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This audit analyzes psychology's fragmented discourse in contrasting natural and social sciences, suggesting critical implications for its scientific legitimacy.
Psychology occupies a unique position in the landscape of knowledge: it is simultaneously claimed as a natural science, practiced as a social science, and criticized for harboring pseudoscientific elements. This paper subjects psychology to a structural audit within the framework of Sequential Time Theory–Critical Review (STT-CR). The central finding is that psychology’s persistent boundary disputes—between schools, between science and practice, between legitimate and illegitimate claims—arise not primarily from empirical disagreements within a shared evidential field, but from a more fundamental condition: the fragmentation of L2. Unlike physics, where the operational ground (L2) is broadly shared and metaphysical surplus (L3) is the site of contestation, and unlike religion, where Over-Θ has fully appropriated L2’s constitutive authority, psychology is a discourse space in which multiple, mutually incompatible L2 structures coexist under a single disciplinary name. This paper reconstructs the major psychological schools as distinct canonical representations T := ⟨Θsys, P, C, D⟩, identifies the Over-Θ intrusion patterns specific to each, analyzes the replication crisis as a large-scale exposure of pseudo-verification, and examines the DSM as a site of managed L3 intrusion. The paper concludes that psychology is best understood not as a single science with internal disagreements, but as a discourse space exhibiting a continuous spectrum of L2 constitutive authority—from regions where observational closure is achieved to regions where Over-Θ governs the admissibility conditions of fact, evidence, and interpretation.
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Tetsuhito Kojima (2026) studied this question.
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