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Methodological questions seem endemic to psychology, as they are to the social sciences in general. The great philosopher of science Henri Poincaré observed: "The natural sciences talk about their results. The social scientists talk about their methods' (in Berelson and Steiner 1964, p. 14). Although methodology deals with the methods and techniques of empirical research, its issues do not derive from these methods and techniques as such, but from much more fundamental questions regarding the nature of psychology (and of scientific knowledge in general): what is the object of psychology? How can it be properly conceived? Which methods can be called upon or should be developed to explore the object of psychology? Can a single method serve all of the various subfields of psychology? Is psychology a singular science or rather a pluriformity of scientific approaches that presently share little more than the name by which they go? Is psychology a science at all or is it, like history, literary theory, and philosophy, a branch of scholarship different from, but just as academic as, the natural sciences? After more than a century of theory and research psychologists still debate the approaches and paradigms proper to their fields of research. A common complaint has been that in so doing they have frequently defined the latter in terms of the former, that is they adapt their definition of psychology and its subject to what they can investigate with those methods at hand instead of following the old Aristotelian adage that methods should be designed according to the nature of the object to be investigated and – I would add – according to the questions one wants to answer. Until the present day this has resulted in publications on the "crisis in psychology" (one of the earliest being by Hans Driesch 1925) and in pleas to "rethink psychology" (Smith et al. 1995), including its methods (Smith et al. 1995/2003).

DOI: 10.1007/978-90-481-3491-5_7

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