Some students in the social sciences acknowledge the importance of understanding the human mind and its functions for the advancement of their field. These statements are evidently true to the extent that any formal effort to prove them is unnecessary. Those who do not immediately accept them will not be persuaded of their truth through any formal logical argument.
Psychology, the science focused on understanding the mind and its functions, is not widely acknowledged as the fundamental basis for various social sciences like ethics, economics, political science, philosophy of history, sociology, cultural anthropology, as well as more specialized fields like religion, law, education, and art.
Some workers in these fields reject psychology’s claim to recognition. Some people pay lip respect to psychology but in reality disregard it, opting to write about topics like morals or economics without any knowledge of psychology. Many contemporary writers on social issues acknowledge the importance of psychology but often rely on oversimplified and inaccurate psychological concepts derived from everyday language, along with some hastily made assumptions about the mind tailored to their needs.
There are indications that this unfortunate situation is likely to change, with psychology soon being recognized as the foundational discipline in the social sciences, a position that many insightful individuals have long believed it deserves. This volume aims to encourage a change in practice. It begins with a brief investigation into the reasons for the current unusual situation and provides some insight into how the desired change can be achieved. The workers in the social sciences have not fully acknowledged psychology due to its shortcomings. To integrate psychology effectively, these flaws must be addressed. What are these shortcomings and why have they endured for so long?
The department of psychology that is most important for the social sciences is that which deals with the springs of human action, the impulses and motives that sustain mental and bodily activity and regulate behavior; and this, of all the departments of psychology, has remained in the most backward state, with the greatest obscurity, vagueness, and confusion.
The answers to such problems as the proper classification of conscious states, the analysis of them into their elements, the nature of these elements and the laws of the compounding of them, have but little bearing on the social sciences; the same can be said of the range of problems connected with the relations of soul and body, psychical and physical processes, consciousness and brain processes; and also of the discussion of the more purely intellectual proc Not these processes themselves, but only the results or products of these processes the knowledge or system “of ideas and beliefs achieved by them, and the way in which these ideas and beliefs regulate conduct and determine social institutions and men’s relations to one another in society—are of immediate importance for the social sciences. The mental powers, the sources of energy, determine the goals and maintain the course.
The intellectual processes are just the servants, instruments, or means of all human activity, and their history in the race and in the person must be made plain before the social sciences may build on a sound psychological foundation. Now, psychologists have mostly occupied themselves with the questions of the former groups, and they have made the most progress toward a consistent and widely acceptable body of doctrine, while neglecting these more socially relevant issues.
This was the result of a number of factors, a conclusion that, looking back on the history of science, appears to have been inevitable. It was inevitable that, when men began to reflect upon the complex phenomena of social life, they should have concentrated their attention on the problems immediately presented, and should have sought to explain them deductively from more or less vaguely conceived principles that they entertained they knew not why or how, principles that were the formulations of popular conceptions, slowly grown up over the course of countless generations and rendered more explicit.
And when, in the eighteenth century and the early part of the nineteenth century, the modern principles of scientific method began to be generally accepted and to be applied to all or most objects of human speculation, and the various social sciences began to be marked off from one another along the modern lines, it was inevitable that the workers in each department of social science would have continued in the same way, attempting to explain social phenomena from.
It was not to be expected that generations of workers, whose primary interest was to lay down general rules for the guidance of human activity in the great fields of legislation, government, private and public conduct, should have deliberately put aside the attempt to construct the sciences of these departments of life, leaving them to the efforts of future generations, while they devoted themselves to the preparatory work of investigating the individua.