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List of contents
Introduction
1. Against Cognitivism
2. Manifest Destiny in Psychology
3. Enter the Skeptics
4. Wittgenstein and the Limits of the Exotic
5. Imperial Borderlines; McDowell’s Reasons
6. Early Childhood as Margin
7. Psychosis as Margin
Conclusion
Bibliography
Notes
Index
About the author
George Tudorie is Lecturer at the National University of Political Studies and Public Administration in Bucharest, Romania.
Summary
Discussing marginality from an analytic perspective and drawing on canonical theories by a diverse set of authors, such as Dilthey, Collingwood, Wittgenstein, Foucault, John McDowell, Susan Carey, Michael Tomasello, and Chris Frith, this book is an important contribution to ongoing debates on marginality among psychiatrists, psychologists, social scientists, and philosophers.
Psychology often resorts to overambitious theorizing due to a perceived pressure to justify its scientific credentials. Taking the cases of preverbal children and mentally ill patients, George Tudorie illustrates that applying overarching and unifying explanations to marginal subjects is problematic, arguing instead that those at the margins should be given their proper explanatory autonomy.
Tudorie examines recent cognitive theories on early development in children to reveal the difficulties of conceptualising the emergence of human abilities, while also demonstrating how cognitive accounts of psychosis, built around the typical concepts of ‘belief-desire-intention’ psychology, eventually falter. In doing so, he reveals that interpretation is not a route psychology can take at the margins, and calls for a clearer view of explanatory options in marginal cases.
Additional text
George Tudorie’s Marginality in Philosophy and Psychology: The Limits of Psychological Explanation is, at first glance, an extraordinarily judicious and subtle critique of the role of philosophical premises in recent psychological and cognitive-scientific research. Tudorie persuasively argues that philosophies presupposing the normal adult mind may not provide a stable conceptual basis for research in developmental psychology and psychopathology. His book also provides a readable and timely history of the sciences of mind. Finally, Tudorie makes an impassioned plea for the importance of methodological precautions and guardrails in the field of psychology and by extension the social sciences in general. Social science, in this case psychology, is perched between natural scientific and humanistic methodologies and remains the problem child (despite and because of the vast scale of its institutionalization). This fundamental insight does not lead Tudorie to an anti-psychological or anti-scientific position. He instead calls for heightened epistemic responsibility based on the clear-eyed recognition that the social sciences are here to stay, and that they are a source of truth-claims we can no longer do without. This essentially practical quality of social scientific knowledge makes it imperative to deal openly with inherited epistemological deficits, which translate into vast real-world human costs.
