The key difficulty facing psychology

It seems incontestable that the key difficulty facing psychology ever since it chose to become a science is that of being able to treat in an adequate manner the phenomena of human reality. The great division in psychology’s perennial debate on this matter is between those who make a commitment to science first, and then turn to their phenomena of interest armed with the criteria of science as filters, or those who make a primary commitment of fidelity to human phenomena, and then try to find rigorous (scientific) ways of interrogating them.

Amedeo Giorgi, »Issues Relating to the Meaning of Psychology as a Science«, in Contemporary Philosophy: A New Survey, ed. Guttorm Fløistad, vol. 2 (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982), 322.