Laudan's normative naturalism: A useful philosophy of science for psychology

Logical positivism, widely regarded as the received epistemology of psychol ogy in the first half of the 20th century, was supplanted in the 1960s by v arious postpositivistic, relativistic philosophies of science, most notably that of Kuhn. Recently, Laudan, a major figure in the philosophy of scienc e, developed a novel approach called normative naturalism that provides an alternative to positivism and relativism. His central thesis is that the tw o are not always on opposite ends of a continuum but rather have many assum ptions in common. This article brings Laudan's important views to the atten tion of psychologists and describes some of the unique implications of thes e views for the conduct of research and theory in psychology. These implica tions, which follow from a number of closely reasoned pragmatic arguments, include more realistic and appropriate evaluation of theory and methodology than has been suggested by logical positivism or relativism.