What is Descriptive Psychology?

Psychology prides itself on being a science. That is well and good. However, in many quarters, it seems not to have a good grasp on just what science is. We still hear statements like “Well, science is all about prediction and control.” On that account, both Mr. Darwin and Mr. Hubble might have responded, “Well, I guess that leaves me out.” Neither the theories of Evolution nor of the Big Bang is about predicting events or about controlling them. They are, one might say in contrast, about the postdiction of events that have controlled us.

One of psychology’s major misunderstandings is about empiricism. Science is empirical, right? Right. At the end of the day, it is about how things are in the world--about how we evolved, about why the moon prescribes a slightly elliptical orbit around the earth, about how DNA is composed of four elements in various combinations arrayed in a double helix configuration--and on and on and on. So far so good. But psychology’s downfall as a science, I submit, has much to do with a second, often implicit belief: “Science is 100% empirical.” To a very large degree, we value only journals that publish empirical findings (one has only to call to mind the most prestigious journals to see that this is true). We look dismissively on any report, written or spoken, that deals in the empirically undemonstrated, the philosophical, or the otherwise non-empirical. We assign all such reports to the benighted realms of the “anecdotal,” “speculative,” “undemonstrated,” or “philosophical” (pejoratively understood). Whatever the adjective, they are considered “unscientific” and therefore inadmissable as true knowledge.

But science is not 100% empirical, and it takes only the most casual observation of the broad scientific scene to see that this is obviously so. The following is an excerpt from a 1991 article of mine entitled “Proposal for an Eclectic Framework,” that speaks to this matter:

“The present framework is a nonempirical, conceptual framework comprising two systematically related concepts and the logical linkages these concepts bear to each other and to existing forms of explanation in psychopathology. Such conceptual and logical (vs. empirical) elements are very familiar and very central in other established sciences (Chalmers, 1982; Lakatos, 1974; Toulmin, 1956; Wittgenstein, 1922), but have received scant attention within psychology. A brief digression into such nonempirical elements in other sciences will serve both to remind the reader of their familiarity and centrality, and to help clarify the unorthodox (within psychology) nature of the present effort.

“Science includes concepts, and concepts are not truth eligible. The concept "vertebrate" is not true (or "verifiable") or false (or "falsifiable"). It is a distinction that a certain kind of scientist makes, which distinction has proven historically an apt and useful one. The same can be said of concepts such as "force", "mass", "gene", "quark", "mammal", "learning", and so on ad infinitum.

“Concepts, far from being incidental or unimportant, are indispensable in science. The scientist who lacks command of a concept (e.g., does not know that a vertebrate is a creature that possesses a backbone or spinal column) cannot study real world instances of that concept (except perhaps accidentally). Lyons, in discussing research on the topic of emotion, puts the point very well. Criticizing another emotion researcher who claimed that ‘any attempt to define emotion is obviously misplaced and doomed to failure,’ Lyons responded that, ‘One is tempted to say that the resulting situation must be like that of sallying forth to study rabbits while having no idea of what is to count as a rabbit’ (1980, p. xi).

“Science includes conceptual relationships, and conceptual relationships are nonempirical. For example, in the classical Newtonian system, there are conceptual relationships between "force", "mass", "acceleration", "inertia", and other concepts. A ‘force’ is ‘any influence that can cause a body to be accelerated’ (Hewitt, 1977, p.47); ‘mass’ is "the proportionality constant between force and acceleration in Newton's second law" (Hewitt, 1977, p. 29). In the Newtonian ‘net’ (Wittgenstein, 1922, p. 68), these are nonempirical, conceptual connections. One would no more do an experiment to empirically determine if forces accelerate bodies than one would to empirically determine whether bachelors have wives.

“Science contains even theoretical law statements that are nonempirical. Newtonian mechanics again provides us with a familiar example. Newton's first law states that unresisted bodies will travel indefinitely in uniform motion in Euclidean straight lines (Hewitt, 1977, pp. 25-28; Toulmin, 1956, pp. 55-59). Inasmuch as there are no actual unresisted bodies in nature, this could scarcely be considered an empirical proposition subject to falsification through empirical observation. Newton's first law, as Toulmin (1956) has pointed out out, is not an empirical proposition at all, but an ‘ideal of natural order’--a statement about an ideal (as opposed to real) state of affairs, which statement the physicist can use to considerable effect in the real world (basically, by accounting for deviations from this ideal motion).

“Finally, of course, and most familiarly, science contains propositions that are empirically falsifiable. ‘Light will bend in the presence of a gravitational field.’ ‘Individuals possessing characteristics advantageous for survival in a given environment will constitute an increasing proportion of their species in succeeding generations.’ ‘The universe originated billions of years ago with the explosion of a hyperconcentrated matter-energy point.’ All of these are propositions that could be falsified by appropriate empirical findings (Bergner, 1991, p. 3)”

So, where does Descriptive Psychology enter the picture? Isaac Newton, like all scientists, required a pre-empirical conceptual system (a set of systematically related concepts such as “force,” “mass,” and “acceleration”) before and in order to make the discriminations necessary to lodge any empirical claim (how could one claim that a “force” was inversely proportional to such and such if one did not first have the concept of “force”--one in this case that Newton himself invented). Indeed, leaving science aside for the moment, the same is true of any empirical claim. The bookkeeper, for example, requires the concepts “debit”, “credit,” “balance,” and so forth, in order to determine what actually happened to the company during the past fiscal year.

Psychology, having failed for over 120 years to provide such a conceptual system, stands radically in need of one. Descriptive Psychology is precisely such a system. It is a pre-empirical set of systematically related concepts designed to provide formal access to any fact or possible fact about human behavior. (Compare: “hue,” “saturation,” and “brilliance” provide such access to any color or possible color). The reader interested in pursuing this matter further is urged look into the following citations by Ossorio.

Seminal Works on Descriptive Psychology by Peter G. Ossorio

Ossorio P (1995). Persons. Ann Arbor, MI: Descriptive Psychology Press.

Ossorio, P. G. (2005). "What actually happens". Ann Arbor, MI: Descriptive Psychology Press.

Ossorio, P. (1998). Place. Ann Arbor, MI: Descriptive Psychology Press. (Original work published, 1982).
Ossorio, P. G. (1981). Explanation, falsifiability, and rule-following. In K. Davis (Ed.), Advances in Descriptive Psychology (Vol. 1, pp. 37-56). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.
Ossorio, P. G. (1981). Outline of Descriptive Psychology for personality theory and other applications. In K. Davis (Ed.), Advances in Descriptive Psychology (Vol. 1, pp. 57-82). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.
Ossorio, P. G. (1981). Notes on behavior description. In K. Davis (Ed.), Advances in Descriptive Psychology (Vol. 1, pp. 13-36). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.
Ossorio P (1981). Conceptual-notational devices. In K. Davis (Ed.), Advances in
Descriptive Psychology (Vol. 1, pp. 83-104). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.
Ossorio P (1985). An overview of Descriptive Psychology. In K. Gergen & K. Davis (Eds.), Social construction of the person. New York: Springer-Verlacht.
Ossorio P (1997). Pathology. In P. Ossorio (Ed.), Essays on clinical topics (pp. 1-70). Ann Arbor, MI: Descriptive Psychology Press. (Original work published, 1985).