On the Metaphysics of Social Psychology: A Critical View

Abstract

Two contrasting social metaphysics are discussed: the naturalistic and the historical. The naturalistic metaphysics emphasizes general conditions, transhistorical explanations, laws in nature, reductive explanations, positivism, cumulative, and value-free knowledge, whereas the historical emphasizes specificity, historical conditions, man-made laws, descriptive explanation, inference, holism, and value-affected knowledge. An analysis of social psychology and sociology journals suggests that social psychology as a discipline is more naturalistic than historical in its orientation. Social psychology studies tend to be experimental, using students as subjects, small samples, and inferential statistics, and are more discipline-bound in referencing, whereas sociology studies are more descriptive, using structural categories of population as subjects, larger samples, and descriptive statistics, and are more related to other social sciences in terms of referencing. Implications of these results for social psychology are discussed.