Is Psychology a Philosophy or a Science?
First Principles
According to Aristotle, a science can be understood as an organized body of knowledge concerning things through their causes. Essentially, “science” can be more broadly understood to mean a field of study.
I am beginning with Aristotle because every field of serious inquiry ultimately rests upon philosophical first principles. First principles are foundational, basic truths or assumptions that cannot be deduced or broken down any further. This is critically important as the Philosopher states, “a small err in the beginning becomes great in the end.”
This matters today because truth should not be limited merely to empirical science but philosophical science as well.
How to approach any field of study, especially psychology.
Before we can properly evaluate the claims of a particular science(field of study), we have to consider three fundamental principles that comprise any body of knowledge:
The material object
a. The material object is the subject matter. It is what the thing is. For example, the material object of biology would be to study the natural world and living organisms while the material object of chemistry would be to study chemical reactions.
The formal object
Some people study the same thing but from different perspectives. I can study the natural world and look at the birds and the trees but if I do so by studying their essences I am a philosopher not a scientist. Whereas if I studied the birds and the trees by their molecular structure I would be a scientist.
The method
Now the method is contingent on both the material and formal object, and the method answers how **the science investigates the object under consideration. This especially matters today because you can’t ever study philosophy empirically due to the material object and formal object. In other words, I can’t ever comprise a scientific experiment to study the essence of trees through an empirical method. That however does not mean that there isn’t a real essence out there which makes up the thing under investigation, which is in our case, trees. It is a first principle that I accept tree as tree to be under investigation.
The Err of Modern Psychology
Now the “small err” for the field of modern psychology is this—that the field of psychology is reducible to the physical material of the brain. Man however is not reducible to matter for man is both body and soul.
And how would we “prove this” empirically — we probably can’t, nor would we need to. That’s like saying prove the essence of trees by a double blind, random experiment. You’d probably just be dumbfounded by the request.
Another way to understand the audacity of the request would be like someone saying “prove love exists with science.” You don’t need to, you take it as a philosophical, immaterial first principle that love exists within the cosmos and that it is real and true and good. Even if we can’t physically see it, we know when love is present and take it as evident.
Well, how can one come to know immaterial truths? By an immaterial, rational soul. It is proper for an immaterial intellect to perceive immaterial things.
Thus it is completely rational to assume that man is a body-soul composite. Not only is this the position held as truth within the body of Christ as revealed through scripture but even among pagan philosophers since the beginning of time up and to a large swath of modern day philosophers and intellectuals today do most people acknowledge there is a spiritual principle found within man that enables him to participate in and perceive immaterial realities.
This spiritual principle in man is not bound to matter: the spiritual principle of man transcends his own body and terminates in something beyond the material.
It is from first principles that modern psychology already begins the inquiry into man’s mind with one tied behind its back.
The Downstream Consequences of Psychology’s First Principle Err
Man, based on first principles is body and soul. Psychology has for its primary material object the mind or intellect of man.
Thus the material object of psychology is the intellect but the intellect of man is a composite — meaning there are aspects to man’s intellect that are spiritual or immaterial (intellect and will) but there are aspects to man’s intellect that depend on man’s senses and other faculties.
Because man is a body-soul composite his mind is at once grounded in his senses, body, and brain and thus it would be proper to study psychology and the human intellect through empirical method and means, however, the mind of man is also immaterial — it is able to perceive immaterial truths. Thus, deeper knowledge of man would have to be reached through philosophical investigation.
The formal object of studying psychology is from the perspective of psychological health. A philosophical science must be capable of addressing immaterial entities. Because the human intellect is primarily immaterial it must be approached in a philosophical manner because only a philosophical science is capable of studying immaterial entities.
The consequences of approaching psychology purely as an empirical science is not only limiting but untrue.
It is untrue that man’s mind is pure body.
It is unhelpful to limit psychological integration through empirical science alone.
A fuller view of psychology will be needed if we desire to heal the entirity of the human condition.
In Conclusion
Psychology, rightly understood, is a valid but incomplete science. It possesses a legitimate material object (the intellect of man, taken in its full composite reality) and a legitimate formal object (the study of that intellect under the view of psychological health).
It falters not in its right to exist as a science (some opponents discount psychology as a pseudoscience), but it falters in its philosophical, anthropological assumptions at the level of first principles.
Psychology quietly imports a materialist or purely mechanistic view of man treating the intellect as though it were reducible to neurons firing rather than a composite of immaterial and material powers. When psychology does this it makes a metaphysical error, and metaphysical errors at the foundation distort everything built above them, however rigorous the methods appear to be.
Man is body and soul. The right approach, then, is not to choose between philosophy and empirical psychology but to order them properly: philosophy furnishing the first principles and the true definition of what man is, and the empirical method supplying the data of how the material aspects of the mind actually behave and can be measured, diagnosed, and treated.
Modern psychology, for all its wandering from right first principles, has not erred totally — no science nor man is entirely devoid of truth. Nevertheless, my critique of modern psychology and its smuggled assumptions need to be looked at through the philosophical and intellectual tradition of man.
If not, we miss the critical purpose of psychology — which is the study of human souls for the sake of human health and flourishing.
References
Ripperger, C. A. (2013). Introduction to the science of mental health. Sensus Traditionis Press.
