Toward a postmodern psychology

Abstract

During the present century psychological science has been largely guided by a modernist world‐view. The modernist perspective, as represented in the arts, sciences, and cultural life, is centrally concerned with locating foundational forms. This romance with essentials is manifest in psychology's assumption of a basic, knowable subject matter; universal psychological processes; truth by (empirical) method; and research as progressive. Yet, in broad sectors of the intellectual world — and elsewhere — one detects a defection from modernism and the emergence of a postmodern perspective. Dominant within postmodernism is a thoroughgoing perspectivism. All attempts at foundations are viewed, then, as reflections of particular perspectives, themselves without justification except by recourse to other perspectives. Postmodernism not only raises critical questions regarding the modernist project in psychology, but opens new vistas for study. Cultural critique and the construction of new and more practical forms of theoretical intelligibility are primary.