Review of General Psychology © 2015 American Psychological Association

2015, Vol. 19, No. 3, 207–214 1089-2680/15/$12.00 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/gpr0000051

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

Christopher D. Green
York University

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
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“boundaries” in the 14 decades since. Psychology, as the field currently stands, does not have the
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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.

Keywords: psychology, history, philosophy, theory, unity

The question of whether psychology can be “unified” is one that
has long occupied the discipline. In order to be “unified” in the
sense I intend here, the discipline would have a common set of
foundational principles from which detailed descriptions of its
phenomena could be rigorously derived and by which they could
be explained.1 It seems that if only psychologists could agree on
these fundamentals—the mental and/or behavioral “elements,” and
the basic principles of their interactions—then the discipline would
start making the kind of impressive progress that we have seen in
natural science over the past few centuries.
The most commonly raised example of this kind of unification
is found in physics, which is often said to have been unified under
Newton’s Laws which were, in turn, reliant on his mathematical
discoveries. Another prime example is in biology, large parts of
which were unified under Darwin’s theory evolution by natural
selection.2 One of the most significant aspects of these two epoch-
making scientific developments is that they not only provided a
common explanatory framework for disparate aspects of complex
fields of study (e.g., respectively, the motions of both terrestrial
cannon balls and of celestial planets; the seemingly ubiquitous
hierarchical arrangement of species in both the animal and plant
kingdoms), but they were later extended and adapted to provide
explanations for phenomena that were either unknown or poorly
understood at the time the framework was first proposed (e.g.,
electrical force; the development of antibiotic resistance), thereby
strengthening the unity of the field even further.
This article was published Online First August 17, 2015.
This research article was written while the author was the recipient of an
Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
of Canada. I thank Thomas Teo and Andrew S. Winston for their com-
ments on earlier drafts of this article.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Christo-
pher D. Green, Department of Psychology, York University, Toronto,
Ontario M3J 1P3, Canada. E-mail: christo@yorku.ca
In psychology, there have been many proposals for a similar
kind of unification. American Psychologist was long a prime venue
for such work (Kimble, 1989, 1994, 1999; Staats, 1981, 1991;
Sternberg & Grigorenko, 2001). Since the founding of The Review
of General Psychology, it has become a popular vehicle for them
as well (Marsh & Boag, 2014; Staats, 1999; Yanchar & Slife,
1997), highlighted by a special issue on the topic in 2013 (Ander-
son, 2013; Catania, 2013; Charles, 2013; Chemero, 2013; Clegg,
2013; Heft, 2013; Henriques, 2013; Hutto, 2013; Lerner, Agans,
DeSouza, & Gasca, 2013; Lickliter & Honeycutt, 2013; Marken &
Mansell, 2013; Mayer & Allen, 2013; Petocz & Mackay, 2013).
Proposals for the unification of psychology have hardly been
confined to these two journals, however. There have been others as
well (e.g., Goertzen, 2008, 2010; Henriques, 2004, 2011; Kimble,
1996; Staats, 1983; Kristensen, Slife, & Yanchar, 2000; Stam,
2004, 2015). An interesting counterpoint to these diverse efforts
can be found in Sigmund Koch’s call to concede that psychology
cannot be unified and to rename the field “psychological studies”
(Koch, 1993).3
1
I contrast this sense of unification with another that is often offered:
mere descriptions of high-level similarities among diverse research areas.
These do not unify a discipline in any important sense. They serve mainly
as appeals to common ideas that hold psychologists together as an insti-
tutional community, but do not show that diverse psychological phenom-
ena spring from the same fundamental bases.
2
Of course, both of these unifications have been superseded in their
respective fields by more recent developments—relativistic and quantum
mechanics in the case of physics, and the “synthesis” of evolutionary
theory with genetics in the case of biology, but these details need not detain
us here.
3
Some have argued that psychology can never be unified in the ways
that physics and biology were because the field is inherently embedded in
historically contingent sociocultural practices (e.g., Teo, 2010; Walsh-
Bowers, 2010). If these critics are correct, then unification may be blocked
for reasons that are even more fundamental than those discussed in this
article.

207
 208 GREEN
Perhaps ironically, the various proposals for unification have
come from a diverse range of epistemological and ontological
perspectives. All too often, however, they have amounted essen-
tially to the author asserting that the perspective on psychology to
which he or she is already committed on prior grounds—whether
behavioristic, humanistic, evolutionary, computational, and so
forth—is, in principle, sufficient to capture and explain all of
psychology, or at least enough of it to create a kind of dominant
subdiscipline within the broader psychology that implicitly chal-
lenges all other areas to either get on board or find another boat.
