When Psychology Broke Away from Philosophy

The title is half in jest — philosophy and psychology have no real feud to speak of, but the two are bound together by a thousand threads.⠀（Editor's note: the original title was "The Feud Between Psychology and Philosophy ﹙Part One﹚"）
⠀
Put most simply, historically speaking, modern psychology really did first split off from philosophy; before that, the study of psychology could be called a branch of philosophy. But here is the question: why did the study of psychology come into its own, gradually breaking away from philosophy to become an independent discipline?⠀
⠀
The answer lies in a single concept: methodology. Building on the success of the natural sciences, many scholars who study human behaviour came to believe that the research methods of the natural sciences could be applied to the study of people. And it was from this conviction that modern social science later grew. Modern psychology, among the many social sciences, can be called the one that has adopted the methods of natural science most thoroughly.⠀
⠀
What we mean by the methods of natural science is, quite simply, empirical research. Within this, the most important is, of course, to conduct experiments that can be controlled. But beyond that, given the limits of experimentation, there are often cases where experiments simply aren't possible, and so scholars — in the natural sciences as well as in psychology — have devised many different empirical methods. Yet whatever the specific method, what makes these methods empirical is that they all build their theories upon observed experience: any theory must be affirmed or refuted by observed experience. As these disciplines have developed, their empirical methods have grown ever more sophisticated — but however they develop, in the end they must always take observed experience as the foundation of theory.⠀
⠀
﹙Some readers will of course ask: didn't early psychology have plenty of theories that are now regarded as not scientific enough, not empirical enough? Take the theory of psychoanalysis founded by Freud — hasn't it long been criticised as fundamentally pseudoscience? Whether psychoanalysis is pseudoscience is not a question this article can easily settle. I can only say that, from the standpoint of the philosophy of science, it is not so easy for us to prove whether a theory is or is not pseudoscience. But perhaps we can at least say this: even if many early psychological theories were not wholly scientific, at least they consciously drew on more empirical methods in their research, and methodology gradually established itself as psychology developed, becoming more empirical over time — and that alone is enough to explain how modern psychology became a discipline independent of philosophy.﹚⠀
⠀
Empirical research methods are precisely what set modern psychology apart from the study of people and the human mind that came before it. Before modern psychology emerged, our various studies of the human mind were still a branch of philosophy — although many of those theories did relate to our experience ﹙in that they could effectively interpret the experiences of our own minds﹚, they never set out to study the mind through systematic, scientific, empirical methods. For this reason, even though such studies also took human behaviour and the mind as their object, they were fundamentally distinct from modern psychology, which studies through empirical means.⠀
⠀
Does this story sound oddly familiar? Quite right — it is not the first time it has happened in the history of philosophy. Two hundred years before social science, the natural sciences left the great family of philosophy by exactly the same path. In Newton's day, natural science was still called "natural philosophy". As natural science slowly matured in its empirical methods of research, it too broke decisively from philosophy and built an independent body of knowledge. And psychology's turn to empirical methods is likewise regarded as the reason it has made such great strides in the study of human behaviour and the mind.⠀
⠀
Putting it this way, then: since psychology has so effectively deepened our understanding of the human mind, do we still need philosophy when it comes to studying the human mind? That question I shall explore with you next time.⠀
⠀
Author: Yim Chun-bong @ Corrupt the Youth – Philosophy Section⠀
=============⠀
By the way, this coming March and April, together with Corrupt the Youth – Philosophy Section we are running a Psychology × Philosophy course, exploring how psychology and philosophy each study the human mind, where they agree and where they part ways, and what distinctive insights each can offer. If this interests you, do not miss it~⠀
⠀