Hi List,

 

  In case anyone is in the mood for some philosophical psychology early on a Tuesday morning, here is a 2015 article I came across yesterday by Hank Stam, who offered a critique of the unified theory back in 2004. This is a similar viewpoint. He is not a fan of attempting to unified the field, ToK style, although he does respect the effort (he was editor of Theory and Psychology and invited me to do a special issue on it in 2008).  

 

Here is the article:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4595780/

 

Here is the most relevant part, at least in relation to a critique of the UTUA approach. I think it is worth being aware of:

 

“But it has meant that from time to time there have been attempts to “unify” psychology under some banner or other so that, at the very least, the stories told to the public by both academics and practitioners would match. The claim is that psychology is not unified and this hurts both its practitioners and its status as a science (Staats, 1991; Henriques, 2008)3. A quick and simplistic comparison is then drawn with the natural sciences wherein physics is taken to be exemplary but even biology will do as a standard. This is then contrasted to psychology’s squabbles and the lack of a consensus on the status of just what is scientific and what counts as pseudo-science and, goes the argument, it is high time to clean up the mess. Some one or another scheme is then proffered for replacing many small but recalcitrant theories in the discipline and this over-riding scheme is usually packaged as superior because of its ability to unite, provide a foundation, or otherwise cohere the many strands that make up the contemporary discipline.

 

Although not numerous, such schemes usually include a list of reasons why this is a problem or why psychology is a “disunified science” in Staats’s (1991) words. After some broad generalizations, lumping all areas of psychology together, a wide variety of propositions or arguments have been put forth to unify the discipline. In Staats’s (1994) case, this was a “unified positivism” or a “psychological behaviorism” depending on what phase of Staats’s career one is reading. Ultimately it was an attempt to fuse multiple areas and features of psychology into a single “unified science.” Others of more recent vintage have attempted to keep these projects alive, or at least to put their personal stamp on such a project for every unification project seems to require that its proponent think through the problem anew. In recent years, Sternberg and Grigorenko (2001), Goertzen (2008) and Henriques (2008) among many others have continued to write on these questions, providing variations on the problem (is there a “crisis” of unification?) and offering numerous solutions (e.g., the “tree of knowledge,”—Henriques, a “unified psychology approach”—Sternberg), and so on (see Stam, 2004 for one critique).

 

The problems with these projects are (i) they are not responses to genuine problems in psychology but an attempt to impose order on disorder from an abstract vantage point, (ii) their relationship to empirical research is thin, and (iii) they rarely amount to more than a singular project or a personal vision of some abstract structures and/or institutional and political processes that might solve the so-called “crisis of disunification” (Green, 2015). But all of these, it is important to note, have also been proposed at a high level of abstraction without solving any particular, single, concrete problem in the discipline. Indeed what characterizes such projects is their considerable remove from the world of minute, everyday psychological phenomena.”

 

Best,
Gregg