ABSTRACT
What sort of psychology is being advocated, or more importantly perhaps, what is this psychology against? The short answer is all forms of positivism. As to what this means exactly, “it is only a slight exaggeration to say that all one can reasonably infer from unexplicated usage of the term ‘positivism’ is that the writer disapproves of whatever he or she is referring to” (Hammersley, 1995, p. 2). Somewhat more specifically, this approach opposes what Shanon (1993) has summarized very neatly as the Representational-Computational View of Mind (RCVM). Although this has dominated in psychology since the 1960s or so, that is not to say that it has gone unchallenged for all that time. The seminal critique in relation to the semantic representation of meaning was presented by Wittgenstein as early as 1953 but it is probably fair to say that even now the cognitive science model remains the most important general framework in use in psychology.
