Beyond subjectivity and objectivity the intersubjective foundations of psychological science (mascolo, 2016) integrative psychological behavioral science

Beyond Objectivity and Subjectivity: The Intersubjective Foundations of Psychological Science Michael F. Mascolo Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science ISSN 1932-4502 Integr psych behav DOI 10.1007/s12124-016-9357-3 23 Your article is protected by copyright and all rights are held exclusively by Springer Science +Business Media New York This e-offprint is for personal use only and shall not be selfarchived in electronic repositories If you wish to self-archive your article, please use the accepted manuscript version for posting on your own website You may further deposit the accepted manuscript version in any repository, provided it is only made publicly available 12 months after official publication or later and provided acknowledgement is given to the original source of publication and a link is inserted to the published article on Springer's website The link must be accompanied by the following text: "The final publication is available at link.springer.com” 23 Author's personal copy Integr Psych Behav DOI 10.1007/s12124-016-9357-3 R E G U L A R A RT I C L E Beyond Objectivity and Subjectivity: The Intersubjective Foundations of Psychological Science Michael F Mascolo # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2016 Abstract The question of whether psychology can properly be regarded as a science has long been debated (Smedslund in Integrative Psychological & Behavioral Science, 50, 185–195, 2016) Science is typically understood as a method for producing reliable knowledge by testing falsifiable claims against objective evidence Psychological phenomena, however, are traditionally taken to be Bsubjective^ and hidden from view To the extent that science relies upon objective observation, is a scientific psychology possible? In this paper, I argue that scientific psychology does not much fail to meet the requirements of objectivity as much as the concept of objectivity fails as a methodological principle for psychological science The traditional notion of objectivity relies upon the distinction between a public, observable exterior and a private, subjective interior There are good reasons, however, to reject this dichotomy Scholarship suggests that psychological knowledge arises neither from the Binside out^ (subjectively) nor from the outside-in (objectively), but instead intersubjective processes that occur between people If this is so, then objectivist methodology may more to obscure than illuminate our understanding of psychological functioning From this view, we face a dilemma: Do we, in the name of science, cling to an objective epistemology that cuts us off from the richness of psychological activity? Or we seek to develop a rigorous intersubjective psychology that exploits the processes through which we gain psychological knowledge in the first place? If such a psychology can produce systematic, reliable and useful knowledge, then the question of whether its practices are Bscientific^ in the traditional sense would become irrelevant Keywords Scientific psychology Objectivity Subjectivity Intersubjectivity Erogdicity Human science * Michael F Mascolo michael_mascolo@yahoo.com; mascolom@merrimack.edu Merrimack College, North Andover, MA, USA Author's personal copy Integr Psych Behav The question of whether psychology can properly be regarded as a science has long been debated (Smedslund 2016) Tension about psychology’s scientific status reveals itself in the definition of psychology itself According to the APA, psychology consists of the Bscientific study of behavior and mental events^ The bifurcation between behavior and mental events can be traced to the traditional Cartesian duality between mind and body According to Descartes, while the mind as an incorporeal thinking substance that operates according to its own principles, the body is composed of physical material that operates according to the laws of physics To the extent that the body is a material entity, it can studied scientifically As an incorporeal thinking process, the mind is beyond scientific analysis Seeking to establish itself as a science, psychology severed itself from its philosophical roots and embraced the objective methods that have been so successful in the study of objects and bodies Although psychology rejected the idea of an incorporeal mind, it never fully resolved the tension between the subjective, self-causing interior and an objective mechanistically-caused exterior Psychology embraced an empirical mindset: if scientific knowledge comes from observation of things in the world, a psychological science should follow suit With the right empirical methods, we should able to gain psychological knowledge in ways similar to the natural sciences The empirical mindset gave rise to what might be called methodological fetishism – the privileging of method over theory in the hope that the careful use of scientific methodology would ultimately lead to psychological knowledge In what follows, I argue that that, because of its unique subject matter, psychological science does not and cannot function in the same way as the natural sciences (Martin and Sugarman 2009) Psychological experiences are not observable in the same way as objects extended in time and space As a result, attempts to study psychological experience Bobjectively^ tend to under-represent the