Scientific Realism, Psychological Realism, and Aristotelian–Thomistic Realism.

In this paper, we examine the attractiveness of scientific realism as a philosophical underpinning providing a realist interpretation of psychology. We begin by discussing how psychology arrived at scientific realism as a kind of default position, and discuss some of the advantages of scientific realism relative to non-realist philosophical approaches to psychology. We then raise several potential problems with the naïve adoption of scientific realism for psychology. We argue that these problems show that scientific realism cannot provide a coherent and comprehensive realist underpinning for psychology, and that scientific realism, if taken seriously, has some quite pernicious effects on the field. In particular, scientific realism would divide all of psychology into the scientific and the non-scientific. However, because scientific realism has no clear criteria for what counts as scientific, this distinction, in practice, tends to collapse into a naïve materialist reductionism. We then describe Aristotelian–Thomistic (A–T) realism, and show how it might be adopted to provide a more coherent and comprehensive philosophical underpinning for psychology. We show that the A–T approach avoids the problems that we identified with scientific realism as a philosophical underpinning for psychology. Importantly, unlike scientific realism, the A–T approach maintains a clear realist orientation while providing clear principles for understanding the extent to which humans have epistemological access to reality by matching appropriate methods of inquiry for various subjects of rational inquiry, rather than elevating the scientific method to the status of a principle. Thus, we argue that the A–T approach could provide a solidly realist philosophical underpinning to the whole field of psychology that does not suffer from the defects common to the naïve acceptance of scientific realism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]