Andrea Reichenberger Technical University of Munich Philipp Berghofer champions a phenomenological experience-first epistemology und he argues for the justificatory force of experiences. The significance that experience has for our everyday lives seems indisputable. Experience is so much a part of everyday life and everyday language that it seems futile to …
Mahdi Khalili Institute for Research in Fundamental Sciences, Tehran It is always my pleasure to study Philipp Berghofer’s work. Even when I disagree with him, I appreciate his ability to convey highly intricate subjects in phenomenology, quantum mechanics, and epistemology in easily understandable texts. I also admire his bold positions …
Philipp Berghofer Department of Philosophy, University of Graz, Austria Experiences are our points of contact with the world. They constitute the ineluctable starting point and epistemological foundation of any scientific investigation. More precisely, in my view, they are a source of immediate justification and our ultimate justifiers. But what makes …
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 its pragmatic project, empirical psychology employs metaphors to interpret data and deliver descriptive explanations.[i] Insofar as it is a positivist project, empirical psychology pursues reductive explanations which have the semblance of taking phenomena designated by natural language to be composed of more ‘real’ elements. Reductive descriptions of complex systems …
In this post, I explore how analogical modes of explanation have been used in empirical psychology to loop together data derived through experiments and descriptive explanation. Metaphor has been used to transcend the limitations of experiments on human subjects because it allows for framing higher-level interpretation of data through notions …
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 …
