ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the shortcomings of the naive realist orthodoxy in modern psychology. That critique has offered critical realism as a more comprehensive and valid framework for reader to explore psychological aspects of inner and outer reality. The chapter explains the price paid, when the politics of disciplinary knowledge at the turn of the twentieth century prompted the intellectual leadership of psychology to distance itself from the traditional authority on the mind, philosophy. Critical realists accept objectivity but conceive it not in terms of value-neutrality or ‘disinterestedness’ but instead in terms of alignment to the object of its enquiry. For critical realism, empiricism misleadingly uses the empirical domain of reality to describe the totality of reality. Turning to positivism in particular and the disciplinary orthodoxy it spawned in the 20th century, it relies heavily on empiricism and so subsumes its strengths and weaknesses, as just noted.
