Principles of Cognition, Language and Action: Essays on the Foundations of a Science of Psychology

This book addresses a growing concern about why psychology, now more than a century after becoming an independent field of research, still fails to meet the basic requirements of a scientific discipline to the same extent as other sciences such as physics and biology. These requirements include: first, agreement on the definition and delimitation of the range of characteristics and properties of the phenomena or subjects to be studied; second, the development of concepts and methods that unambiguously specify the phenomena and the systematic study of their characteristics and properties. A third, equally important requirement, implicit in the first two, is the exclusion of any other question that falls outside the discipline’s purview. To these requirements must then be added the development of basic hypotheses about the nature of what is being studied, and principles for accounting for its properties and guiding the relevant questions to be asked and the theories to be developed about them.