Psychology since 1945 has been characterized by two aspects:
ignorance and dogmatic analysis.
Ignorance ignores the insights of predecessors such as Romanes, Morgan, Lewes, Lessing, etc., as well as the findings of other sciences.
A key tool for ignorance is the dogmatization of analysis.
Every analytical separation, such as that into body and mind, natural sciences and humanities, is permissible and even necessary as a fiction in Vaihinger’s sense . However, the knowledge that it is a fiction and not reality must always be maintained.
Modern psychology, however, turns this analytical separation into dogma, fragmenting the whole into thousands of individual parts, and then, like behaviorism, wrongfully concludes from these individual parts to the whole, as GH Lewes has extensively demonstrated.
To avoid errors, a resynthesis of the fictitiously separated components is also necessary. To illustrate this, Vygotsky chose the example of water, the properties of which are in no way reflected in its components, hydrogen and oxygen. While water extinguishes a fire, hydrogen burns and oxygen promotes combustion. Similar ideas can also be found in GH Lewes.
Therefore, like a watchmaker who puts the watch back together after „analysis“, psychonomy must understand analysis as permissible FICTION and always strive for synthesis.
It must also take into account the findings of both its predecessors and other sciences, such as ethology.
The dogma of “ antithetical dualism „, the either/or, must also be avoided, so that, for example, quantitative and qualitative research can be viewed as complementary rather than opposites.
