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Over a third of a century has passed since the philosopher Passmore (1967) announced the demise of positivism. While positivism seems to have disintegrated rather quickly and its epitaph already written, behaviorism, positivism's closest ally on the psychology side of disciplinary boundaries, is fading away only gradually. It is often said that cognitivism has replaced behaviorism as the dominant perspective in North American psychology. However, it is not easy to assess the merits, problems, and prospects of cognitivism, because like behaviorism and positivism, it comes in many varieties. Like hardy strains of adaptive organisms, these perspectives resist extinction; they mutate and reappear in more or less benign, beneficial, deceptive, as well as insidious forms. Although never consecrated as official doctrines (even Skinner denied being a positivist), varieties of neopositivism have deeply shaped the way many of psychologists look at the world. For decades, Carnapian positivism served as an implicit and loose but pervasive metatheoretical framework that tried to unite the diverse areas within psychology and to integrate them with a unified body of scientific knowledge. However, the Carnapian ideal of the unity of science has failed to materialize, and it is clear that a unity in fields of knowledge cannot be forced under the imperial domination of a single discipline ruling by the decree of doctrines such as reductionism. Nevertheless, today as in the past, there is a need for a broad metatheoretical framework within which the specialists in the varied fields within and across the boundaries of psychology could meaningfully communicate and collaborate with one another.

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4612-4402-8_11

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