What defines the very character of science is not the mechanical application of one or another method, but a much larger narrative in which methods are chosen because of their transparent relevance to a widely perceived problem. The methods adopted by Archimedes in ancient Greece, Newton in seventeenth-century England, Darwin in the middle of the nineteenth century, and Einstein early in the twentieth have very little in common at the descriptive level. In a word, there is no single scientific method at all. There is, however, a quite systematic relationship between the identification of a problem of scientific consequence and the subsequent choice from among available methods of observation and measurement. What establishes this relationship is a theory rich in ontological or in explicative possibilities. A theory rich in ontological possibilities is one which, when found to be valid, clarifies and may even reduce the domain of really existing entities. We no longer believe that heated objects rise because, as a result of heating, they take on a substance called »levity.« We no longer explain phenomena by referring to the properties of phlogiston.

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.

Psychology is not only the study of human thinking, feeling, acting, and interacting: it has itself – like the other human sciences – brought into being new ways of thinking, feeling, acting, and interacting. We ordinary people whom the psychologist studies have turned out to be not quite the same ordinary people that we were before such extraordinary people as William James and Freud and Kohler and Piaget. Psychologists have had varying (sometimes striking) success in interpreting the human world; but they have been systematically successful in changing it.

Alasdair MacIntyre, »How Psychology Makes Itself True – or False«, in A Century of Psychology as Science, ed. Sigmund Koch and David Leary (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1985), 897, doi: 10.1037/10117-055.

För några veckor sedan försökte jag formulera några tankar om religion och det problematiska i den scientistiska synen att vetenskapen utgör alltings mått. Det är tankar jag försökt formulera i flera års tid, och jag vet inte om det gick så bra. Men nu har Jonna Bornemark kommit till sin undsättning med en essä i Svenska dagbladet betitlad »Scientismen tolererar bara sin egen tro«. Hon sätter i princip ord på mina egna tankar.

Tack, Jonna!

A central thesis then begins to emerge: man is in his actions and practice, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal. He is not essentially, but becomes through his history, a teller of stories that aspire to truth. But the key question for men is not about their own authorship; I can only answer the question »What am I to do?« if I can answer the prior question »Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?« We enter human society, that is, with one or more imputed characters – roles into which we have been drafted – and we have to learn what they are in order to be able to understand how others respond to us and how our responses to them are apt to be construed. It is through hearing stories about wicked step-mothers, lost children, good but misguided kings, wolves that suckle twin boys, youngest sons who receive no inheritance but must make their own way in the world and eldest sons who waste their inheritance on riotous living and go into exile to live with the swine, that children learn or mislearn both what a child and what a parent is, what the cast of characters may be in the drama into which they have been born and what the ways of the world are. Deprive children of stories and you leave them unscripted, anxious stutterers in their actions as in their words. Hence there is no way to give us an understanding of any society, including our own, except through the stock of stories which constitute its initial dramatic resources. Mythology, in its original sense, is at the heart of things. Vico was right and so was Joyce. And so too of course is that moral tradition from heroic society to its medieval heirs according to which the telling of stories has a key part in educating us into the virtues.

Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (University of Notre Dame, 1981), 216.

För närvarande håller jag på att skriva ihop min avhandling. I början på mars är det tänkt att alla kapitel skall vara skrivna — om än långt ifrån färdigställda. Oftast känns det fullt möjligt, men andra gånger — som nu — tvivlar jag på att jag någonsin kommer att ro i land det här projektet.

I en essä i Expressen tar Joel Halldorf sig an den utbredda föreställningen att »religion« är vår tids (och äldre tiders) farsot och att världen skulle vara så mycket bättre om vi helt enkelt gjorde oss av med allt vad »religion« heter. Halldorf anför i huvudsak två argument: (1) det är blott 6–7% av alla krig kan betraktas som »religiösa konflikter« (dessa uppgifter går att finna på Wikipedia); samt att (2) det bakom krig och framväxten av exempelvis IS »finns en rad faktorer: politiska, ekonomiska, sociala och ekologiska« och att religionen »inte nödvändigtvis sitter i förarsätet«.