book review General Psychology Psychology in Everyday Life

Review of ‘The Scout Mindset’ by Julia Galef

Recent books in popular psychology, and particularly those about our capacity for judgment and reasoning, don’t paint a flattering picture of our intellectual capacities. They argue that we deceive ourselves, that we become satisfied with a feeling of knowing rather than knowing, that we instrumentalize our capacity for reason to justify what we want (and what we want isn’t itself decided by reason), that we conform unthinkingly to established norms and group opinions. These arguments,…

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What Is Science? Science versus Scientism

The 2018 volume, On Hijacking Science, edited by Edwin E. Gantt and Richard N. Williams, provides a good starting point in thinking about general questions about science, e.g., What is science? What are the differences, if any, between science and scientism? Why are there tensions between a scientific (scientistic) worldview and those grounded in older cultural traditions, such as religions? In this post I will only draw on three passages taken from the editors’ introductory…

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On Hijacking Science (E. E. Gantt & R. N. Williams)

I have written a review and summary of this book on Medium. In future posts, I am planning to select specific passages from the book and explore questions regarding science, scientific communication, and scientism. This slim, engaging, and valuable book belongs in the book series, Advances in Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, edited by Brent D. Slife. It consists of eight chapters by various authors, in addition to a foreword by the series Editor, a preface by…

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Interview with Marc Applebaum

Recently I had the pleasure of speaking with Marc Applebaum. We talked about his experience and education in psychological research and about how his interest was first developed in phenomenology. We also talk about phenomenological attitude, the importance of empathy with the experience of another human being, the connection between knowing someone and the style of relating to them, and how the phenomenological attitude differs from the attitude encouraged by natural scientific psychology. I hope…

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Philosophy William James

Another Thing Altogether

The following passage is about professional philosophy and its relation to human experience, but it applies equally well to academic psychology. Don’t we learned, similar to the student James talks about in this passage, to expect an absence of relationship between psychological science and our personal realities? [The student] began by saying that he had always taken for granted that when you entered a philosophic class-room you had to open relations with a universe entirely…

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