Beyond subjectivity and objectivity the intersubjective foundations of psychological science (mascolo, 2016) integrative psychological behavioral science

Psychology embraced an empirical mindset: if scientific knowledge comes from observation of things in the world, a psychological science should follow suit.. From this view, the objects

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Integrative Psychological and

Behavioral Science

ISSN 1932-4502

Integr psych behav.

DOI 10.1007/s12124-016-9357-3

Beyond Objectivity and Subjectivity: The Intersubjective Foundations of Psychological Science

Michael F. Mascolo

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R E G U L A R A RT I C L E

Beyond Objectivity and Subjectivity: The Intersubjective Foundations of Psychological Science

Michael F Mascolo1

# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2016

Abstract The question of whether psychology can properly be regarded as a science

has long been debated (Smedslund in Integrative Psychological & Behavioral Science,

50, 185–195,2016) Science is typically understood as a method for producing reliable knowledge by testing falsifiable claims against objective evidence Psychological phenomena, however, are traditionally taken to be Bsubjective^ and hidden from view

To the extent that science relies upon objective observation, is a scientific psychology possible? In this paper, I argue that scientific psychology does not much fail to meet the requirements of objectivity as much as the concept of objectivity fails as a methodo-logical principle for psychomethodo-logical science The traditional notion of objectivity relies upon the distinction between a public, observable exterior and a private, subjective interior There are good reasons, however, to reject this dichotomy Scholarship sug-gests that psychological knowledge arises neither from the Binside out^ (subjectively)

nor from the outside-in (objectively), but instead intersubjective processes that occur

between people If this is so, then objectivist methodology may do more to obscure than

illuminate our understanding of psychological functioning From this view, we face a dilemma: Do we, in the name of science, cling to an objective epistemology that cuts us off from the richness of psychological activity? Or do we seek to develop a rigorous intersubjective psychology that exploits the processes through which we gain psycho-logical knowledge in the first place? If such a psychology can produce systematic, reliable and useful knowledge, then the question of whether its practices are Bscientific^

in the traditional sense would become irrelevant

Keywords Scientific psychology Objectivity Subjectivity Intersubjectivity Erogdicity Human science

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DOI 10.1007/s12124-016-9357-3

* Michael F Mascolo

michael_mascolo@yahoo.com; mascolom@merrimack.edu

1

Merrimack College, North Andover, MA, USA

The question of whether psychology can properly be regarded as a science has long been debated (Smedslund2016) Tension about psychology’s scientific status reveals itself in the definition of psychology itself According to the APA, psychology consists

of the Bscientific study of behavior and mental events^ The bifurcation between

behavior and mental events can be traced to the traditional Cartesian duality between mind and body According to Descartes, while the mind as an incorporeal thinking

substance that operates according to its own principles, the body is composed of physical material that operates according to the laws of physics To the extent that the body is a material entity, it can studied scientifically As an incorporeal thinking process, the mind is beyond scientific analysis

Seeking to establish itself as a science, psychology severed itself from its philo-sophical roots and embraced the objective methods that have been so successful in the study of objects and bodies Although psychology rejected the idea of an incorporeal mind, it never fully resolved the tension between the subjective, self-causing interior and an objective mechanistically-caused exterior Psychology embraced an empirical mindset: if scientific knowledge comes from observation of things in the world, a psychological science should follow suit With the right empirical methods, we should able to gain psychological knowledge in ways similar to the natural sciences The

empirical mindset gave rise to what might be called methodological fetishism – the

privileging of method over theory in the hope that the careful use of scientific methodology would ultimately lead to psychological knowledge

In what follows, I argue that that, because of its unique subject matter, psychological science does not and cannot function in the same way as the natural sciences (Martin and Sugarman2009) Psychological experiences are not observable in the same way as objects extended in time and space As a result, attempts to study psychological experience Bobjectively^ tend to under-represent the nature, scope and richness of those processes However, while psychological experiences are not themselves Bobjectively^ observable, neither are they subjective states that are accessible only from a first person perspective Psychological knowledge originates neither from the Boutside in^ (objectively) nor from the Binside out^ (subjectively) Instead, it arises in

intersubjective encounters that operate between people If this is so, then a genuine psychological science must itself rest on intersubjective foundations.

