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Abstract
In the historical interaction of science and philosophy, empirical science has used cumulative research to shed new light on how the science of philosophy understands fundamental scientific issues. As an effort of self-renewal, the initial impetus for the birth of cognitive science was dialogue among disciplines, with a view to making it possible to unlock the mysteries of cognition. In other words, cognitive science was to pave the way for fundamentally updating the philosophical premises of the science of mind or even making possible a new scientific worldview. As a branch of cognitive science, psychology was to have contributed to the renovation of the ontological, methodological and scientific worldview of cognitive science through its unique interpretation of human nature. However, in the course of the development of cognitive science and psychology, psychology has failed to employ its disciplinary endeavors to renew the ontology, methodology and values of the philosophical foundations of cognitive science, and has also failed to contribute to the promotion of cognitive science. On the contrary, cognitive science’s mechanistic worldview and positivist methodology are the sole determinants of the background of cognitive science that shapes psychology’s model of development—that is, cognitive psychology (if one sees cognitive psychology as a concrete manifestation of the interaction of cognitive science and psychology). This study examines cognitive psychology’s ontological, methodological and value presuppositions and scientific worldview and reflects on the blind and passive nature of the discipline’s development. Moreover, from a history of science perspective, it considers how the development of this discipline can contribute to the renewal of scientific concepts in the philosophy of science through the interaction of the mature natural sciences and philosophy and thence provide possibilities for handling the relationship between psychology and philosophy in psychology’s future development.
Notes
1 Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man, p. 286.
2 The “Copernican revolution” mentioned here includes but is not limited to the intellectual changes accomplished by Copernicus; rather, it refers to the changes in the way questions were put to nature and answers sought that was initiated by Copernicus and completed by Galileo and Kepler, among others.
3 Duane P. Schultz and Sydney Ellen Schultz, Modern Psychology: A History (The 10th ed.), p. 488.
4 Ibid., p. 483.
5 Shu Yueyu, Shi Yingbo and Yuan Yan, “An ‘Operational Definition’ and a ‘Falsifiability Criterion’ Are not Sufficient to Lay the Foundation for Scientific Psychology.”
6 Yuan Yan, Shu Yueyu and Zhou Aibao, “What Is the ‘Science’ of ‘Psychology’: In Search of the Ontological Presuppositions of Psychology,” pp. 206-214.
7 Jiang Tianji, Contemporary Western Philosophy of Science, p. 90.
8 Edmund Husserl, “Philosophy as a Rigorous Science,” p. 27.
9 Shu Yueyu, “Tension between Purpose and Method: The Philosophical and Historical Roots of the Fragmentation of Psychology,” pp. 160-166.
10 Although these different schools do not necessarily follow the same path, their belief in positivism and the physicalist ontology reflected in this belief do constitute an important element of their thinking.
11 Alan Chalmers, What is This Thing Called Science?, p. 287.
12 Alan Chalmers, Science and Its Fabrication, pp. 22-23.
13 E. A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science, pp. 180, 186, 191.
14 Li Jianhui, The Philosophy of Life Sciences, pp. 9, 13, 19-20.
15 Edmund Husserl, “Philosophy as a Rigorous Science,” p. 27.
16 Eric Margolis, Richard Samuels and Stephen P. Stich, The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Cognitive Science, p. 161.
17 We harbor no doubt that it is possible to understand human psychology through physical and behavioral observations, but so far psychology has not yet been able to systemically demonstrate how these physical and behavioral indicators manifest psychological activity.
18 Peng Yunshi, Dissolution and Reconstruction of Human Beings: A Methodological Study of Western Psychology, pp. 12-13.
19 See Mark Burgin, Theory of Information: Fundamentality, Diversity and Unification.
20 Rom Harré, Cognitive Science: A Philosophical Introduction, p. 110.
21 Section 13 of Chapter 14 in Handbook of the Philosophy of Science · Information Philosophy.
22 Section 1 of Chapter 17 in Handbook of the Philosophy of Science · Information Philosophy.
23 Robert Cummins, Minds, Brains, Computers: An Historical Introduction to the Foundations of Cognitive Science, p. 6.
24 Our point here is whether repeatability, a defining characteristic of physical science, can be invariably applied to all branches of science? A case in point is psychology: since its object of inquiry is subjective consciousness, it may be possible to propose a non-repeatability-based standard to judge the scientific nature of research. For example, as mentioned earlier, the theory of evolution is an unrepeatable historical narrative, which does not meet the repeatability criterion. The courage to innovate the existing scientific worldview means reflecting on and assuming a “not-necessarily-true” attitude toward all the standards of all the branches of existing science.