In this series, I summarized major arguments in A Suspicious Science: The Uses of Psychology. My exploration of the uses of psychology has emphasized the explanatory roles it fulfills within broader cultural projects. Briefly, empirical psychology seeks mechanistic explanations which then filter into popular uses of psychology, and discursive clinical …
The ethical quandary at the core of how we represent the mind in practical uses of psychology is the technology of agency. The biomedical and psychodynamic (i.e., discursive) approaches are “two different ways to identify, understand, and respond to mental anguish.”[i] In the latter, there are mechanistic accounts for how …
In A Suspicious Science, I analyze the epistemic context of the uses of psychology in contemporary society so as to develop an interdisciplinary, multi-level human science. I distinguish three uses of psychology: positivist-pragmatic empirical study, discursive therapeutic approaches which promote expressive individualism, and reflexive creative practices employed in the arts …
You have surely heard about cultural differences in reasoning, how people can fabricate reasons when asked to explain one of their decisions, and how many people seem systematically susceptible to reasoning errors. Much of this research was contributed by Richard Nisbett and their colleagues. Dr. Nisbett was kind enough to …