Consequences of Cartesianism: The Subjective-Objective Dichotomy

Science is typically understood as a method for producing reliable knowledge by

testing falsifiable claims against objective evidence An objective observation is typi-cally understood as one that is (a) based upon publitypi-cally observable phenomena (i.e., overt behavior); (b) unbiased, in the sense that it records only what is observed, without adding or taking away from the observation, and (c) provides an accurate representa-tion how the world as it truly is Viewed from this perspective, a scientific psychology

immediately faces a problem: How can we study processes regarded as Bsubjective^ in

an Bobjective^ way? Toward this end, psychological scientists seek to identify overt acts that can function as observable indicators of internal states To study emotion, for example, a researcher might seek to define Banger^ operationally in terms of patterns

of facial and bodily behavior, verbal descriptions, scores on rating scales, or measures

of blood flow or electrical activity in the brain Having done so, the researcher would seek to determine the validity and reliability of such measures of emotion

In the natural sciences, while there is a much that is hiđen from view, the physical aspects of the world – or their effects – are assumed in principle to be open to public observation The question of objectivity in the natural sciences has evolved primarily

an issue of whether or not it is possible to remove the effects of the observer on the observed Daston and Galison (2007) have argued that our contemporary conception of objectivity is a recent development In their historical analysis of how Bworking objects^ are represented in scientific atlases, Daston and Galison (2007) identified three phases in the development of Bobjectivity^ During the early Enlightenment, atlases were filled with perfected images of objects drawn according to a standard of Btruth-to-naturệ In these images, local variations among objects of a particular type (ẹg., plants, organisms, etc.) were eliminated to reveal a single Btruê form Such images were understood to be Btruê in abstract sense, even if no image corresponded

to any actual existing object With the emergence of recording technologies (ẹg., photography), standards shifted; Bmechanical objectivity^ arose as the practice of recording images of actual objects, complete with their imperfections and variations

As it became clear objects produced in their Bobjectivê form were often difficult to use for teaching and research purposes, standards of description shifted to the pursuit of Btrained judgment^ – the skill of distinguishing what is relevant and irrelevant of any given image for any given purposẹ In this way, the scientific pursuit of Bobjectivity^ has long been defined with reference to an awareness of the relation between the knower and the known

In the natural sciences, the distinction between objectivity and subjectivity primarily concerns the extent to which the various biases of the knower can be separated from the known In psychology, however, the objective-subjective distinction extends beyond this issuẹ In the natural sciences, while some aspects of the physical world may be

Bhiđen^ in the sense that they are difficult to observe, there is no assumption that the

world of scientific objects is itself divided into objective and subjective parts The same cannot be said for psychological sciencẹ In psychology, it is often assumed that the psychological world is a priori private, hiđen, and cut off from the view of others

From this view, the objects of psychological inquiry are taken to be inherently

unobservable – except perhaps as Bintrospected^ from the perspective of Bsubjectivê first person experiencẹ There are, however, good reasons to reject this traditional conception of subjectivity and objectivitỵ

Neither Subjective nor Objective: How Experience Shines through Action

In recent years, scholars from a many disciplines have challenged the notion that

psychological experience are private states that are inherently hiđen from third person

access This critique was most elegantly articulated by Wittgenstein (1953) in his argument against the possibility of a private languagẹ Wittgenstein argued that if

Binner experiences^ (ẹg., pain, sadness) were truly private states, it would impossible

for people to learn how to use words to refer to them In advancing this claim, Wittgenstein (1953) compared the idea of Bprivate experiencê to a situation in which everyone has an object – call it a Bbeetlê – in a private box into which only the owner could ever look Under these circumstances, saying, BI have a beetle in my box^ would

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be entirely useless as a means of communicating the contents of one’s box If the

contents of one’s box were truly private, there could be no public criteria to determine if people were using the term beetle in a shared way Without some form of shared

reference, no one – including the box’s owner herself – could be certain of what the

word beetle meant.

Wittgenstein used this argument to show the absurdity of the idea that experiences are private states (Overgaard2005) If public criteria are needed in order to corroborate the meaning of inner state terms, what are the public criteria that identify inner states?

For Wittgenstein, these criteria are the bodily expressions of the inner states themselves.

