ABSTRACT
Psychologists have never really had the luxury of simply calling themselves scientists, pure and simple, the way physicists, biologists, and chemists have had. We have wanted to be principally and only scientists as we studied ourselves and other animals, but there has always been at least one group of psychologists calling another “unscientific” or “soft-headed” since the days when Freud’s efforts could be compared to those of Wundt’s or Watson’s. The problem has always been, whether we recognized it or not, that we have taken on what is perhaps the most difficult explanatory task ever. We purport to explain some of our own behavior, such as thinking and problem solving, by using those very behaviors in the process—a system doubling over on itself. As we all know, it has proved extremely difficult to accomplish enough to satisfy even our own expectations, much less those of the general public; particularly when we compare our efforts with those of the physicists or biologists. They don’t have our problems. Physicists remain outside of the domain they attempt to explain in most important ways. The way that their own characteristics enter the domain of their explanatory process is largely trivial, even though it is true that a physicist, when dropped out of the window of a tall building, will fall at the rate of 32 feet per second per second. Psychologists, on the other hand, put themselves in a position of attempting to predict the behavior of a fellow human being while at the same time declaring their behavior is susceptible to similar predictions. As we know, this effort sometimes confuses us because it appears circular and self-contradictory. I hope I have shown that it is not contradictory or circular, if one acknowledges the different focal areas of the three major approaches to social behavior.
