Uma Quebra e Duas Crises: Labirintos da Pedologia e Psicologia de Vigotski

Over the last few years, psychology researchers have become increasingly preoccupied with the question of whether findings from psychological studies are generally replicable. The debates have originated from some unfortunate events of scientific misconduct in the field, and they have reached a climax with the recent discovery of a relatively weak rate of replicability of published literature, leading to the so-called replicability crisis in psychology. The present paper is concerned with examining the issue of replicability in the field of social psychology. We begin by drawing a state of the art of the crisis in this field. We then highlight some possible causes for the crisis, discussing topics of statistical power, questionable research practices, publication standards, and hidden auxiliary assumptions of context-dependency of social psychological theories. Finally, we argue that given the absence of absolute falsification in science, social psychology could greatly benefit from adopting McGuire’s perspectivist approach to knowledge construction.

This article discusses the problems involved in dating the manuscript of "The Historical Meaning of the Crisis in Psychology," which is housed in the Vygotsky family archive, and its connection to other works by Vygotsky (Pedagogical Psychology, "The Science of Psychology," "The Social Transformation of Man"). Vygotsky's personal notes on the problem of the crisis in psychology are also examined.

Biomedical science is recovering from an existential crisis. Recent reports have highlighted major problems with the reproducibility and reliability of a diverse range of scientific fields, including my own discipline, psychology and neuroscience. These issues have arisen due to a range of factors, some of which are specific to certain fields, while others apply across biomedical science (the Academy of Medical Science's 2015 report "Reproducibility and reliability of biomedical research: improving research practice," provides an excellent overview of the key issues involved). One factor is a lack of replication studies, which stems from an incentive structure built into academia that discourages scientists from replicating.

The objective of this research is to present the encounters and disagreements between the thoughts of Edmund Husserl and the Brazilian philosopher Raimundo de Farias Brito that permeate the philosophical criticisms in relation to Positivism and Scientific Psychology and, from this, how they developed an authentic Psychology with similarities. Both philosophers made a diagnosis of the crisis of Science, which affects Scientific Psychology, and presented a project for overcoming the crisis and renewal of culture. Husserl reflected that the crisis of the sciences consists of a European humanity that has lost belief in the capacity of reason to provide satisfactory answers to the basic problems of human existence, replacing knowledge with technique. Farias Brito reflected the establishment of a darkness over Western thought due to materialist positivism and skeptical criticism. The meaning of this darkness is the exclusion of the reality of the spirit, in the name of the positive given and the reduction of the real to the material. The purpose of this research is, therefore, to explore the possible relationships between the two philosophies regarding their criticisms to Scientific Psychology and their proposals for the refoundation of Psychology. It was sought to understand the scenario of scientific production on the theme through bibliographic reviews. From that, two articles were produced to be presented here. The first is called “Crisis in Science and in Psychology: the critiques of Edmund Husserl and Farias Brito”, whose objective consisted of highlighting the so-called "crisis" of science and humanity, arising from positivism-naturalism, and the so-called "crisis" of psychological science, as denounced by Edmund Husserl and Farias Brito, as well as the criticisms of both to Scientific Psychology. The second article, on the other hand, is entitled “The crisis of Psychology and its Restoration: proposals for overcoming it and the links between Edmund Husserl's Phenomenology and Farias Brito's Transcendent Psychology”. This article aimed (i) to reconstitute the elaboration of a new Psychology in both philosophers, as a possibility for the renewal of science through philosophy; (ii) explain, specifically in the question of psychological science, possible conceptual encounters and disagreements between the philosophies of these philosophers; and, finally, (iii) analyze the reasons for the similarities. The results showed that Many convergences between Husserl’s and Brito’s thinking were found, regarding the comprehension of the human soul, even though they had no contact with each other. Both denounced the misconception of the direct transposition of the positive method to Psychology, making it impossible to have access to psychological essences, to the study of human totality, and to the answers for essential human issues. Such similarities were already catalogued in literature and it was also possible to assert others, through elaboration's reconstitution of both of the new Psychology - Phenomenologic Psychology of Husserl and Transcendent Psychology of Farias Brito. This new Psychology has no more basis with materialism's parameters. Evident differences between both Psychologies were observed as well. At last, it was concluded that one of the possible reasons for their similarities lies in motivation - long lasting goals - that guided them. New research may point out new parallelism, new divergences and new reasons for their convergences.