In everyday action, our inner life is expressed directly in our actions, words and

expressions A person’s experience shines through their bodily expression (e.g.,

writh-ing in pain; sobbwrith-ing in grief) (Overgaard2005; ter Hark1990) If this is so, it cannot be

that bodily expressions are merely contingently related our inner states – they must be public manifestations of those states (Hacker1997) There is not first the experience

and then also the expression Expression is an aspect of experience, and vice-versa If

experience shines through our expressions, it is often possible to read a person’s

experience directly from those expressions.

For any particular individual, experience itself is immediate, direct and pre-linguis-tic However, the capacity to represent experiences as explicit objects of consciousness

is not (Zahavi2005) People come to form explicit representations of their own inner experience when they gain the reflective capacity to apply inner state words – words whose shared meanings are organized with reference to the public aspects of personal experience – to their own experience

This view provides a strong counterpoint to the common psychological belief of

radical hiddenness (Shotter2000) – the idea that the bulk of what is important in psychological inquiry is private and hidden from view This is not to say that

experi-ential states never hidden In only means that internal experiences are not a priori

hidden (ter Hark1990) It does not mean that a person’s experience is transparent to others; it means only that a person’s experience is not inherently or necessarily cut off from others There are many possible third person paths to an individual’s first person’s experience; none are infallible, and none guaranteed It is also possible, of course, for people to hide their experience When they do so, however, they inhibit their external actions – not their Binner^ feelings Further, this view also does not mean that what has

traditionally been regarded as subjective is actually objective Instead, it suggests that there is something wrong with the subjective/objective dichotomy itself Is there an

alternative way to understand the ways we acquire psychological knowledge? The Intersubjective Origins of Psychological Knowledge

This critique of traditional Cartesian dichotomies suggests that psychological knowl-edge arises neither from the Binside out^ (i.e., subjectively) nor from the Boutside-in^

(i.e., from objective observation) Instead, it arises between people in intersubjective exchanges with others over time Intersubjectivity refers to the capacity to share and

coordination experience between people in everyday social interactions (Matusov

1996; Zlatev et al.2008)

The idea that psychological knowledge arises through intersubjective engagement is supported by theory and research on Bmirror neurons^ (Iacoboni2011) During the last

decades of the 20th century, researchers identified neurons in the brains of monkeys that fired not only when an animal performed a given action, but also when the animals

observed another animal perform the same action The discovery of mirror neurons

suggests a way to understand the problem of Bother minds^ – the question of how it is possible to understand and be responsive to the inner experience of others It provides

an empirically grounded framework to understand otherwise difficult to explain phe-nomena as neonatal Bimitation^, empathy, the coordinated emotional dances that occur

in early infant-caregiver interaction, and the very possibility of coming to know other minds (Trevarthen and Aitken2001)

Given something like a Bmirror resonance system^, it becomes possible imagine that

an infant’s experience of a caregiver’s smiling face and contoured voice would activate similar actions and experiences in the infant herself From a very early age, infant and caregiver mutually regulate each other’s actions, feelings and interest in real time Stable patterns of acting, feeling and understanding emerge and develop within these co-regulated exchanges (Fogel et al.2006) The jointly coordinated experiences pro-vide the intersubjective foundations upon which the child’s psychological understand-ing of self and other develops How this occurs within joint action processes is a matter

of investigation and controversy (Martin et al.2008; Meltzoff2013; Iacoboni 2009; Sodian2011) Such patterns of emotionally-attuned engagement with others are

for-mative in a child’s socio-emotional development (Schore and Schore2008) With the capacity for symbolism, children gain the capacity to use language to identify and reflect upon their internal experiences This occurs as caregivers use psychological language to regulate, represent and respond to children within intersubjective exchanges

The existence of something like a mirror resonance system transcends our traditional ways of thinking about human sociality Instead of thinking of infants as isolated beings who must break through the opaque exteriors of others to gain access to their minds, we can understand infants as capable of primitive forms of intersubjective engagement from the start of life (Reddy2015; Trevarthen and Aitken2001) This suggests that

psychological knowledge arises within intersubjective exchanges that occur between people We gain such knowledge neither by introspecting into a private world of inner

experience; nor by inferring the content of other people’s minds from their overt

behavior It follows that the processes by which we construct psychological knowledge

are qualitatively different from those through which we understand the physical world.

