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Knowledge paradigms and controversies

Psychology · Unit 1 · ~13 min read · Original chapter

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Psychology's deepest arguments are not about findings but about what counts as knowledge: must psychology copy physics, or does studying meaningful human beings demand different methods? For example, a strict experimentalist and a social constructionist studying the same interview will disagree about whether the interview reveals a fact or creates one. This chapter maps the paradigms, their assumptions, and the crisis that followed strict adherence to one of them.

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