In this article, I critically discuss the philosophy and psychology of science that are put forward by psychologists involved in the reform debates centered on the so-called “replication crisis” of the 2010s. Following the historian of psychology Laurence Smith, I describe the psychologists’ conception of the science system and individual psychology of the scientist as an “indigenous epistemology.” By first describing the indigenous epistemology of the reform movement, my aim is to constructively criticize it by making explicit how psychologists psychologize scientific psychology, and pointing to where such psychologizing needs more conceptual work, especially when it uses the work of philosophers of science. In their writing, the reformers tentatively subscribe to various positions on ways of knowing and functioning of the science system which exhibit fundamental inconsistencies. I suggest some ways for improving and deepening the discussion of epistemological positions that are taken in the replication crisis debates.

This book is borne [sic] out of what I can only describe as a deep personal frustration with the working culture of psychological science. I have always thought of our professional culture as a castle—a sanctuary of endeavor built long ago by our forebears. Like any home it needs constant care and attention, but instead of repairing it as we go we have allowed it to fall into a state of disrepair. The windows are dirty and opaque. The roof is leaking and won’t keep out the rain for much longer. Monsters live in the dungeon. (Chambers, 2017, p. ix)

Chris Chambers paints a dark picture in the opening paragraph of his book on the most recent crisis in psychology.1 Under the title The Seven Deadly Sins of Psychology: A Manifesto for Reforming the Culture of Scientific Practice (2017), Chambers offers a tour de force of issues that have cropped up and disturbed researchers in psychology in the past years. Organized around the tongue-in-cheek metaphor of psychologists’ seven deadly sins, Chambers’ manifesto is an informed criticism of what went awry with psychology as a science: the institutionalization of biases, dubious flexibility in the usage of statistical procedures, lack of transparency, outright fraud, and systemic perverse incentives. He concludes the book with a chapter calling for reform, arguing for the institution of a new publishing practice called registered reports and, with it, improved best practices for research in psychology.

I picked out Chambers’ (2017) account of the crisis in psychology, among other prominent voices in the reform movement,2 because it offers a deeply personal view on the current crisis which is used as a springboard for normative, methodological, and statistical discussions. Chambers’ book shows that for many psychologists, be they reformers or fellow travelers, what is currently at stake are the norms of good science, the viability of their research programs, and in the long run, their survival in the competitive funding structures of science at large (see Green, 2018). The reformers argue for robust enforcement of what they perceive as the norms of science. In doing so, they provide an explication of what is “healthy” research in a very particular way: by employing a reconstruction of what science is, coupled with a psychologically informed view of who scientists are. From these two usually implicit views of what is science and who scientists are (or in some accounts, should be) as people, they criticize current research practices and provide solutions. In this article, I will make these usually implicit views on science and scientists explicit.

To investigate the reformers’ conception of science and scientists I will use an analytical category called “indigenous epistemology” developed by the historian Laurence Smith (1986). I will reconstruct the indigenous epistemology of the reform movement and critically contrast it with the kind of philosophy of science psychologists use when discussing science reform. My aim is to constructively criticize the reform movement by making explicit how psychologists psychologize scientific psychology, and, by extension, to point out where such psychologizing needs more conceptual work. The reformers tentatively subscribe to various positions on ways of knowing and functioning of the science system. There is a big discrepancy in how they discuss those epistemological questions, and how such questions are debated among historians and philosophers of science. So much so that the reform debates seem to be completely out of tune with contemporary history and philosophy of science. I try to map these disparate discussions about similar topics, and in doing so, indicate how to move the discussion forward.

In the first section, I will describe what indigenous epistemologies are by using two historical examples. The first example is neobehaviorism, for which Smith proposed the concept of indigenous epistemology in the first place, and the second example is interpreting Abraham Maslow’s humanistic psychology as a kind of indigenous epistemology. In the second section, I will describe my reconstruction of the indigenous epistemology that is dominant in the current reform movement, which I call the indigenous epistemology of irrationality. In the third section, the reformers’ indigenous epistemology of irrationality will be criticized. In the fourth section, I will discuss some implications of psychologists’ indigenous epistemologies being a kind of naturalized epistemological position. Finally, in the conclusion, I will offer some suggestions on how to move the reform debate forward and change its parameters.