nature, scope and richness of those processes However, while psychological experiences are not themselves Bobjectively^ observable, neither are they subjective states that are accessible only from a first person perspective Psychological knowledge originates neither from the Boutside in^ (objectively) nor from the Binside out^ (subjectively) Instead, it arises in intersubjective encounters that operate between people If this is so, then a genuine psychological science must itself rest on intersubjective foundations Consequences of Cartesianism: The Subjective-Objective Dichotomy Science is typically understood as a method for producing reliable knowledge by testing falsifiable claims against objective evidence An objective observation is typically understood as one that is (a) based upon publically observable phenomena (i.e., overt behavior); (b) unbiased, in the sense that it records only what is observed, without adding or taking away from the observation, and (c) provides an accurate representation how the world as it truly is Viewed from this perspective, a scientific psychology immediately faces a problem: How can we study processes regarded as Bsubjective^ in an Bobjective^ way? Toward this end, psychological scientists seek to identify overt acts that can function as observable indicators of internal states To study emotion, for example, a researcher might seek to define Banger^ operationally in terms of patterns of facial and bodily behavior, verbal descriptions, scores on rating scales, or measures Author's personal copy Integr Psych Behav of blood flow or electrical activity in the brain Having done so, the researcher would seek to determine the validity and reliability of such measures of emotion In the natural sciences, while there is a much that is hidden from view, the physical aspects of the world – or their effects – are assumed in principle to be open to public observation The question of objectivity in the natural sciences has evolved primarily an issue of whether or not it is possible to remove the effects of the observer on the observed Daston and Galison (2007) have argued that our contemporary conception of objectivity is a recent development In their historical analysis of how Bworking objects^ are represented in scientific atlases, Daston and Galison (2007) identified three phases in the development of Bobjectivity^ During the early Enlightenment, atlases were filled with perfected images of objects drawn according to a standard of Btruth-to-nature^ In these images, local variations among objects of a particular type (e.g., plants, organisms, etc.) were eliminated to reveal a single Btrue^ form Such images were understood to be Btrue^ in abstract sense, even if no image corresponded to any actual existing object With the emergence of recording technologies (e.g., photography), standards shifted; Bmechanical objectivity^ arose as the practice of recording images of actual objects, complete with their imperfections and variations As it became clear objects produced in their Bobjective^ form were often difficult to use for teaching and research purposes, standards of description shifted to the pursuit of Btrained judgment^ – the skill of distinguishing what is relevant and irrelevant of any given image for any given purpose In this way, the scientific pursuit of Bobjectivity^ has long been defined with reference to an awareness of the relation between the knower and the known In the natural sciences, the distinction between objectivity and subjectivity primarily concerns the extent to which the various biases of the knower can be separated from the known In psychology, however, the objective-subjective distinction extends beyond this issue In the natural sciences, while some aspects of the physical world may be Bhidden^ in the sense that they are difficult to observe, there is no assumption that the world of scientific objects is itself divided into objective and subjective parts The same cannot be said for psychological science In psychology, it is often assumed that the psychological world is a priori private, hidden, and cut off from the view of others From this view, the objects of psychological inquiry are taken to be inherently unobservable – except perhaps as Bintrospected^ from the perspective of Bsubjective^ first person experience There are, however, good reasons to reject this traditional conception of subjectivity and objectivity Neither Subjective nor Objective: How Experience Shines through Action In recent years, scholars from a many disciplines have challenged the notion that psychological experience are private states that are inherently hidden from third person access This critique was most elegantly articulated by Wittgenstein (1953) in his argument against the possibility of a private language Wittgenstein argued that if Binner experiences^ (e.g., pain, sadness) were truly private states, it would impossible for people to learn how to use words to refer to them In advancing this claim, Wittgenstein (1953) compared the idea of Bprivate experience^ to a situation in which everyone has an object – call it a Bbeetle^ – in a private box into which only the owner could ever look Under these circumstances, saying, BI have a beetle in my box^ would Author's personal copy Integr Psych Behav be entirely useless as a means of communicating the contents of one’s box If the contents of one’s box were truly private, there could be no public criteria to determine if people were using the term