The incorrigible science

a conversation with James Lamiell

James T. Lamiell

pp. 211-244

in: Heather Macdonald, David Goodman, Brian Becker (eds), Dialogues at the edge of American psychological discourse, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017

Abstrakt

James Lamiell, in his interview, discusses his abiding concerns over the notion, by now thoroughly embedded within the research methods canon of contemporary mainstream scientific psychology, that knowledge of statistical patterns in population-level data is knowledge that is also scientifically informative about the psychological lives of individual persons. Located at the nexus of the philosophy of psychology, the history of psychology, and research methods in psychology, Lamiell's work identifies the many historical points at which the confusions that result from this mistaken notion have been clearly articulated by critics but then ignored, or misunderstood, within psychology's mainstream, revealing the discipline to be, in this crucial respect, effectively incorrigible. The result is neither good science nor ethically unquestionable professional practice.