Scientific Psychology- Some Epistemological Considerations

Abstract

Psychology has adopted a positivist framework established by Auguste Comte in which positive was identified with the scientific, and scientific with the discovery of natural laws. That humans are the creators of higher psychological functions and that the development of human beings is dialectic and therefore cannot be simulated by simple cause–effect understanding, should be underlined in an alternative epistemology for human beings. The approach taken in this article is that the elementary, ‘natural’ mechanisms would impede the development of psychological features because natural mechanisms are antithetical to cultural-psychological mechanisms and features. The only way that biological processes can participate with cultural processes is for them to bequeath their determining properties over behavior to culture, and for biological processes to recede into the background as a general potentiating substratum of human psychology, consciousness and behavior.
Keywords: Biology, Culture, Higher psychological functions, Psychological epistemology.