POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY: THE SCIENCE AND PRACTICE OF PSYCHOLOGY?

Abstract

144 spiring to construct and subsequently consolidate psychology as a scientific enterprise requires full compliance with various tasks (Kantor, 1963), for the purposes pursued here we will mention the three most notable ones, namely: 1. The clear and precise definition of the subject matter. 2. Having a coherent body of concepts and categories that represent it. 3. Having a method — procedures and techniques — that contributes to prove the theory, matching what is said theoretically and conceptually with the empirical evidence generated in the form of data. The definition of the subject matter, both the material and the formal, i.e., what we are interested in and what we intend to do to address it, respectively (Roca, 2013), is only the first step on the long and winding road that we must travel in the process of the construction of psychology as a discipline of knowledge. Let us suppose, for a moment, that we are interested here in the study of behavior (material object) for which it would be necessary to specify which aspects or perspective will be adopted for study (formal object): for Ribes (1995) this would be the contingency relations, whereas for Roca (2007) it would be the associative relationships between the factors involved in a field of psychology. It is also essential to be clear about what procedures will be used to select the terms and expressions that are considered relevant to conceptually represent the subject matter and all that is presumed to be psychological, e.g., attention, perceiving, feeling, reasoning, imagining, thinking, remembering, among many others (Kantor, 1924/1926, Kantor & Smith, 1975; Ribes, 2009a). Finally, one must know which method to use, in order to interpret in a theoretical sense the data obtained in the practice of research; hence, as suggested by Hanson (1985), data that are interpreted in the form of facts are always conceptual facts. It is true that, thanks to the current pluralism in the discipline, which is a consequence of the lack of consensus on the definition of the subject matter, today we can find many and varied psychologies, which are distinguished by their categories and concepts and their methods and logical application of knowledge, and are openly divergent and even incommensurable with each other (Ribes, 2000). What is interesting from the current state of affairs in the discipline, is that when one would expect that the collective efforts of psychologists would be aimed at seeking a kind of consensus or unity, as recently suggested by Ardila (2010), on the contrary, we find approaches that are presumed to give birth to “new” and “different” psychologies, which are promptly credited with scientific character; a conspicuous example is what is known as positive psychology (hereinafter PP). Three questions arise in relation to this: does it make sense in the current circumstances to consider the existence of a scientific POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY: THE SCIENCE AND PRACTICE OF PSYCHOLOGY?

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