Two Cheers for Psychologic--and Three Reservations

Abstract

My first cheer is for what Smedslund has done for the discipline of psychology by his lonely attempt to explicate and formalize the logical structure of ordinary language dealing with psychological topics. The proposition that a coherent structure of logically connected terms must underlie successful communication and the effective coordination of everyday social interaction seems irrefutable, and some version of this proposition has been held by numerous modem thinkers (to mention only a few-Harre & Secord, 1973; Ossorio, 1966, 1969/1978, 1971/1978; Ryle, 1949; Wittgenstein, 1953). The task that Smedslund, however, has taken on is the presentation of substantial body of this logic in an authoritative manner. Among the critics of conventional psychology, Smedslund and Ossorio stand out in their commitment to developing systematic, formal alternatives to the pseudoempiricism so common in our science. In this appreciation and critique of psychologic (PL), I draw on conceptual resources first developed explicitly in descriptive psychology by Ossorio (1985; see Shideler, 1988, for a readable brief introduction to descriptive psychology and its major concepts), because they provide clear alternatives to some of the crucial decisions that Smedslund has made, and I believe that it is extremely important to the task of reformulating the social practices of academic psychology to examine critically the alternatives proposed. A second reason for cheering PL is that Smedslund's identification of pseudoempiricality as a metatheoretical concept provides an explanation for the poverty of much psychological theorizing. In Persons (1966), Ossorio did a similar job for the major personality and learning theories of that period, and in Davis (1968) and Ossorio and Davis (1968), I raised similar questions about research on interpersonal attraction and dissonance theory. But granting two of Smedslund's major points-that a coherent structure of logically related terms can be shown to exist and that much modem psychological research is limited in both its depth and relevance by its pseudoempiricality-one may still wish to pursue the task of articulating the logical structure of psychological discourse in a much different way from the approach Smedslund has taken with PL. I offer three reasons for being wary of PL and refer interested readers to sources where they can follow up these briefly stated views. I am wary of PL chiefly because of the following three concerns: (a) Smedslund's choice of conceptual/representational devices for exhibiting the logical structures of everyday behavior, (b) the absence within PL of a systematic criterion for the adequacy of his formulation, and (c) the lack of a substantial body of empirical work that extends the frontiers of psychological knowledge. I deal with each of these concerns in turn.

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