This tactic, popular as it might be, is highly unlikely to succeed
because the perspective that is put forth as the basis for unification
is already well-known to the audience to whom it is proposed, and
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those individuals who did not accept it before in the area where it
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first gained credibility are virtually certain not to accept it as the
basis for psychology more broadly.
What is required from a unification proposal is a theory, prob-
ably framed in a mathematical or otherwise formal language,
which rigorously captures apparently disparate phenomena. The
chief reasons to employ a formal language are essentially three-
fold. First, a formal language can bridge across areas that differ in
terms of their concrete content, but that have similar underlying
structural properties. Second, it is in formal languages that the
work of prediction, and the sort of explanation that relies upon
prediction, can be most satisfactorily achieved. I am not among
those who believe that these are the only legitimate goals of
science, but the accurate prediction of new phenomena is certainly
an impressive achievement when it can be attained, and it is most
convincingly accomplished in the context of a formal language.
That is to say, formal language (the “right” language, not just any
superficial formalism) enables one to achieve both breadth of
scope and fidelity to detail at the same time. Finally, formal
languages often have the ability to short-circuit the all-too-
common impulse to become mired in endless (and often pointless)
a priori disputes about which theoretical ideology is to be pre-
ferred—for example, behavioral, evolutionary, humanistic, and so
forth. If the predictions work, they work.
Newton’s laws of motion did precisely this— explaining why
the apple falls directly to the ground, why the cannon ball flies for
some distance before returning to the ground, and why the moon
revolves about the earth in apparent perpetuity. The Newtonian
framework was later successfully extended to matters such as fluid
dynamics and electromagnetism, among others—areas that are
different in content from those that Newton began with, but that
turned out to be structurally similar. Darwin’s theory was not
framed in formal language at first, but neither did it immediately
capture its field. Its gradual integration with Mendelian genetics in
the early decades of the 20th century, and the later rise to domi-
nance of the “Modern Synthesis” (Huxley, 1942) was, in no small
part, dependent on its redescription in formal terms (e.g., Hardy,
1908; Weinberg, 1908). As a result, evolutionary models have
been successfully applied to topics far removed from the biological
realm where Darwin first developed them.
By contrast, psychological attempts at unification have rarely
even aspired to this degree of formal rigor and, as a result, they
have been unable to facilitate psychological prediction or expla-
nation to any significant degree. Even when psychological theo-
rists have attempted to develop a formal language to achieve both
predictive accuracy and broad scope, they have fallen dramatically
short (e.g., Hull, 1943).4
There was a time when it was popular to argue that psychology
was following Thomas Kuhn’s famous formula for the progress of
mature science under the auspices of successive “paradigms” (see,
e.g., Coleman & Salamon, 1988 for a summary and assessment).
This happened (and continues, to some degree) despite the coun-
tervailing fact that the early psychological systems—Structural-
ism, Functionalism, Psychoanalysis, Gestalt, Behaviorism, and so
forth—were obviously overlapping, competing “schools of
thought,” rather than consensual “paradigms” that successively
captured the entire field. This state of affairs is precisely what
Kuhn himself said characterizes the state of science is in its
“pre-paradigmatic” phase: “schools of thought.” There is also the
glaring fact that Kuhn specifically excluded the social sciences
from his scheme, using psychology as a key example (see, e.g.,
Kuhn, 1970, p. 160). Kuhn’s model of paradigmatic science is
inapplicable to psychology, whether or not it is true elsewhere in
the sciences.
Wilhelm Wundt, as is well known, strove from the 1860s
forward to render psychology scientific by employing the methods
and, perhaps more important, the equipment that had succeeded in
reshaping physiology as an experimental science in previous de-
cades to address his questions about the mind. He achieved a fair
degree of success, founding the first university-authorized institute
dedicated exclusively to experimental psychology at Leipzig in
1879, and drawing dozens of students from all over the world to
study with him and learn his methods. But even he recognized that
the range of psychological phenomena that he could tame into a
form suitable to laboratory investigation was highly restricted.
