Paying the price of positivism

Abstract

For the first half of the 20th century the discipline of psychology spent its time asserting itself as a positive science concerned only with ‘the facts’. It has spent its time ever since then in a state of crisis and confusion because of this hubris. This piece offers a short historical account of this crisis tendency in the discipline. It argues that only the middle way of critical realism can rescue us from the rock of implausible positivism and the hard place of postmodernism.