The Hubble Hypothesis and the Developmentalist's Dilemma

Developmental psychopathology stands poised at the close of the 20th century on the horns of a major scientific dilemma. The essence of this dilemma lies in the contrast between its heuristically rich open system concepts on the one hand, and the closed system paradigm it adopted from mainstream psychology for investigating those models on the other. Many of the research methods, assessment strategies, and data analytic models of psychology’s paradigm are predicated on closed system assumptions and explanatory models. Thus, they are fundamentally inadequate forstudying humans, who are unparalleled among open systems in their wide ranging capacities for equifinal and multifinal functioning. Developmental psychopathology faces two challenges in successfully negotiating the developmentalist’s dilemma. The first lies in recognizing how the current paradigm encourages research practices that are antithetical to developmental principles, yet continue to flourish. I argue that the developmentalist’s dilemma is sustained by long standing, mutually enabling weaknesses in the paradigm’s discovery methods and scientific standards. These interdependent weaknesses function like a distorted lens on the research process by variously sustaining the illusion of theoretical progress, obscuring the need for fundamental reforms, and both constraining and misguiding reform efforts. An understanding of how these influences arise and take their toll provides a foundation and rationale for engaging the second challenge. The essence of this challenge will be finding ways to resolve the developmentalist’s dilemma outside the constraints of the existing paradigm by developing indigenous research strategies, methods, and standards with fidelity to the complexity of developmental phenomena

National Institute of Mental Health Roundtable Discussion: Promissory Notes and Prevailing Norms in Social and Behavioral Sciences Research

Most workshops convened by the National Institute's of Health are devoted to the puzzle-solving activities of normal science, where the puzzles themselves and the strategies available for solving them are determined largely in advance by the shared paradigmatic assumptions, frameworks, and priorities of the scientific community's research paradigm. They are designed to facilitate what Thomas Kuhn referred to as elucidating topological detail within a map whose main outlines are available in advance. And apparently for good reason. Historical studies by Kuhn and others reveal that science moves fastest and penetrates most deeply when its practitioners work within well-defined and deeply ingrained traditions and employ the concepts, theories, methods, and tools of a shared paradigm. No paradigm is perfect and none is capable of identifying, let alone solving, all of the problems relevant to a given domain of inquiry. Thus, the essential day-to-day business of normal science is not to question the limits or adequacy of a given paradigm, but rather to exploit the presumed virtues for which it was adopted. As Kuhn cautioned in his discussion of paradigms, re-tooling, in science as in manufacture, as an extravagance to be reserved for the occasion that demands it. Well, as the marketing people say --- this is not your father's Oldsmobile. We are breaking with tradition today by stepping outside the map to initiate and pursue a long-overdue dialogue about paradigm reform and scientific retooling. Our warrant for prosecuting this agenda is a Kuhnian occasion that demands it--- is a protracted paradigm crisis, the neglect of which has hurt us terribly and the resolution of which will determine the viability and fate of the social and behavioral sciences in the 21st century. Since the details of the crisis are well know within and outside our ranks, a brief sketch of its main outlines will suffice as a framework for our dialogue today. They include, (a) widespread dissatisfaction with the meager theoretical progress and practical yield of more than a century of social and behavioral sciences research in many substantive domains, (b) long-neglected yet widely recognized deficiencies in the epistemological assumptions, discovery practices and justification standards of the dominant paradigm on which the social and behavioral sciences have relied --- and rely--- to conceptualize, interpret, and guide their empirical research, (c) a broadly based consensus among leading scholars and scientists about the need for fundamental paradigm reforms, and (d) institutional incentive structures that not only encourage and reinforce the status quo but discourage constructive reform efforts. Our objective for the next eight hours is to formulate strategies and recommendations for leveraging the resources and influence of the National Institute of Mental Health to foster a climate of constructive reforms where they are needed by freeing investigators in from the oppressive constraints of existing paradigms and facilitating, encouraging, and funding their retooling their effort

Psychiatry's Turbid Solution

Psychiatry?s generic concept of disorder has long served an important legitimizing function for the broad array of conditions for which individuals seek mental health treatment, regardless of their presumed causes. Wakefield?s proposal to restrict the mental disorder concept to only a subset of these conditions has given rise to concerns about the uncertain consequences of classifying others as non-disorders. In Bergner?s recent counterproposal, this concern is masked in the form of a conspicuously overinclusive definition of mental disorder. Bergner?s resistance to Wakefield?s classification objective underscores an important, unmet, and often unacknowledged need within the clinical treatment community. The challenge ahead lies in finding ways to address this need without compromising the integrity of efforts to develop a more coherent concept of mental disorder

The Abduction of Disorder in Psychiatry

The evolutionary cornerstone of J. C. Wakefield's (1999) harmful dysfunction thesis is a faulty assumption of comparability between mental and biological processes that overlooks the unique plasticity and openness of the brain?s functioning design. This omission leads Wakefield to an idealized concept of natural mental functions, illusory interpretations of mental disorders as harmful dysfunctions, and exaggerated claims for the validity of his explanatory and stipulative proposals. The authors argue that there are numerous ways in which evolutionarily intact mental and psychological processes, combined with striking discontinuities within and between evolutionary and contemporary social/cultural environments, may cause non-dysfunction variants of many widely accepted major mental disorders. These examples undermine many of Wakefield's arguments for adopting a harmful dysfunction concept of mental disorder

Incredible utility: The lost causes and causal debris of psychological science

Variable-oriented, sample-based individual differences research strategies and statistical modeling approaches to causal-theoretical inference depend on their logic, coherence, justification, and presumed heuristic value on the tacit assumption that individuals are qualitatively the same, homogeneous with respect to the psychological structures and processes underlying their overt functioning, and that quantitative differences between them are produced by exactly the same psychological structures functioning in exactly the same way within each individual. This psychological homogeneity assumption, however, is demonstrably false and invalidated by a substantial body of uncontested scientific evidence documenting psychological heterogeneity as a ubiquitous, defining characteristic of human functioning. This irreconcilable mismatch between the psychological homogeneity assumption of the paradigm and the psychologically heterogeneous realities of its phenomena renders the individual differences methodology intrinsically incapable of advancing theoretical knowledge about the causes of psychological and behavioral phenomena. A detailed look at this mismatch reveals also that it holds considerable explanatory power as the root cause of the slow theoretical progress and replication failures of psychological research, as well as the driving force behind psychology’s inability to relinquish its controversial reliance on null hypothesis significance testing as a justification standard for evaluating theoretical claims

Methodological question-begging about the causes of complex social traits

Burt formulates her critique at a general level of abstraction that highlights the methodological deficiencies of sociogenomics without also calling attention to precisely the same deficiencies in the social science model she seeks to defend against its encroachments. What might have been a methodological bulwark against the excesses of sociogenomics is in-stead a one-sided critique that merely renews its charter

Anthony Bourdain's long-burning suicidal wick -- in his own words

As Bourdain continued to struggle publicly with his demons over the years, he also became increasingly comfortable with the idea of suicide as potential exit strategy. He became particularly comfortable with the idea of hanging himself as an option, and was especially drawn to the idea of hanging himself in the shower. Sufficiently comfortable that he referred casually and explicitly to killing himself in this way throughout his professional career. Not occasionally, but frequently. A cursory review of his public statements over the years reveals 19 separate occasions— in writing, during interviews, and on camera— on which he refers to suicide by hanging. On the vast majority of these occasions he refers explicitly to hanging himself in the shower, on 1 occasion more specifically to hanging himself in the shower of his hotel room, and on 1 occasion even more specifically to hanging himself in the shower stall of his lonely hotel room