Psychology, Biology and the Market Place

Early in his paper, Radford discusses the origins of Western universities and argues that they were designed to provide a "very practical preparation for life and particularly for the professions, specifically law, medicine and theology." Radford then mentions how a core part of such education was grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic. Radford's purpose is to emphasise the practical nature of university education from the start and to imply that this should be its aim now. Throughout much of the paper he discusses the putative benefits of psychology and in so doing he is commenting on the nature of the modern world and its demands. Radford espouses a strange relativism about the subject, arguing that people ought to take seriously the "psychologies" of other cultures and embrace allied disciplines. This author does not share Radford's anthropocentric vision of psychology, which is about all behaving creatures, but rather advocates organising psychology along Niko Tinbergen's lines, which have emerged from the production of knowledge in the behavioural sciences and from a recognition of the explanatory requirements. The author's advocacy of Tinbergen comes from scientific judgement. In effect, market forces have tested Tinbergen's framework and the market has decided that it has value. The author argues that this market has not fully included psychologists who make curriculum decisions and claims that psychologists should pay attention to those in the human evolutionary behavioural sciences. Dickins stresses that academic psychology must be allowed to pursue scientific methods, develop new theories and falsify old, change frameworks, and follow particular interests as the market of ideas dictates. (Contains 1 footnote.)