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Record W2797024609 · doi:10.1037/gpr0000051

Why Psychology Isn't Unified, and Probably Never Will Be

2015· article· en· W2797024609 on OpenAlexafffund
Christopher D. Green

Bibliographic record

VenueReview of General Psychology · 2015
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldPsychology
TopicAcademic and Historical Perspectives in Psychology
Canadian institutionsYork University
FundersSocial Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
KeywordsUnificationEpistemologyCoherence (philosophical gambling strategy)Field (mathematics)NegotiationPoliticsSet (abstract data type)PsychologySociologySocial scienceComputer sciencePolitical scienceLawPhilosophyPhysics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Over the past few decades, a large literature has emerged on the question of how one might unify all or most of psychology under a single, coherent, rigorous framework, in a manner similar to that which unified physics under Newton's Laws, or biology under Darwin's theory of natural selection. It is argued here that this is a highly unlikely scenario in psychology given the contingent and opportunistic character of the processes that brought its original topics together into a new discipline, and the nearly continuous institutional, social, and even political negotiating and horse-trading that has determined psychology's “boundaries” in the 14 decades since. Psychology, as the field currently stands, does not have the intellectual coherence to be brought together by any set of principles that would enable its phenomena to be captured and explained as rigorous products of those principles. If there is a kind of unification in psychology's future, it is more likely to be one that, paradoxically, sees it broken up into a number of large “super-subdisciplines,” each of which exhibits more internal coherence than does the current sprawling and heterogeneous whole.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.009
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.012
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Commentary · Consensus signal: Commentary
Teacher disagreement score0.009
Threshold uncertainty score0.048

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0090.012
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.001
Bibliometrics0.0020.003
Science and technology studies0.0040.037
Scholarly communication0.0090.016
Open science0.0020.003
Research integrity0.0050.009
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0030.001

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.081
GPT teacher head0.425
Teacher spread0.344 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreCommentary

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations71
Published2015
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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