beetle in a shared way Without some form of shared reference, no one – including the box’s owner herself – could be certain of what the word beetle meant Wittgenstein used this argument to show the absurdity of the idea that experiences are private states (Overgaard 2005) If public criteria are needed in order to corroborate the meaning of inner state terms, what are the public criteria that identify inner states? For Wittgenstein, these criteria are the bodily expressions of the inner states themselves In everyday action, our inner life is expressed directly in our actions, words and expressions A person’s experience shines through their bodily expression (e.g., writhing in pain; sobbing in grief) (Overgaard 2005; ter Hark 1990) If this is so, it cannot be that bodily expressions are merely contingently related our inner states – they must be public manifestations of those states (Hacker 1997) There is not first the experience and then also the expression Expression is an aspect of experience, and vice-versa If experience shines through our expressions, it is often possible to read a person’s experience directly from those expressions For any particular individual, experience itself is immediate, direct and pre-linguistic However, the capacity to represent experiences as explicit objects of consciousness is not (Zahavi 2005) People come to form explicit representations of their own inner experience when they gain the reflective capacity to apply inner state words – words whose shared meanings are organized with reference to the public aspects of personal experience – to their own experience This view provides a strong counterpoint to the common psychological belief of radical hiddenness (Shotter 2000) – the idea that the bulk of what is important in psychological inquiry is private and hidden from view This is not to say that experiential states never hidden In only means that internal experiences are not a priori hidden (ter Hark 1990) It does not mean that a person’s experience is transparent to others; it means only that a person’s experience is not inherently or necessarily cut off from others There are many possible third person paths to an individual’s first person’s experience; none are infallible, and none guaranteed It is also possible, of course, for people to hide their experience When they so, however, they inhibit their external actions – not their Binner^ feelings Further, this view also does not mean that what has traditionally been regarded as subjective is actually objective Instead, it suggests that there is something wrong with the subjective/objective dichotomy itself Is there an alternative way to understand the ways we acquire psychological knowledge? The Intersubjective Origins of Psychological Knowledge This critique of traditional Cartesian dichotomies suggests that psychological knowledge arises neither from the Binside out^ (i.e., subjectively) nor from the Boutside-in^ (i.e., from objective observation) Instead, it arises between people in intersubjective exchanges with others over time Intersubjectivity refers to the capacity to share and coordination experience between people in everyday social interactions (Matusov 1996; Zlatev et al 2008) The idea that psychological knowledge arises through intersubjective engagement is supported by theory and research on Bmirror neurons^ (Iacoboni 2011) During the last Author's personal copy Integr Psych Behav decades of the 20th century, researchers identified neurons in the brains of monkeys that fired not only when an animal performed a given action, but also when the animals observed another animal perform the same action The discovery of mirror neurons suggests a way to understand the problem of Bother minds^ – the question of how it is possible to understand and be responsive to the inner experience of others It provides an empirically grounded framework to understand otherwise difficult to explain phenomena as neonatal Bimitation^, empathy, the coordinated emotional dances that occur in early infant-caregiver interaction, and the very possibility of coming to know other minds (Trevarthen and Aitken 2001) Given something like a Bmirror resonance system^, it becomes possible imagine that an infant’s experience of a caregiver’s smiling face and contoured voice would activate similar actions and experiences in the infant herself From a very early age, infant and caregiver mutually regulate each other’s actions, feelings and interest in real time Stable patterns of acting, feeling and understanding emerge and develop within these co-regulated exchanges (Fogel et al 2006) The jointly coordinated experiences provide the intersubjective foundations upon which the child’s psychological understanding of self and other develops How this occurs within joint action processes is a matter of investigation and controversy (Martin et al 2008; Meltzoff 2013; Iacoboni 2009; Sodian 2011) Such patterns of emotionally-attuned engagement with others are formative in a child’s socio-emotional development (Schore and Schore 2008) With the capacity for symbolism, children gain the capacity to use language to identify and reflect upon their internal experiences This occurs as caregivers use psychological language to regulate, represent and respond to children within intersubjective exchanges The existence of something like a mirror resonance system transcends our traditional ways of thinking about human sociality Instead of thinking of infants as isolated beings who