The historical meaning of the psychological crisis. Methodological research

Vygotsky’s analysis of the crisis in psychology is an important methodological milestone in the development of his cultural historical theory. Therefore, discussing his work would entail including an examination of this analysis from a methodological point of view. This study emphasises the significance of the Marxist method in Vygotsky’s analysis of the crisis in psychology – in the emergence of the social character of psychological knowledge, in the critical approach to the different currents of the time, and in the search for new ways to creatively develop the science of psychology.

GENERAL COMMENTARY article Front. Psychol., 02 December 2015Sec. Comparative Psychology Volume 6 - 2015 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01867

Este artigo buscou resgatar a importância de L. S. Vigotski como historiador e epistemólogo da Psicologia. Vigotski diagnosticou uma crise e fragmentação na ciência psicológica nos anos de 1920, e destacou no materialismo dialético uma filosofia científica e uma visão de mundo que poderiam realizar a integração metodológica que ele achava necessária à Psicologia, que teria a consciência como objeto principal de estudo. Para isto, são analisados textos de cunho metodológico de Vigotski, em especial "O Significado Histórico da Crise na Psicologia", de 1926. A análise da proposta vigotskiana leva-nos a pensar no sentido da crise e da fragmentação que persiste na própria Psicologia contemporânea, e a refletir mais cuidadosamente sobre a pluralidade metodológica que caracteriza nossa ciência.

My title is that of a manuscript the leading Soviet psychologist Lev Semenovich Vygotsky (1896-1934) wrote in 1926. At that time, the whole world was talking about the "crisis" in the science of psychology, which had split into competing currents with little understanding of one another: behaviorism, psychoanalysis, Gestalt psychology, the Wurzburg school, and others. The problem lay not just in the fact that there was no unifying paradigm, as we would say today, but in the inordinate claims of each to have discovered some universal principle explaining all the phenomena of the mind.

My title is that of a manuscript the leading Soviet psychologist Lev Semenovich Vygotsky (1896-1934) wrote in 1926. At that time, the whole world was talking about the "crisis" in the science of psychology, which had split into competing currents with little understanding of one another: behaviorism, psychoanalysis, Gestalt psychology, the Wurzburg school, and others. The problem lay not just in the fact that there was no unifying paradigm, as we would say today, but in the inordinate claims of each to have discovered some universal principle explaining all the phenomena of the mind.

Nathalie Bulle, writing in these pages, asks whether Vygotsky is indeed responsible for a major, foundational, contribution to integrative psychological and behavioral science. Bulle queries both "analysts" who strive to establish what Vygotsky's original texts actually meant in context and "emulators" who attempt to simulate his work on modern, hence not necessarily compatible, methodological "hardware". Here we query Bulle's distinction: as Vygotsky's legatees, we hold that analysis (at least in Vygotsky's sense) and emulation constitute each other. We demonstrate: first, we analyze Vygotsky's contribution using his own methodological prolegomena, "The Historical Sense of the Crisis in Psychology", newly translated in full for the first time, and we find that his crisis was not simply, as Bulle contends, due to "the triumph in Vygotsky's name of an objectivistic, natural science, approach to psychology"; it is better understood today as due to the kind of interpretative, "understanding" way of handling data that methodological individualism advocates. We then emulate Vygotsky's later semic method using data from post-seminar interviews about an initial teacher education seminar in Australia. We contend that Vygotsky's major, foundational, contribution to integrating psychological and behavioral science was twofold: he explained the methodological clash between the two and showed a way out of it through the study of meaning.

