ABSTRACT
At first blush, anti-reductionistic empiricism seems to be an obvious contradiction in terms. It has become almost axiomatic in both philosophy and psychology to assume that empiricism necessarily entails the reduction of human knowing to sensory experiences that are thought to be the building blocks of human cognition and behavior. A defining feature of the experimental method psychologists adopted from the natural sciences is its emphasis on empirical reduction. For those psychologists who felt beleaguered by the hegemony of the mechanistic and reductionistic theories of behaviorism, systems theory was like a breath of fresh air. It expanded the field of psychological research to include the broader context within which human behavior and feeling takes place and provided psychologists a systematic, but more comprehensive method by which to study the complexity of human life. Many social psychologists have modeled elements of Kurt Lewin's field theory in their own research and have attempted to maintain a fidelity to empiricism without compromising holism.
