Texts, Sings, Artefacts

Abstract

This chapter discusses texts, signs, and artefacts. There are three forms of "soft" or "alternative" psychology. In retrospect, each has seemed to make a characteristic claim. The first was that psychologists should abandon all thought of becoming scientists, and concern themselves with ‘human relations.’ The second was that, more or less by definition, human thought and action is "socially constructed." The third was that psychology should properly be conducted in the form of a "critique." Of these, the "human relations" option seemed at the time worryingly mushy. While stressing human potentiality, a noble theme, it did so in ways which threatened continually to remove it from the world of dispassionate knowledge to that of wise thoughts. Eastern religions, drug-induced states of heightened awareness, primal screams: these were not activities, it seemed, from which a patient accumulation of knowledge about the mind could easily be won.