K. Hillner – författare

The pre-eminent 19th century British ethicist, Henry Sidgwick once said: "All important ethical notions are also psychological, except perhaps the fundamental antitheses of ''good'' and ''bad'' and ''wrong'', with which psychology, as it treats of what is and not of what ought to be, is not directly concerned" (quoted in T.N. Tice and T.P. Slavens, 1983). Sidgwick''s statement can be interpreted to mean that psychology is relevant for ethics or that psychological knowledge contributes to the construction of an ethical reality. This interpretation serves as the basic impetus to this book, but Sidgwick''s statement is also analyzed in detail to demonstrate why a current exposition on the relevance of psychology for ethical reality is necessary and germane.

This volume presents one possible conceptual analysis of the task of constructing a model of psychological reality, so that psychology''s pluralistic state can be put into perspective.Chapters 1 and 2 specify the essential input assumptions of the analysis, establish the boundary conditions of the treatise, preview the kinds of decisions involved in the construction process, and present some necessary background information. Chapters 3 to 5 collectively abstract out possible psychological universes and recount the dominant classical and contemporary models of psychological reality framework. Chapters 6 to 9 focus on the philosophical input into psychology, especially as related to the nature of humanity, the mind-body problem, scientific explanation, and the discipline''s two fundamental analytical categories: behavior and experience. Chapters 10 to 12 highlight many of the cultural and pragmatic constraints imposed on any model of psychological reality by considering the applied, contextual and relational aspects of psychology.

The primary purpose of this book is to document the pervasive ramifications of the compositional problem (the discipline''s historical inability to define or give a technical specification to psychological phenomena) for the conduction of academic, experimental psychology at five levels of analysis: methodological, epiphenomenal, explanatory, metaphysical, and normative.