must break through the opaque exteriors of others to gain access to their minds, we can understand infants as capable of primitive forms of intersubjective engagement from the start of life (Reddy 2015; Trevarthen and Aitken 2001) This suggests that psychological knowledge arises within intersubjective exchanges that occur between people We gain such knowledge neither by introspecting into a private world of inner experience; nor by inferring the content of other people’s minds from their overt behavior It follows that the processes by which we construct psychological knowledge are qualitatively different from those through which we understand the physical world A psychological science based on methods for understanding the physical world would be impoverished in comparison to one built explicitly upon the human capacity for intersubjective engagement How Pre-Understandings Structure Observation Beyond the prescription that scientific evidence be publically observable, the concept of objectivity stipulates that observation should produce unbiased descriptions of the world as it really is An objective observation records that is there without adding to or subtracting from the event itself This idea, however, violates one of the most basic principles of psychological activity: existing knowledge – our pre-understandings – organize the process of perceiving the world (Piaget 1954) All observation is necessarily prefigured by some form of pre-understanding, however inchoate or formal Author's personal copy Integr Psych Behav Without some existing framework to organize inquiry, observation would simply be unintelligible Pre-understandings are thus a kind of bias They bias what we look at, how we look at it, and how we interpret what we see To observe is not simply to record what is there; it is to record something under some descriptive framework – however basic or tacit (Ochs 1979) If observation is structured by pre-understanding, it is not possible to describe the world in an objective way This conclusion might seem to threaten the very possibility of scientific knowledge One might ask, BIf the data we collect are not independent of our theoretical frameworks, how is scientific progress possible?^ The answer is to be found in the hermeneutic idea that our pre-understandings are never as rich as the data that they anticipate Although our pre-understandings organize experience, the world fights back When pre-understandings – scholarly or otherwise – fail to anticipate the world of experience, pre-understandings become subject to revision Scientific progress does not progress by eliminating the Bbiasing^ effect of pre-understandings It occurs by revising failed pre-understandings that were disconfirmed by novel data or experience, and replacing them with more developed understandings that are more able to accommodate those data and experiences Because of the intersubjective origins of psychological knowledge, psychological pre-understandings play an especially important role in psychological science The preunderstandings that guide psychological inquiry consist in large part of the everyday psychological knowledge that arises from the history of our intersubjective relations with others Such knowledge is represented in our everyday psychological language and in the wealth of socio-emotional understanding that we use in our everyday lives Without this wealth of intersubjectively constructed and sign-mediated knowledge, the psychological acts of others would be unintelligible As observers, we would be completely autistic Other people would be experienced as confusing configurations of muscle movements We would have no way of understanding the intentionality of another person’s actions Psychological scientists not experience their participants as mysterious mechanisms or alien creatures about whom they have no prior knowledge Theorists and researchers experience their participants as persons – social agents whose behavior occurs against the backdrop of motives, meanings, emotions and evaluations As researchers, our everyday psychological knowledge necessarily frames our inquiries and our capacity to make the most rudimentary of observations However, as scientists committed to objective observation, we often think of our psychological preunderstandings as unscientific background If, as Einstein is said to have remarked, Bthe whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking^, then psychological science can gain much by refining the intersubjective processes through which we gain our psychological knowledge Methodological Fetishism: When the Methodological Tail Wags the Theoretical Dog Historically, thinking of philosophy as a form of armchair speculation, psychology sought to establish itself as an empirical science Through the use of evidence, psychology could put theoretical ideas to the test As a result, unlike philosophy – Author's personal copy Integr Psych Behav often characterized as having failed to resolve its problems over time – psychology could look forward to the type of progress enjoyed by the natural sciences In distancing itself from philosophical speculation, psychology embraced a rigorous empiricism From this view, our scientific concepts arise from careful observation of the empirical world itself If our scientific categories can be clarified through careful observation of the world itself, then scientific principles are to be found in patterns of empirical data themselves As a result, the rigorous