI: PubMed:28481589

You might also like
Discover & Discuss Important Research

Keeping up-to-date with research can feel impossible, with papers being published faster than you'll ever be able to read them. That's where Researcher comes in: we're simplifying discovery and making important discussions happen. With over 19,000 sources, including peer-reviewed journals, preprints, blogs, universities, podcasts and Live events across 10 research areas, you'll never miss what's important to you. It's like social media, but better. Oh, and we should mention - it's free.

  • Download from Google Play
  • Download from App Store
  • Download from AppInChina

Researcher displays publicly available abstracts and doesn’t host any full article content. If the content is open access, we will direct clicks from the abstracts to the publisher website and display the PDF copy on our platform. Clicks to view the full text will be directed to the publisher website, where only users with subscriptions or access through their institution are able to view the full article.