Fractionating reaction times into sensations, perceptions, acts of
will, muscular reactions, and, at the center of these, the all-
important apperceptions—impressive as the feat might have
been—was only a small part of the totality of the mind (see
Robinson, 2001). Although he continued to manage his very
productive laboratory into the 1910s, Wundt devoted his own
greatest efforts to writing the 10-volume Völkerpsychologie, in
which he described the artistic, religious, and broader cultural lives
of various peoples—all human mental activities that he did not
believe to be amenable to the constraints of the laboratory.
Many of Wundt’s American students brought his ideas about the
psychological utility of kymographs and chronoscopes back across
the ocean, and they established similar laboratories in their home
colleges and universities. This importation of the physical mani-
festations of German expertise was very impressive to college
trustees and presidents, but it left many of the psychologists
themselves frustrated with the inherent limitations of such a view
of the field. The momentary reactions of the well-prepared normal
adult male human mind to a sparse array of artificial laboratory
stimuli did not bring them intellectual satisfaction. Instead, many
sought to found scientific psychology anew on the basis of Dar-
winian evolutionary theory. They sought to expand the repertoire
of mentalities explored to include children and women, workers
4
Various interesting candidates for “rigorous, formal over-arching psy-
chological framework” have appeared over the decades: for example,
psychophysics, signal detection theory, decision theory, game theory.
While all have been valuable, none has gone on to attain the range of
application that would be needed to unify the discipline as a whole.
 WHY PSYCHOLOGY ISN’T UNIFIED
and asylum patients, cats and chickens and fish, and even insects.
In short, they wanted psychology to cover the full array of mental
variation, and to consider what forces— both internal and exter-
nal—might have led it to evolve in the way it had, and how it
might evolve further in the future (see, e.g., Green, 2009).
This extremely tumultuous state of affairs was given the name
“Functionalism” by its most vocal opponent, E. B Titchener (an
Englishman who was trained in Germany and then employed,
sometimes to his chagrin, in America).5 Functionalists shared
some broad aspirational themes, to be sure, but Functionalism by
no means represented a unification of the discipline of psychology.
Quite to the contrary, its ethos was more in line with letting a
hundred flowers bloom. Indeed, G. Stanley Hall was fairly explicit
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about this in an 1894 article, though, in his customary promotional
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style, he presented it as a strength; a measure of the wide range of
material covered by the new discipline:
It [psychology] studies the instincts of animals from the highest to the
lowest . . . It shows how the highest intuitions of reason and con-
science are rooted in the lowest animal instincts . . . It studies the
myths, customs, and beliefs of primitive man . . . It devotes itself to
the study of insanity and nervous disease, and has already begun to
introduce new methods and utilize new results. It has a special
department of neurology for exploiting all the properties of brain,
nerve, and sense . . . It has transformed and shaped the problems of
logic and ethics; is slowly rewriting the whole history of philosophy,
and . . . is showing itself not only to be the long hoped for, long
delayed science of man . . . but is introducing a period that will be
known hereafter as the psychological era in scientific thought. (Hall,
1894, pp. 160 –161)6
It would only require the exchange of a few obsolete turns of
phrase for more current ones for this paragraph to have been
written by a psychological enthusiast of the past decade.
Behaviorism, which began just a couple of decades later, of
course, is a special case. Indeed, it is probably the main source of
psychology’s Kuhnian misapprehension and, as such, it requires
special attention. Many believe that behaviorism constituted the
first broad unification of psychology, that we somehow “lost” that
unity, and that we must now recapture it either under a more
adequate formulation of behaviorism or under some other overar-
ching framework. It must be recalled, however, that there were
many species of behaviorism—Watson, Tolman, Hull, Skinner,
among others. Some attempted to “redescribe” conventional psy-
chological language in behavioral terms (e.g., Tolman, 1932)
while others attempted to eschew the entire traditional vocabulary
in favor of a new behavioral language (e.g., Skinner, 1945). This
situation hardly recapitulates the compelling unity of F ⫽ ma or of
evolution ⫽ reproductive variation ⫹ natural selection by fitness.