A psychological science based on methods for understanding the physical world would

be impoverished in comparison to one built explicitly upon the human capacity for intersubjective engagement

How Pre-Understandings Structure Observation

Beyond the prescription that scientific evidence be publically observable, the concept

of objectivity stipulates that observation should produce unbiased descriptions of the world as it really is An objective observation records that is there without adding to or

subtracting from the event itself This idea, however, violates one of the most basic principles of psychological activity: existing knowledge – our pre-understandings – organize the process of perceiving the world (Piaget1954) All observation is neces-sarily prefigured by some form of pre-understanding, however inchoate or formal

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Without some existing framework to organize inquiry, observation would simply be

unintelligible Pre-understandings are thus a kind of bias They bias what we look at,

how we look at it, and how we interpret what we see To observe is not simply to record

what is there; it is to record something under some descriptive framework – however

basic or tacit (Ochs1979)

If observation is structured by pre-understanding, it is not possible to describe the world in an objective way This conclusion might seem to threaten the very possibility

of scientific knowledge One might ask, BIf the data we collect are not independent of our theoretical frameworks, how is scientific progress possible?^ The answer is to be found in the hermeneutic idea that our pre-understandings are never as rich as the data that they anticipate Although our pre-understandings organize experience, the world fights back When pre-understandings – scholarly or otherwise – fail to anticipate the world of experience, pre-understandings become subject to revision Scientific progress

does not progress by eliminating the Bbiasing^ effect of pre-understandings It occurs

by revising failed pre-understandings that were disconfirmed by novel data or experi-ence, and replacing them with more developed understandings that are more able to

accommodate those data and experiences

Because of the intersubjective origins of psychological knowledge, psychological understandings play an especially important role in psychological science The pre-understandings that guide psychological inquiry consist in large part of the everyday psychological knowledge that arises from the history of our intersubjective relations with others Such knowledge is represented in our everyday psychological language and in the wealth of socio-emotional understanding that we use in our everyday lives Without this wealth of intersubjectively constructed and sign-mediated knowledge, the psychological acts of others would be unintelligible As observers, we would be completely autistic Other people would be experienced as confusing configurations

of muscle movements We would have no way of understanding the intentionality of another person’s actions

Psychological scientists do not experience their participants as mysterious mecha-nisms or alien creatures about whom they have no prior knowledge Theorists and researchers experience their participants as persons – social agents whose behavior occurs against the backdrop of motives, meanings, emotions and evaluations As researchers, our everyday psychological knowledge necessarily frames our inquiries and our capacity to make the most rudimentary of observations However, as scientists committed to objective observation, we often think of our psychological pre-understandings as unscientific background If, as Einstein is said to have remarked, Bthe whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking^, then psychological science can gain much by refining the intersubjective processes through which we gain our psychological knowledge

Methodological Fetishism: When the Methodological Tail Wags

the Theoretical Dog

Historically, thinking of philosophy as a form of armchair speculation, psychology sought to establish itself as an empirical science Through the use of evidence, psychology could put theoretical ideas to the test As a result, unlike philosophy –

often characterized as having failed to resolve its problems over time – psychology could look forward to the type of progress enjoyed by the natural sciences In distancing itself from philosophical speculation, psychology embraced a rigorous empiricism From this view, our scientific concepts arise from careful observation of the empirical world itself If our scientific categories can be clarified through careful observation of the world itself, then scientific principles are to be found in patterns of empirical data themselves As a result, the rigorous pre-empirical articulation of psychological concepts could often be seen as superfluous at best – and overly Bphilosophical^ at worst

This line of thinking runs the risk of what might be called Bmethodological fetishism^ – the practice of privileging methodology over conceptual clarity, based

on the idea that observable data themselves are the ultimate source of scientific knowledge Psychology is replete with increasingly sophisticated methods for assessing

relations among variables A method is a procedure for solving a problem; a

method-ology is a philosophical or theoretical articulation of the principles that govern the use

of methods in any given discipline In light of a broadly shared disdain for Bphilosophical speculation^, psychologists are more likely to enter into discussions

about methods than methodology This has led to a series of entrenched assumptions

about the proper methods for psychological sciences – assumptions that deserve to be re-evaluated In what follows, I discuss two such assumptions