pre-empirical articulation of psychological concepts could often be seen as superfluous at best – and overly Bphilosophical^ at worst This line of thinking runs the risk of what might be called Bmethodological fetishism^ – the practice of privileging methodology over conceptual clarity, based on the idea that observable data themselves are the ultimate source of scientific knowledge Psychology is replete with increasingly sophisticated methods for assessing relations among variables A method is a procedure for solving a problem; a methodology is a philosophical or theoretical articulation of the principles that govern the use of methods in any given discipline In light of a broadly shared disdain for Bphilosophical speculation^, psychologists are more likely to enter into discussions about methods than methodology This has led to a series of entrenched assumptions about the proper methods for psychological sciences – assumptions that deserve to be re-evaluated In what follows, I discuss two such assumptions Low Hanging Fruit and the Risks of Reification Psychological constructs often have their origins in everyday language and common sense (e.g., anger, trait, self-esteem) Given the bias in favor of measurement over conceptual clarification, when psychologists invoke a psychological concept, they often begin their work by asking, BHow can we measure this construct?^ rather than BWhat we mean when we use this construct?^ The rush to measurement reflects the privileging of empirical data over conceptual clarity: if empirical data are the ultimate arbiter of theoretical claims, then psychological theory will eventually be clarified as it is adjusted to the particularities of data However, this view fails to take into consideration the importance of theoretical clarity in the process of organizing psychological research In any given study, the psychological constructs under examination help structure the very data that will be used to test those constructs This process can not only lead to self-verifying research, but also to the reification of psychological concepts – treating theoretical constructs as if they were real entities in the world An example of this process involves the concept of trait in personality research In everyday language, we tend to think of people as having particular qualities, characteristics or traits Such concepts are metaphorical extensions of how we understand properties of objects in the world For example, Mendel classified his pea plants as either Bshort^ or Btall^ Once grown, their height is fixed In this way, the concept of trait refers to a stable quality of a thing Moving to the psychological world, McCrae and Costa (1997), define trait as a Bmore or less stable pattern of thinking, feeling and acting^ Defined in this way, the task then becomes how to measure Btraits^ in actual persons The most common way of doing so involves asking people to rate their propensity to act in defined by different trait terms Resulting ratings from large Author's personal copy Integr Psych Behav numbers of participants are factor analyzed to identify a series of broad dimensions presumed to reflect the Bbuilding blocks of personality^ In this example, reification occurs when the everyday metaphorical concept of trait is treated as a real entity that can be observed At this point, patterns of action – processes that change dynamically over time and place – are turned into fixed things This is done by aggregating measures across time and place to produce Baverage^ rating on any given trait dimension (Rose et al 2013) Such a measure not only privileges stability over temporal and contextual variation, an abstract entity that has no empirical referent is created and treated as a tangible object of scientific inquiry (Slaney and Garcia 2015) The use of ratings scales as Bmeasures^ of psychological traits is equally as problematic The use of rating scales is a relatively easy way of collecting data about human behavior; they are, perhaps, among the best methodological examples of Blow hanging fruit^ Further, invoking the traditional value of objectivity, scores on a Likert scale give the appearance of being Bobjective^ in the sense that, once produced, they are available for all to see However, this loses sight of the fact that ratings by participants are nonetheless judgments that about processes that are generalized across time and place Such judgments depend upon the participant’s understanding of the question asked, capacity to judge action across time and place, ability to turn an evaluative judgment into a number, and so forth (Rosenbaum and Valsiner 2011) When this happens, psychology creates the appearance of having identified a psychological entity where no such entity really exists This is not to say that there is not stability and order in human behavior There is both order and variation It is to say that if we want to study that order, we must examine what real people actually in real time and in various times and places Under such assessment conditions, the complexity of psychological order and variation become clearer, and Btraits^ become less trait-like The Problem of Generalization: From Persons to Populations and Back Again Science seeks general laws that can be generalized beyond the local conditions of any given study In psychology, this means identifying psychological principles that are broadly applicable to persons across time, place and social group This is typically accomplished by