Second, although behaviorism (collecting its various conflicting
forms together) may have been the ascendant American metatheory
during the middle of the 20th century, even in its heyday there
remained large areas of psychology that it was unable to effectively
address. Consider that many of the classic studies from the 1930s,
1940s, and 1950s—studies so important that we continue to teach
them to our students even today—stand as monuments against the
claim that psychology was unified under behaviorism: Stevens’
psychophysical power law, Gesell’s studies of childhood develop-
ment, Terman’s longitudinal studies of intelligence, Dollard and
Miller’s frustration-aggression hypothesis, Sherif’s “Robber’s
209
Cave” studies of group behavior, Adorno’s “authoritarian person-
ality,” Ash’s studies of compliance, Festinger’s theory of cognitive
dissonance, to name just a few. These were in no significant way
dependent on behaviorist theory (though sometimes attempts were
made to shoehorn them into some version of behaviorism, often in
order to shield them from the judgmental eye of one disciplinary
authority or another).7
Beyond the observation that much important mid-20th-century
American psychology was not behavioristic, there is also a certain
level of unreflective nationalism lurking beneath the claim that
behaviorism was “dominant,” considering that the movement was
never ascendant in Europe, only ever gaining a modest following
there (not to mention the rest of the world).8 Thus, although
behaviorism may have been an important metatheoretical move-
ment, it never commanded ascent in the discipline as a whole; it
was certainly never the stuff of Kuhnian paradigms.
Of course, Kuhn’s model of scientific unification is only one of
myriad models of how science develops, and it is now mainly of
historical interest to most philosophers and historians of science.
Contra Kuhn, the course of events may well proceed along differ-
ent lines in different sciences, according to the unique features of
different disciplines (see, e.g., Dupré, 1993; Hacking, 1996;
Lakatoš, 1970; Laudan, 1978).
Looking specifically at the history of psychology we can begin
to see that there are certain aspects to its historical “assembly” as
a discipline that would seem to make it highly unlikely that the
particular constellation of topics that currently fall under the head-
ing of “psychology” would ever be unified into a strongly coherent
scientific discipline (in any way tantamount to post-Newtonian
physics or post-Darwinian biology).
If, for instance, one looks at the sheer variety of topics that G.
Stanley Hall invited into the new discipline back in 1887 when he
launched the very first U.S.-based periodical specializing on the
new field of inquiry—the American Journal of Psychology – it is
easy to see that they did not have much in common with each other
either ontologically or epistemologically: experimental work on
perception, qualitative writing on (what we would now call) cog-
nition, historical studies of mind, case studies in psychiatry, and
physiological work on the nervous system. What is more, some of
these early invitees soon moved on to other disciplinary venues,
only to be replaced by new invitees, or by Hall’s own creations:
5
Titchener’s fervent hope was to establish the first psychology labora-
tory at his alma mater of Oxford. Such a move not seeming imminent, he
tried at least to “return to British soil” by repeatedly inquiring about
positions in Canada (Ferguson, 1982; Myers, 1982).
6
Robert S. Woodworth (1943, pp. 17–18), who quoted this passage even
more extensively than I have, claimed that the article “doubtless closely
paralleled” Hall’s long-lost inaugural presidential address to the APA in
1892. Because two (far from identical) abstracts of the 1892 speech are all
that are left to us, we will probably never know, but it remains interesting
that this was the vision of psychology that Hall chose to present to
nonpsychologists in the middle of the 1890s: not of a tightly unified
discipline, but of one with an enormous range of interests, from the activity
of the individual neuron to complexities of human social life.
7
It is interesting to note that the second-best-known work of Dollard and
Miller was their attempt to rewrite Freudian psychoanalysis into a form
consistent with Hull’s drive theory.
8
To be entirely fair, behaviorism did have an important presence in both
Latin America and Japan, but it would go too far to describe it as having
been the dominant form of psychology in either place.
 210 GREEN
intellectual and moral development in children, animal behavior,
and so forth (see Green & Feinerer, 2015).
Of course, Hall’s journal was soon followed by other similar
ventures, most notably James McKeen Cattell and James Mark
Baldwin’s Psychological Review in 1894. The Review was estab-
lished specifically to compete with Hall’s AJP (see Sokal, 1997)
and, consequently it had a somewhat different profile of research
communities: Large sections were devoted to philosophical psy-
chology and psychological metatheory, much of the early Func-
tionalist experimentation and interpretation, and vision research
into both color and depth/distance (Green, Feinerer, & Burman, in
press, 2015). But, again, there was hardly an overarching set of
principles guiding this jumble of different interests. Most research-
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ers of the era would have agreed that they were working on one or
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another aspect of “consciousness,” but (a) this was a term of art
often deployed to fend off those who argued, at the time, that
experimental psychology was not an autonomous discipline but
only a branch of physiology; and (b) appeals to “consciousness”
only provided a broad tent under which many different kinds of
researchers could do their work, not an underlying set of principles
to guide the explanatory vocabulary of the new discipline. It is
important to recall that as soon as William James (1904a, 1904b)
called consciousness into question, the entire rickety structure
began to fail and Behaviorism burst on to the scene less than a
decade later (one can find the reactions of many of James’ con-
temporaries collected together in Taylor & Wozniak, 1996).