Low Hanging Fruit and the Risks of Reification

Psychological constructs often have their origins in everyday language and common

sense (e.g., anger, trait, self-esteem) Given the bias in favor of measurement over

conceptual clarification, when psychologists invoke a psychological concept, they often

begin their work by asking, BHow can we measure this construct?^ rather than BWhat

do we mean when we use this construct?^ The rush to measurement reflects the

privileging of empirical data over conceptual clarity: if empirical data are the ultimate arbiter of theoretical claims, then psychological theory will eventually be clarified as it

is adjusted to the particularities of data

However, this view fails to take into consideration the importance of theoretical clarity in the process of organizing psychological research In any given study, the psychological constructs under examination help structure the very data that will be

used to test those constructs This process can not only lead to self-verifying research, but also to the reification of psychological concepts – treating theoretical constructs as

if they were real entities in the world

An example of this process involves the concept of trait in personality research In everyday language, we tend to think of people as having particular qualities,

charac-teristics or traits Such concepts are metaphorical extensions of how we understand

properties of objects in the world For example, Mendel classified his pea plants as

either Bshort^ or Btall^ Once grown, their height is fixed In this way, the concept of

trait refers to a stable quality of a thing Moving to the psychological world, McCrae

and Costa (1997), define trait as a Bmore or less stable pattern of thinking, feeling and

acting^ Defined in this way, the task then becomes how to measure Btraits^ in actual persons The most common way of doing so involves asking people to rate their propensity to act in defined by different trait terms Resulting ratings from large

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numbers of participants are factor analyzed to identify a series of broad dimensions presumed to reflect the Bbuilding blocks of personality^

In this example, reification occurs when the everyday metaphorical concept of trait

is treated as a real entity that can be observed At this point, patterns of action –

processes that change dynamically over time and place – are turned into fixed things.

This is done by aggregating measures across time and place to produce Baverage^

rating on any given trait dimension (Rose et al 2013) Such a measure not only

privileges stability over temporal and contextual variation, an abstract entity that has

no empirical referent is created and treated as a tangible object of scientific inquiry

(Slaney and Garcia2015)

The use of ratings scales as Bmeasures^ of psychological traits is equally as problematic The use of rating scales is a relatively easy way of collecting data about human behavior; they are, perhaps, among the best methodological examples of Blow hanging fruit^ Further, invoking the traditional value of objectivity, scores on a Likert

scale give the appearance of being Bobjective^ in the sense that, once produced, they

are available for all to see However, this loses sight of the fact that ratings by

participants are nonetheless judgments that about processes that are generalized across

time and place Such judgments depend upon the participant’s understanding of the question asked, capacity to judge action across time and place, ability to turn an evaluative judgment into a number, and so forth (Rosenbaum and Valsiner2011) When this happens, psychology creates the appearance of having identified a psychological entity where no such entity really exists This is not to say that there is not stability and order in human behavior There is both order and variation It is to say

that if we want to study that order, we must examine what real people actually do in

real time and in various times and places Under such assessment conditions, the

complexity of psychological order and variation become clearer, and Btraits^ become less trait-like

The Problem of Generalization: From Persons to Populations and Back Again

Science seeks general laws that can be generalized beyond the local conditions of any given study In psychology, this means identifying psychological principles that are broadly applicable to persons across time, place and social group This is typically accomplished by recruiting a sample of subjects who can be viewed as representative of the larger population of interest To ensure generalizability, researchers typically seek to include as many participants in a study as they can recruit By aggregating data across individuals in a sample, researchers seek to ensure that their findings generalize from the local sample to the larger population of interest

The task of producing findings that generalize to target populations is an important one However, the methodological quest for generalization often produces the exact opposite of its intended effect Research methods commonly used in psychological

science often produce findings that are valid at the level of populations, but not at the level of individual persons This is the problem of ergodicity (Velicer et al. 2014) Research is ergodic when findings that operate at the level of the population are also applicable at the level of understanding individuals The problem, however, is that

research in psychology is often non-ergodic; it tends to identify relations that operate at

the level of the population but not at the level of individual action