recruiting a sample of subjects who can be viewed as representative of the larger population of interest To ensure generalizability, researchers typically seek to include as many participants in a study as they can recruit By aggregating data across individuals in a sample, researchers seek to ensure that their findings generalize from the local sample to the larger population of interest The task of producing findings that generalize to target populations is an important one However, the methodological quest for generalization often produces the exact opposite of its intended effect Research methods commonly used in psychological science often produce findings that are valid at the level of populations, but not at the level of individual persons This is the problem of ergodicity (Velicer et al 2014) Research is ergodic when findings that operate at the level of the population are also applicable at the level of understanding individuals The problem, however, is that research in psychology is often non-ergodic; it tends to identify relations that operate at the level of the population but not at the level of individual action Author's personal copy Integr Psych Behav An example of non-ergotic research involves the calculation of heritability in behavioral genetics research Heritablity refers to the proportion of variance between people in some psychological structure that results from differences between people in their genes A heritiablity coefficient of 50 for Bintelligence^ means that half of the statistical variation among people in Bintelligence^ can be attributed to differences between them in their genes This statistic, however, is applicable only to the population If social conditions were to change so that all members a given population were raised in the same environment, the heritability for Bintelligence^ would shift to 100 % This is because if everyone lived in the same environment, the only source of variation in Bintelligence^ would be differences between people in their genetics Conversely, if a population of clones were raised in different environments, any differences among them would necessarily be a product of non-genetic differences between them To say that a behavior pattern is heritable is not the same as saying it is inherited Heritability is a statistic that applies only to understanding the origins of differences between people in a population at a particular point in time (history) It tells us nothing about how genes and environments operate over time to produce Bintelligence^ at the level of individuals In this way, studies that seek to identify genetic and environmental sources of variation in any given set of psychological structures are non-ergodic – their conclusions are relevant at the level of populations, but not at the level of individual processes Some have suggested that the majority of research performed in psychology is nonergodic This is a result of basic assumptions about research design and the use of statistics As articulated by Molenaar and Ram (2010), virtually all standard statistical analysis used in psychology – analysis of variance, regression, structural equations modeling, factor analysis, and so forth – are directed at assessing the sources of interindividual variation at – differences between people – at the level of the population Statistical parameters are estimated by aggregating data across participants, a practice that assumes that participants are homogeneous in relevant respects While the intention in using such techniques is to identify individual processes that generalize to the population in question, typical outcomes are exactly the opposite: knowledge about sources of inter-individual variation at the level of the population cannot be used to understand processes at the individual level of functioning This raises a central question: how can psychological scientists identify principles at the level of individual processes that nonetheless generalize to broader populations? When dealing with nonergodic phenomena, the most basic strategy is to design studies organized around assessments of inter-individual rather than intra-individual variation Siegler and Jenkins’ (1989) study on the development of addition strategies in children provides a good example of research that assesses inter-individual variation Siegler and Jenkins (1989) asked eight children to perform a series of 15 simple addition problems monthly over the course of 11 months For each calculation, the authors identified the strategy that individual children used to perform the task They were able to identify a series of different strategies For example, among other strategies, using the SUM strategy, using their fingers, children counted out the number of fingers corresponding to the first addend on their left hand, the number of fingers corresponding to the second addend on their right hand, and then counted all of the numbers on their fingers from the beginning Using the MIN strategy, children counted out the number of fingers corresponding to the larger addend on their left hand, and then, using their right hand, Bcounted up^ the number of fingers corresponding to the Author's personal copy Integr Psych Behav second addend to arrive at the sum In analyzing their data, Siegler and Jenkins (1989) created developmental profiles for each individual child They found that seven of the eight children spontaneously created the MIN strategy over the course of the 11 month period In so doing, however, there