The internal conflicts of the early American Psychological As-
sociation reflect some of the differences of opinion over who was
truly to count as a psychologist. Some wanted to throw the phi-
losophers out, even though nearly all of them had originally trained
in philosophy departments. (The philosophers formed their own
associations just after the turn of the 20th century.) Others wanted
to restrict membership to laboratory researchers only, excluding
those who worked on psychological “applications.” (E. B. Titch-
ener even tried to enforce this ban by forming his own separate
by-invitation-only society—The Experimentalists, later reorga-
nized as The Society for Experimental Psychology, which contin-
ues on to this day.) Various independent associations of applied
psychologists eventually sprung up as well.
Psychology became extremely popular in its early decades, and
its embrace expanded rapidly. Many new scholarly journals ap-
peared in the early 20th century to satisfy the needs of new
specialties: Journal of Abnormal Psychology (founded 1906), Psy-
chological Clinic (1907), Journal of Educational Psychology
(1910), Journal of Animal Behavior (1911), Journal of Experi-
mental Psychology (1916), Psychobiology (1917), Journal of Ap-
plied Psychology (1917), and so forth (see Osier & Wozniak,
1984). After being buffeted, but also nourished, by the trials of
World War I, the discipline emerged in the 1920s into what was at
the time described as an “outbreak of psychology” (Leacock, 1924,
cited in Benjamin & Baker, 2004, p. 54). Not only was its profes-
sional footprint growing rapidly—new university departments,
new journals, new associations— but the wider public began to
clamor for advice from popular psychology magazines to enhance
the quality of their lives, whether romantic, intellectual, religious,
commercial, athletic, or what have you.9
All of this public attention, however, did nothing to “unify” the
discipline. Indeed, the term ”psychology” started being used so
variously that academic psychologists further intensified their
already-existing campaigns to police the boundaries of its “legit-
imate” use. Behaviorists, of course, began to reject any (behavior-
ally unreduced) mention of mind, psyche, or consciousness as
being “unscientific.” The rapidly expanding psychological testing
movement—intelligence, vocation, and later personality— only
crossed behaviorists’ strictures when they sought to reify the
various dispositions they were testing, but it was a simple enough
matter to use the new testing technologies profitably without
taking a strong ontological stance on the matter (see, e.g., Boring,
1923). The explosive expansion of clinical, educational, voca-
tional, industrial, and various other species of applied psycholo-
gy—much of it outside of the academy—led to the ranks of such
practitioners soon outnumbering their university-bound cousins.
Although they sometimes drew upon the theoretical constructions
of academic psychologists, many of them worked within disciplin-
ary languages that would be better understood and trusted by their
employers and their clients, whether medical, mentalist, psycho-
analytic, or something else again.
I could continue to summarize the history of 20th century
psychology—the integration of the American Association for Ap-
plied Psychology with the APA in the 1940s; the simultaneous
emergence of the Bolder Model; the rise and fall of “third wave”
humanism; the partial retreat of behaviorism as a theoretical basis
for psychology and its reformulation as a leading basis for various
therapies; the splintering off from the APA, first, of the Psycho-
nomic Society and, later, of the American Psychological Society;
the appearance of the Psy. D.; the rises of cognitivism, computa-
tionalism, evolutionism, neuroscience, and so forth. Many readers
will already be familiar with these more recent historical turns,
however. The point I am trying to establish is that “psychology”
did not originate in a well-circumscribed set of scientific problems
that were pursued by a small group of like-minded intellectuals.
Psychology has been a hodge-podge from its very creation, and
none of the various efforts to create a theoretically unitary disci-
pline out of that miscellany has ever been remotely successful. The
unsteady and always-changing alliances of a number of distinct
researcher and practitioner groups under the umbrella term “psy-
chology” has long been more a matter of economic, political, and
institutional contingency than it has been of a clear and consensual
vision of the intellectual problems to be tackled and the methods to
be used to resolving them.
