DOI:10.6129/CJP.201912_61(4).0009
Chinese Journal of Psychology 2019, Vol.61, No.4, 439-456
Positivism vs. Realism: Philosophical Foundations for Constructing Theories in Indigenous Psychology
Kwang-Kuo Hwang（Department of Psychology, National Taiwan University）
Abstract
Positivism advocated radical empiricism for its ontology and argued that the only reality is what can be experienced by one’s sensory organs. The only legitimate way for a scientist to recognize objects in the world is through their representations in his mind. It is unnecessary for scientists to seek the ultimate cause that creates the objective world beyond sensory experience. Such radical empiricism advocates for an epistemological view, believing that scientific theories represent truth. Therefore, Schlick (1936) proposed a famous statement that was followed by most logical positivists: “The meaning of a proposition is the method for its verification” (Schlick, 1936). In contrast, evolutionary epistemology adopts the ontology of “realism,” which assumes that there exists an ontological reality beyond our sensory experience. A scientist has to construct a theory to describe the objective world by conjecturing about the nature of its noumena. According to the transcendental idealism proposed by Kant and the various versions derived from it. The goal of scientific activities is the construction of theoretical models to depict the natural order. Hence theoretical models are constructed by scientists, and though they might be independent from any particular individual, they cannot be independent from the scientific community. Because the noumenon of an object for study is transcendent, any scientific theory constructed by a scientist is just an approximation to the truth, but not truth itself. Therefore, it must be examined by members of a scientific community through various methods. Its methodology is falsification but not verification. In order to resolve the difficulties encountered in their theoretical construction, Indigenous psychologists have to adjust their mentality form positivism to realism.
Keywords: ontology, phenomenon, radical empiricism, thing-in-itself, transcendental idealism
