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In the face of psychologys continuing expansion and diversity, Pickren and Teo (2020) call for a re-envisioning of general psychology. They challenge us to reforge psychologys historic links to philosophy and the humanities while also accommodating contemporary critiques arising from the disciplines increasing specializations. In response, Osbeck (2020) explores the idea of general psychology as common ground and point of view, and suggests that the latter makes general psychology itself a specialization. Nevertheless, she anticipates difficulties for resolving psychologys methodological value conflicts, sees no resolution for its ongoing dilemma of establishing limits to avoid incoherence while also honoring diversity, and wonders how psychology can incorporate the position of critic without sabotaging its own disciplinary progression. In this paper we argue that general psychology neither stands in contrast to psychologys specializations nor is itself a specialization. When realistically re-envisioned in the light of a clarification of thoroughgoing realism, general psychology resolves Osbecks dilemmas, extends the ways in which philosophy is always in psychology, and takes us much further along the common ground and point of view paths, to where they converge in their roles of infusing and contextualising psychologys numerous specializations. General psychology is thus the sine qua non of all psychological inquiry, no matter how specialized.
Keywords: general psychology, specialization, methods, philosophy of science
Psychology as a discipline has long been challenged by its paradoxical combination of flourishing via empirical expansion and struggling via theoretical disarray. According to Mackay and Petocz (2011):
Indeed, psychology is not so much one discipline as many, a large, disparate and sprawling enterprise, whose subdomains, ranging from cultural studies to brain science, depend on concepts of mind, action and person so various that they are almost unrecognisable as part of the same venture.... And as every student of psychology soon realises, there is little cohesion across the theories that are encountered in psychology's different subdomains. Psychology is a veritable boom town with scores of rambling unconnected buildings, some once fashionable but abandoned, others planned but never built, some large, many small, in different regions isolated from one another. (pp. 17-18)
This ongoing challenge of unification and coherence in the face of expansion and diversity has prompted a recent call by Pickren and Teo (2020) to re-envision general psychology. Their...