Of course, many will object, correctly, that “origin is not es-
sence;” that history is not destiny. The fact that psychology started
out as a congeries of idiosyncratic interests bundled together more
through administrative and diplomatic efforts than by underlying
intellectual coherence does not in any way prevent some clever
person down the line from devising or discovering a means by
which they can be recognized as diverse manifestations of a small
set of powerful underlying principles. That is, it is not impossible
that these disparate parts might be unified. The entire aim of
9
The Cummings Center for the History of Psychology at the University
of Akron, in Ohio, holds a large collection of these rare and fascinating
publications: Herald of Psychology, Everyday Psychology and Inspiration,
Current Psychology and Successful Living, Brain Power, and Golden Rule
Magazine: The New Psychology are just a few of the titles. The collection
was first assembled by Ludy T. Benjamin, Jr. who has published about the
history of the public view of psychology in various venues (e.g., Benjamin,
2012).
 WHY PSYCHOLOGY ISN’T UNIFIED
scientific unification, after all, is to show that what seems to be
anarchy is, in fact, merely the superficial appearance of an under-
lying harmony. Who would have guessed, for instance, that the
phenomena of the magnet and of lightning are really just different
aspects of a single basic reality until it was shown to be so? Things
are darkest before the dawn, and all that.
On the other hand, having conceded the sheer possibility that the
wildly multifarious psychological phenomena of today might
eventually be synthesized by some as-yet-undiscovered set of
unifying principles, I see little reason to expect that this particular
assemblage is ripe for unification, especially given the fairly
arbitrary social and institutional processes that brought them to-
gether in the first place. What reason might there be for the
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particular set of facts that we call “psychological” today to be any
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more susceptible to unification than, say, some other more or less
arbitrarily selected group of happenings in physiology, medicine,
education, sociology, anthropology, and the like?
It seems more likely that any sizable unification in the near
future will not capture the bulk of what is today called “psychol-
ogy” (and only that). Instead, it seems more reasonable to expect
that the discovery of powerful coherent principles would pull
psychology apart into a set of large “super-subdisciplines” that are
no more closely related to each other than, say, biology, psychol-
ogy, economics, sociology, and political science are today. Indeed,
one can see an illustrative historical example of this “pulling apart”
in the way that Newton’s Laws “unified” mechanics: One of the
concepts that was discussed and explained in the earlier Aristote-
lian understanding of motion was “growth.” This was not simply
the growth of a mathematical curve, but growth in the fuller
“biological” sense10 that a seed grows into a mature plant (Aris-
totle, ca. 340 bc/1996, pp. 50; 198b16 –21 in the citation format
that is conventional for ancient works). Growth is, of course, a
kind of movement, generally speaking, but it was not captured by
the laws of motion that Newton put forth and, as a result, it was
simply abandoned as a concept in physics. It would seem, there-
fore, that it is not only the phenomena that dictate the success of
a theory. Sometimes the success of a theory can dictate which
phenomena are to be included in the category the theory covers,
and which are not. Because Newton’s laws of motion did such a
good job of describing so wide an array of physical phenomena,
their failure to illuminate “growth” was regarded as a kind of
evidence that growth was not properly a part of the natural kind
called “motion.” Growth became an “orphan” problem that even-
tually migrated to other branches of science where it could be
better accommodated.
Similarly, rather than unifying today’s “psychology” as a whole,
it seems more likely that some portion of contemporary psychol-
ogy may be unified according to some set of principles. These will,
perhaps, capture a large chunk of the current discipline, but not all
of it, by any means. It may well be that the portion unified will, in
addition, be integrated with other phenomena that are not currently
considered to fall within the boundaries of “psychology.” (Con-
sider how porous the boundaries already are between various parts
of psychology and the neighboring disciplines of neuroscience,
sociology, anthropology, philosophy, education, economics, etc.)
The result of this partial unification of (a subset of) psychology
would be the formation of a new discipline with new boundaries.
Such an event, it might be said metaphorically, would show that
the current form of psychology fails to “cut nature at its joints”
211
(though there are ontological implications of speaking in this way
that I, personally, would be reluctant to endorse). Later, some large
part of the remaining portion of “psychology” might be unified
under another set of principles entirely, separate and distinct from
the first unification. Whether either of these distinctly unified
pieces of today’s psychology would continue call itself “psychol-
ogy” is anyone’s guess, but it would be only a matter of nominal
importance, in any case. What is more, it is likely that numerous
problems now considered to be “psychological” would fail to be
integrated into either of the major unifications that had taken place
and, thus, become “orphan” problems, just as growth did during
the Newtonian unification of motion. The ultimate fate of these
“orphans” is uncertain. Some might turn out to be special cases of
phenomena that are already understood in other disciplines. Some
might be the bases of yet other new disciplines. Some may,
instead, turn out to be pseudoproblems: mere words appearing as
problems.
