ABSTRACT
Every science has had its grand visions—its ideals and over-beliefs, going beyond what is compelled by the facts—of what its subject matter is really all about. Either we have our visions and risk the problems, or we forego the visions and turn psychology into something bland, tepid, and probably inconsequential. Without its visionary over-beliefs, psychology would be only a collection of mute facts and pedestrian generalizations, perhaps also of some more or less marketable technical skills. One of its chief sources is the fact that these visions are, after all, a kind of faith that the truth of things will turn out to be pretty much what one believes it to be in the first place. Whether we call them visionary over-beliefs, theoretical first principles, or simply points of view, these visions of what the subject matter is really all about are not just tentative, dispassionate hypotheses that one is willing to abandon at a moment’s notice.
