Laudan's Normative Naturalism: A Useful Philosophy of Science for Psychology

Logical positivism, widely regarded as the received epistemology of psychology in the first half of the 20th century, was supplanted in the 1960s by various postpositivistic, relativistic philosophies of science, most notably that of Kuhn. Recently, Laudan, a major figure in the philosophy of science, developed a novel approach called normative naturalism that provides an alternative to positivism and relativism. His central thesis is that the two are not always on opposite ends of a continuum but rather have many assumptions in common. This article brings Laudan's important views to the attention of psychologists and describes some of the unique implications of these views for the conduct of research and theory in psychology. These implications, which follow from a number of closely reasoned pragmatic arguments, include more realistic and appropriate evaluation of theory and methodology than has been suggested by logical positivism or relativism.