I have ventured into this bit of “science fiction” not because I
have any particular knowledge of how psychology’s future will
play out but, rather, to show imaginatively that there are indeter-
minately many possibilities beyond psychology simply “being
unified” or “not being unified,” and many of those possibilities
seem, given the somewhat jumbled history of the field, at least as
likely as either a Newtonian-style unification or simply continuing
on indefinitely as we have for the past several decades.
Shifting to a related issue, there is a great deal of debate in
philosophy of science these days among “realists” and “anti-
realists.” My guess is that the antirealists are winning at present.
That, I suspect, would come as something of a surprise to most
scientists, who, by and large, see themselves as working to get a
better understanding of the world “as it is.” Most antirealists’ view
of science, however is not that “anything goes” or that “all stories
are equally valid,” as they are sometimes caricatured by their
critics.11 Rather, the key assertion is that the history of science,
examined over a period of centuries, shows not steady progress by
a single scientific method toward some single Truth (as the high
school textbooks would have it). Instead, it shows that the foun-
dations, methods, aims, and configurations of the sciences are all
constantly subject to negotiation among its “players” and, as a
result, they all experience more or less continuous change—some-
times slow and gradual, other times violent and sudden, but never
wholly stable for very long.
That observation doesn’t undermine science by showing it to
be “nothing but” political subterfuge, social fashion, or arbi-
10
I am reluctant to use the term “biological” here because “biology” is
a concept and a term that was available neither to Aristotle nor to Newton.
“Biology,” is a 19th-century invention. I have overcome that reluctance for
the sake of expository clarity, but wish to note that some of that apparent
“clarity” is actually anachronism.
11
There are a few antirealists who go to these radical lengths, to be sure,
but the attention they receive, especially by critics whose main aim is to
discredit philosophy and humanistic studies of science more broadly, far
outweighs their numbers or their influence on those fields. Be those issues
as they may, the point here is that there is another, antirealist view of
science that aims not to undermine science but, rather, to see clearly and to
explain important phenomena within the evolving historical institution
called “science” which are often ignored or hastily covered over by those
who might be termed naïve scientific triumphalists. Science is grand, but
its path has been crooked.
 212
trary verbiage. It is, indeed, exactly as we should expect it to be
because it is our underlying ontological conceptions, our epis-
temological values, and our apprehension of methods that are
often in error and need to be revised. As they change, the
content of the science that depends on them shifts as well. To
give a simple example, up into the 19th century, probability was
thought by many to be something primarily associated with
gambling and, thus, could have little to offer the serious scien-
tist who was interested in attaining Certain Truth. However, as
it gradually came to be accepted that science rarely deals in
certainties (even if that is its ultimate aim), but almost always
in various likelihoods, and that the apparatus of probability
theory could be used to measure the degree of uncertainty
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associated with particular claims, probability came to be ac-
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cepted among scientific methods. It is difficult to even imagine
modern science without the extensive use of probability and its
associated statistical machinery.
This more tumultuous, but also more authentic history of sci-
ence gives us scientists of the present day no more reason to assume
that we, now, have finally “got it right” than pre-Einsteinian physicists
had space and time “right” or than pre-Darwinian botanists and
zoologists had species “right.” The one thing we can be fairly
certain of is that there will be change, even in some of the things
we believe to be foundational to the knowledge we have managed
to so acquire through our most arduous efforts. This doesn’t mean
that we have accomplished nothing of import. It means that we are
a vital bridge from the less adequate understandings of the past to
the (we hope) more adequate understandings of the future. That
said, much of what we stand on is probably not bedrock.
Although I just presented an argument that favored antirealism
(because I think that it is more widely misunderstood than real-
ism), personally I have never been entirely comfortable on either
side of the debate. I am fairly realist about some scientific objects
(e.g., trees, mountains, stars) and I am fairly instrumentalist (an-
tirealist) about others (e.g., the implicit memory system, the
openness-to-experience personality trait, dissociative identity dis-
order). What does any of this have to do with unification? Psy-
chologists, it seems to me, perhaps more than most scientists,
cannot rely on the terms that they use to refer to “real” objects and
processes. By “real” here I mean something like “permanent parts
of the science.” If even so ancient and apparently straightforward
a term as “planet” can be subject to debate, negotiation, and
revision, as we saw recently in the dispute over the status of Pluto
(and, by extension, of Eris, Ceres, Makemake, and Haumea), then
what hope can there be, over the long haul, for things like intel-
ligence, extraversion, racism, attachment, and autism (all of which
have seen important shifts within our lifetimes)? Consider, by
contrast, how quickly once seemingly indispensible terms like
“hysteria” and “neurosis” slipped out of the disciplinary vocabu-
lary entirely.
