Psychological Reality

This volume presents one possible conceptual analysis of the task of constructing a model of psychological reality, so that psychology's pluralistic state can be put into perspective.Chapters 1 and 2 specify the essential input assumptions of the analysis, establish the boundary conditions of the treatise, preview the kinds of decisions involved in the construction process, and present some necessary background information. Chapters 3 to 5 collectively abstract out possible psychological universes and recount the dominant classical and contemporary models of psychological reality framework. Chapters 6 to 9 focus on the philosophical input into psychology, especially as related to the nature of humanity, the mind-body problem, scientific explanation, and the discipline's two fundamental analytical categories: behavior and experience. Chapters 10 to 12 highlight many of the cultural and pragmatic constraints imposed on any model of psychological reality by considering the applied, contextual and relational aspects of psychology.