was no single sequence in the development of children’s adding strategies In fact, children used a variety different strategies at any given point in their development The strategies developed in a series of overlapping Bwaves^: different strategies emerged, increased, and then decreased in use at different but intersecting periods of time Siegler and Jenkins (1989) identified two broad phases of strategy development: strategy construction and strategy generalization As novel and more effective strategies were constructed, they were gradually generalized to similar problems, while less efficient strategies fell into disuse The power of Siegler and Jenkins (1989) study is to be found in their analysis of strategy construction at the level of the individual child That is, instead of aggregating and tracking the frequency of strategy use across children, they analyzed the pattern of strategy use over time for each individual child Had they averaged across children, they would likely have reported a series of gradually rising and falling trajectories in the frequency with which each strategy was used (Siegler 1987) This result would have masked the nature of the actual developmental processes as it operated at the level of the individual child It is essential to understand that even though Siegler and Jenkins’ (1989) analysis targets the individual level of functioning, it is nonetheless generalizable In fact, it is because it assesses intra-individual processes that it is able to produce generalizable findings at all Siegler’s (2005) Bwave model^ of development; the proposed transition from strategy construction to strategy generalization; and the capacity to fit children into different profiles of strategy development; are generalizations that result directly from their intra-individual, person-oriented analysis (Siegler 1987) In psychology, large sample sizes help to produce statistically reliable results, which allow researchers to make inferences that are generalizable to populations However, while such analyses give the impression that that they reflect processes that occur at the level of individual persons, they often not Among the most ergodic of psychological research might include a study that has been much maligned: Piaget’s (1952) careful observations of the development of his three infants has been criticized for its small sample size However, despite the various interpretations that have been offered about meaning of the changes he identified, the sequence Piaget identified in his three individual children has proven to be among the most generalizable in all of psychology The Scientific Status of Psychological Science The question of whether psychology can properly be considered a science depends a great deal on what we mean by science From a natural science perspective, science relies upon principles of objectivity The physical properties that are the focus of the natural sciences are understood to be, in principle, observable From this view, the inability to make objective observations of the Bsubjective^ aspects of human action cast doubt on psychology’s scientific status In response, some might suggest that the ability to identify Bobjective^ indicators of Bsubjective^ processes is sufficient to qualify psychology as a legitimate science From this view, while social sciences may differ from the natural sciences, the difference is one of degree rather than kind Author's personal copy Integr Psych Behav An alternative view holds that there are qualitative differences between the natural sciences and the social sciences (Martin and Sugarman 2009) From this view, psychology can be understood as a science, but one that operates from a qualitative different methodology than that of the natural sciences From this view, psychology would function best as a hermeneutic discipline that does not presuppose a sharp line between theory and data From this view, psychological understanding arises from a cyclic process of testing and revising theoretical pre-understandings against novel sources of data and experience The arguments advanced throughout this paper suggest both quantitative and qualitative differences between the social and the natural sciences The problems of reification and ergodicity can be addressed by making adjustments within existing methodological frameworks in psychology More important, however, are concerns about the objectivist epistemology that informs psychological research A psychology founded upon hermeneutic or intersubjective principles would be very different from one based upon the objectivist ideals of the natural sciences (Yanchar and Slife 2000) There is a sense, however, that the question of whether psychology is or is not a science is not a helpful one Such a question presumes that science is itself a kind of objective discovery or revealed truth – a bounded activity defined by a set of uncontestable rules A debate over whether a given discipline is or is not a science would seem to be more of a battle about status and prestige than about identifying alternative pathways to reliable knowledge A better question might be, given its subject matter, how can we study psychological processes in systematic, reliable and useful ways? 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Objectivity and Subjectivity: The Intersubjective Foundations of Psychological Science Michael F Mascolo # Springer Science+ Business Media New York 2016 Abstract The question of whether psychology