Clinical Psychology and the Philosophy of Science

Introduction.- Special Topic: What are philosophical methods?.- The Major Problems of the Philosophy of Science and Clinical Psychology.- Special Topic: The relationship between the history of science and the philosophy of science.- Epistemology and Logical Positivism.- Special Topic I: Logical Positivism and Radical Behaviorism.- Special Topic II: Epistemic and Philosophical Problems of the APA's Ethical Code 61.- Popper: Conjectures and Refutations.- Special Topic I: Three Other Key Evolutionary Epistemologists: Campbell, Quine and Skinner.- Special Topic II: Popper's Political Philosophy.- The Spell of Kuhn on Psychology.- Four Other Major Philosophers of Science.- Special Topic: A Fifth Account of Science: The B.F. Skinner's Indigenous, Behavioral Account of Science.- Post-Modernism, Social Constructionist, and the Science Wars.- The Complexity of Science Studies: Multiple Perspectives on a Human.

William O'Donohue earned a Bachelor's degree in psychology at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He went on to study clinical psychology at SUNY at Stony Brook earning a Master's degree in 1982 and a Ph.D. in 1986. He then earned a Master's degree in philosophy in 1988 from Indiana University Bloomington. He was an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Maine, Orono from 1987 to 1991. In Harrington v. Almy the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit found that a penile plethysmograph test ordered to be administered by O'Donohue as a precondition of employment was a violation of a Maine police officer's rights under the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. In 1996, he was appointed Director of Sexual Assault Prevention and Counseling Services at University of Nevada, Reno. O'Donohue founded CareIntegra with colleagues in 1999 and serves as CEO. O'Donohue has been critical of the use of forensic evaluations administered to litigants in child custody disputes. He told the New York Times, "Psychologists don't have the knowledge to do what they attempt to do when they do custody evaluations," adding that custody decisions are more about competing values than scientific findings when determining a child's best interest.

From the reviews:

"William O'Donohue, accordingly, deserves our praise in making a serious effort to cross disciplines-but especially disciplines as messy as psychology and philosophy...For O'Donohue, there are insights to be gained from each of the writers that he considers, as well as from postmodernism, and there is currently no consensus among philosophers on what might replace logical positivism. He concludes, accordingly, that one must be open to a "pluralism of perspectives" (p. 3). This conclusion is safe if it means that we need to assess the criticisms of the prevailing approaches and seek to frame them into a coherent philosophy of science. Given that psychology is a mansion with many rooms, O'Donohue avers that it may not be possible to construct a coherent philosophy of science that illuminates psychology. But some, at least, of the insights-even of postmodernism, fundamentally a philosophy of antiscience-are present in writers in very strong philosophy of science traditions."
Peter T. Manus
October 9, 2013, Vol. 58, Release 41, Article 5
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