Historical and Philosophical Foundations of Psychology

Introduction: Why the philosophy of science?

I have chosen to start this survey of the historical and philosophical foundations of psychology with an examination of some of the major theories put forward in the philosophy of science. This might, at first sight, seem to be a rather unnatural place to start, but there are good reasons for it. Firstly, given that most psychologists think of their discipline as a science and of themselves as scientists, it is important to investigate ideas about what science actually is and what, if anything, are the characteristics that differentiate it from other, non-scientific, intellectual disciplines.

But there is another reason for looking at the philosophy of science to start off with, and that is that there is a good deal of overlap between ideas in the philosophy of science and psychology. Both the philosophy of science and psychology are concerned, at least in part, with the question of how we know about the world. As we shall see, many of the themes that will arise in the course of this presentation of the philosophy of science will re-emerge later in the history of psychology. Indeed, all of the philosophers of science that will be discussed in these three chapters make use of psychological ideas about the nature of knowledge.