None of this bodes well for the possibility of a stable unification
of the discipline. Principles of unification, whatever they might be,
would seem to require, at minimum, a relatively stable set of
concepts (and objects) in order to do their work. But so much in
psychology remains highly malleable that it is hard to see how
principles could be formed to rigorously capture them when their
meanings might change by the time of the next textbook edition. Is
it possible that principles of unification would play a significant
role in stabilizing the network of psychological concepts and
GREEN
objects? Yes, it is possible, but now we are asking that a unifica-
tion we do not yet understand do something we aren’t able to do
for ourselves. It is, in effect, asking not just for unification, but for
a unificatory miracle. That seems unreasonable.
Conclusions
Where have we been? First, I noted that scientific unification is
an issue which has generated quite a bit of literature of the past few
decades. I also noted that many of these efforts have been rather
partisan, attempting to show that one “school of thought” or
another can expand its boundaries to cover all of psychology, and
that this is unlikely to succeed. I offered the suggestion that a
successful unification would probably have to be couched in rather
more neutral, and in much more rigorous (e.g., formal) terms.
Then I looked to psychology’s history to show that the disci-
pline has been a mashup of different interests from the time its
very first American journals appeared. It was not the result of a
group of like-minded scientists coming together to solve problems
they had in common. It was more the result of talented diplomats
and administrators inviting relatively disparate groups of research-
ers to come together for the purposes of publication and institu-
tional entrenchment. There may have been all kinds of good
practical reasons for the discipline to proceed this way in order to
“get off the ground,” but they probably do not constitute a prom-
ising intellectual basis for the future unification of the field. Then
I suggested, in light of this history, that if unification comes to
psychology, it may well be piecemeal—various portions of the
discipline unifying and breaking away from the “mother” disci-
pline until there are a number relatively independent “offspring”
disciplines (and some remnant “orphan” problems) rather than a
single unified psychology.
Finally, I took a short excursion into philosophy of science,
trying to explain how antirealism is not, in the main, antiscience
but, rather, an effort to come to terms with the history of science
as it has actually proceeded over the past several centuries. One
need not conclude that there are no “real objects out there” in
order to see the power of the antirealist narrative. The point is,
rather, that at any point in time, we have little reason to believe
that we, of all the people in history, happened to have arrived at
the uniquely correct concepts by use of the precisely attuned
methods. It is much more likely that we are like the people who
came immediately before us: We have descriptions of the world
that are more or less adequate to our current finite set of
observations, but we are always only a day way from observa-
tions that will render those descriptions inadequate. Even some
of our most cherished current concepts and principles will be
abandoned in favor of other new ones in our collective effort to
get a more adequate grip on matters: better resolution of detail
and wider scope. Psychology, at its current stage, seems par-
ticularly prone to fairly dramatic shifts in its concepts and
methodological principles. We are a fairly heterogeneous
group, ontologically and epistemologically, to begin with. What
is more, the ontological bases of many of the “objects” we deal
with are still fairly poorly understood. The odds that we are
conceiving as a single kind of object a set of things that would
be better handled as two or more kinds of objects, or that
something we conceive of as a set of two or more kinds of
things would be better handled as one, seems fairly high. There
 WHY PSYCHOLOGY ISN’T UNIFIED
is a bare possibility that a successful unification would simul-
taneously help us to stabilize our concepts; that we might see
better and more consensually what objects they refer to. Al-
though possible, this seems to be more an exercise in wishing
rather than in making any concrete progress toward a unifica-
tion of the field.
Although unification in psychology may well seem to be a
laudable goal, psychology may not have been configured histori-
cally in a way that will allow it to happen. We must, in a sense, let
unification come to us, perhaps in a series of fragments, and then
we will see what becomes of the larger psychology as a result,
rather than explicitly attempt to pursue unification for the disci-
pline as whole.
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Received June 15, 2015
Accepted July 14, 2015 䡲