| For some time now psychologists have been troubled by the fact that their discipline shares no conceptual or methodological framework in which its practitioners work. In this thesis I analyze this problem of unification in psychology. The philosopher Thomas S. Kuhn argues that, absent such a unifying framework, a discipline cannot begin to be considered mature. Through a detailed review of current psychological literature I conclude that psychology's disunity is caused by incommensurable competing frameworks, and that the problem of unification is rooted in an ontological dispute, i.e., the classical mind-body problem. As a solution, I argue for an antirealist reading of psychology to obviate the ontological dispute. I conclude by proposing Paul C. L. Tang's Complementarity Model of MindBrain. I suggest that Tang's model might very well be the unifying framework that psychology needs. |
