Publisher's Synopsis
This discipline has become more reflective in recent years. It has also become blatantly philosophical, which is itself cause for reflection. The philosophy of psychology has not been exactly a burgeoning field, and yet psychologists and philosophers of all persuasions are writing philosophical psychology. Perhaps all this activity merely reflects the uneasy bifurcation of psychology into biological and cognitive domains. After all, there were similar flurries in the 1920s and 1950s when the discipline assumed new directions. But, before, there were too many things to do; scientific knowing seemed so compelling and so singular in methodology. Today, the entire enterprise is much more uncertain, and not just psychology, but all human scientific inquiry. The fun- damental questions remain much the same, of course; what has changed is that philosophers are explicitly addressing questions of psy- chology and psychologists are at least implicitly engaged in philosophy. The bounderies are no longer clear cut! Theoretical psychology is as much the doing of philosophy as it is of experimental research. Volume 4 of these Annals attests to this state of affairs. The psychologists' style reflects their philosophical understanding; the philosophers differ according to what they take to be psychological knowledge.
