ABSTRACT
Quantification in the social sciences is a result of social standardization of knowledge and its construction process. Psychologists’ recurrent fascination with “contributing to the literature”-resulting in large databanks pooled together-may decrease the empirical potential for innovation in psychology. Contemporary qualitative mathematics provides many examples of deductive formal systems that could be abductively mapped onto psychologists’ phenomena of interests so that they go beyond simple metaphoric description devices. If psychology is to become abstracting—rather than “empirical”-science, it needs to become knowledgeable of mathematics far beyond statistics. Psychology has in the last century followed the inductive model, with all of its “side effects.” Given that psychology’s initial phenomena are qualitative in nature, quantification can easily lead to data alienation. The phenomena of psychological kind require the use of different systems of numbers to be used to capture their qualitative nature—possibly complex numbers, and beyond the-mathematical spaces.
