The Scientist—practitioner model: A critical examination

Abstract

What is understood as the scientist-practitioner model is disclosed in particular ways of talking and writing, or in a discourse that positions the psychological practitioner as a scientist invested with legitimate epistemic authority. This discourse constitutes the psychological enterprise, and various social arrangements and practices associated with it, in familiar ways. The privileging of this discourse, which draws heavily on outmoded epistemological ideas about science and the process of knowledge production, gives rise to a number of problematic contradictions in the prescribed training of aspiring practitioners that are likely to impede their understanding of psychological practice. Recent developments in science studies and the sociology of scientific knowledge suggest that psychological practice might be rendered more intelligible by explicating the way in which it is discursively constituted as a mundane aspect of social reality instead of trying to shoe-horn it into a preconceived idealisation.