Discussions of the replication crisis in psychology require more substantive analysis of the crisis of academic labour and of social reproduction in the university. Both the replication crisis and the crisis of social reproduction in the university describe a failure in processes of reproducing something. The financial crisis of 2007–8 shortly preceded the emergence of the replication crisis, as well as exacerbated ongoing tendencies in the organisation and practices of university research (particularly the use of precarious contracts and the adjunctification of research). These provide two reasons to address these two named crises together. But many analyses of and responses to the replication crisis turn to research culture, often at the expense of adequate investigations of research labour. Today’s psychological sciences are made through multiple forms of labour: these include researchers, who range from senior principal investigators to sub-contracted, and exploited, research assistants; research participants/subjects, who include those providing labour for experiments via exploitative platforms including Amazon Mechanical Turk; and workers providing heterogeneous technical and administrative labour. Through understanding what is at stake for these multiple forms of labour, psychology might better analyse problems besetting psychology today, as well as develop different imaginaries and practices for how to address them.

Challenging dominant positivistic psychology, Vygotsky elaborated cultural-historical theory in order to overcome the crisis in psychology. Spinoza’s monism, Hegelian dialectics and Marx’s materialistic dialectics inspired Vygotsky to develop a dialectical understanding of the development of higher mental functions. Dialectics as a way of thinking focuses on the study of each concrete object in its mutual connections with other objects, in its internal contradictions and in its process of change. Vygotsky criticized the understanding of dialectics as a sum of universal principles which can be applied in a direct way in the field of psychology and highlighted the complex relationships between philosophy and concrete scientific disciplines. Rethinking cultural-historical psychology in the light of dialectics offers a creative insight into crucial theoretical questions of psychology such as the interconnection between theory and practice, objectivist-subjectivist distinction, etc. Dialectical underpinnings of cultural-historical theory have been forgotten in mainstream, North-Atlantic interpretations and applications of Vygotsky’s theory.

While various shortcomings and flaws in the conduct of research and analysis of results in psychology and other social sciences have been recognized for a long time, recent years have witnessed greater prevalence and wider scope of this criticism. There are also more proposals for improvement. In this article, we focus on selected, key areas of the credibility crisis in psychology. Piotr Wolski discusses those related to the improper understanding and application of significance tests, while Arkadiusz Białek characterizes some of the research practices that undermine the credibility of psychological studies and demonstrates how to counteract them. Although the use of good research practices can improve the reproducibility and replicability of research results, the proposed reform should also encompass the way theories are developed. The discussed proposal for theory development in psychology leads to a series of practical steps. Unlike the hypothetico-deductive model, it starts with the identification and description of the phenomenon. The explanation of the phenomenon formulated through abduction is then formalized in mathematical equations or computer simulations and verified. Adhering to good research practices and proper theory development has the potential to provide psychology with more solid foundations and make it a cumulatively evolving science.

The repeatability crisis of psychology has two known sources: the limitation of the significance test system of nihility hypothesis in traditional statistics, and the drawbacks in the academic tradition of psychology. The discussion on repeatability may become an important opportunity for the development of psychology. In order to further understand and solve the repeatability crisis of embodied effect, it is necessary to trace back the origin of embodied philosophy and re-understand the experimental embodied effect, so as to find the direction suitable for oneself. Repeatability is a common problem facing the scientific community at present. The issue of reproducibility in the field of psychology has received wide attention, which has led to active discussion and exploration by researchers. Future research can be promoted from the separation and integration of the physical effects level, the boundary of strong and weak conditions, the discussion of regulation or intermediary mechanism, and the innovation of experimental paradigm. Based on the principle of machine vision, this paper analyzes the two root causes of psychological repetitive crisis, which can help the reflection of the majority of psychologists.