Indigenous epistemology as an analytical category Scientists are rats in a maze searching for truth In 1986, Laurence Smith published a historical reanalysis of the relationship between behaviorism and logical positivism in the first part of the 20th century. Smith’s work was an answer to the then-standard view that there was an alliance between logical positivism and the research lines of the most prominent neobehaviorists like Hull, Skinner, and Tolman. Smith strongly argued against such an interpretation. According to him, neobehaviorists used their own research to make sense of their science: From the beginning of their careers, the principal neobehaviorists—Tolman, Hull, Skinner—developed views of science that evolved out of and in close parallel with their presuppositions about the nature of organismic behavior. … All along, and in their separate ways, they were striving to develop naturalistic behavioral epistemologies that would encompass all forms of knowing, from that of the laboratory rat to the highest forms of human knowledge—including science itself. (1986, p. 19) These “indigenous epistemologies” were fellow travelers of logical positivism, not its applications. Interpreting them as only parts of the dominant philosophical view doesn’t do them justice, considering they were worldviews built as epistemological extensions of psychologists’ empirical work. A striking example of this psychologism is the metaphor of the maze in Tolman’s view of science: “Tolman held the world to be a complex, richly articulated maze that comes to be known in varying degrees by rats, ordinary humans, and scientists alike by means of exploratory activity” (Smith, 1986, p. 136). To learn about behavior, Tolman researched rats navigating mazes and postulated that they develop cognitive maps to do so. Rats in mazes were a powerful metaphor for him, and he readily used it to explain the behavior of scientists: “[Cognitive maps] could serve as effective guides for action in an ambiguous and changing environment” and consequently, “science was to be understood not in logical terms but in psychological terms—or, to be more exact, in the spatial terms of his cognitive behaviorism” (Smith, 1986, p. 137). All human knowledge was purposive behavior and science was a psychological system of spatial relations. Another important aspect of the neobehaviorists’ indigenous epistemologies was that they were naturalized. Naturalism in epistemology (for a comprehensive overview, see Rysiew, 2017) is a contentious issue for philosophers. Rysiew considers it as “more a movement or a general approach to epistemological theorizing than it is some substantive thesis (/theses)” (2017, para. 1). Naturalized epistemology is any epistemology that takes “the attitude that there should be a close connection between philosophical investigation—here, of such things as knowledge, justification, rationality, etc.—and empirical (‘natural’) science” (para. 1). I will return to the discussion of naturalism and psychology later in this article. Not only the neobehaviorists developed indigenous epistemologies. I argue Abraham Maslow also did when describing science through his theory of personality and motivation. Carving an epistemological middle way: Maslovian science Abraham Maslow’s humanistic psychology was in some sense a type of indigenous epistemology—a description of the science that was developed concurrently with Maslow’s thinking about motivation and personality. For our discussion, the central features of Maslow’s theory of motivation3 are relevant, “its universalism and antirelativism, its biological essentialism, and its explicit connection between the healthy person and the healthy society” (Weidman, 2016, p. 114). Maslow approached science as a social manifestation of the internal dynamics of human nature and developed his view in the 1966 book The Psychology of Science: A Reconnaissance. His reform effort was aimed at loosening up what he perceived as the too-strict standards inherited from behaviorism. His aim was a more inclusive humanistic psychology. In a way, Maslow’s indigenous epistemology was opposite from the neobehaviorists Laurence Smith was writing about. Maslow’s goal in reforming science was to allow for the full actualization of the “empirical attitude” even non-scientists could take as human beings. He defined the empirical attitude as “looking at things for yourself rather than trusting to the a priori or the authority of any kind” (Maslow, 1966, p. 135). It was the kind of healthy skepticism anybody could internalize, from “a child … watching an anthill” to “a housewife comparing the virtues of various soaps” (1966, p. 136). To achieve a healthy and creative expression of the empirical attitude, scientists needed to integrate dichotomies that could be pathological if taken to extremes. Maslow represented these dichotomies in different ways that meshed the social level of the functioning of science as a system of norms and institutions and the individual functioning of scientists as human beings. He called it the “Two Sciences” (1966, p. xv) and gave it many names: mechanistic and humanistic science, safety science and growth science, spectator knowledge and experiential knowledge, simpleward and comprehensive science, abstractness and suchness meaning, controlling science and Taoistic science, desacralized and sacralized science, means-centering and problem-centering. He discussed the dichotomy in different ways, spelling out implications for scientists as social actors, their object/subject of research, science education, human happiness; and ontological, epistemological, and ethical consequences of the two extremes. Fundamentally, all those implications were drawn from Maslow’s view of science as the product of human nature. Science was the institutionalization of humans’ cognitive activities (Maslow, 1966, pp. 21–22), or “a technique with which fallible men try to outwit their own human propensities to fear the truth, to avoid it, and to distort it” (p. 29). These activities were prompted by cognitive needs that are “instinctlike and therefore defining characteristics of humanness (although not only of humanness), and of specieshood” (p. 20). Crucial for Maslow was that these cognitive activities could be instigated by fear and anxiety or, on the other hand, proceed without fear, courageously: “Behavior, including the behavior of the scientist, can be seen in simplest schema as a resultant of these two forces, that is, as a mixture of anxiety-allaying (defensive) devices and of problem-centered (coping) devices” (1966, p. 22). The same mechanisms and goals can be “neuroticized” or “healthy” (p. 30), and the way individual scientists resolve them impacts the kind of science they produce. Psychological health of self-actualized individuals wasn’t only morally good, but a requisite for scientific creativity: “This ability to be either controlled and/or uncontrolled, tight and/or loose, sensible and/or crazy, sober and/or playful seems to be characteristic not only of psychological health but also of scientific creativeness” (p. 31). The epistemological consequence of these opposite ways of knowing was far-reaching: “The merely cautious knower, avoiding everything that could produce anxiety, is partially blind. The world that he is able to know is smaller than the world that the strong man can know” (p. 32). Seeing Maslow’s psychology of science as an indigenous epistemology provides us with three things. First, it shows that developing indigenous epistemologies was not a quirk of neobehaviorism. On the contrary, I would argue that it is a necessary consequence of the psychologists’ subject matter—if one tries to construct a scientific view of the psychology of individuals, that view will encompass the psychology of the scientist, especially when the psychologist is prompted to reflect about their own scientific practice by a perceived crisis. Second, since Maslow’s theory of motivation is “instinctlike,” thus biological, it necessarily roots his indigenous epistemology in human biology and psychology. Third, it shows how, for American psychologists in the second part of the 20th century, the human mind was a sandbox that bundled up multiple aspects of contemporary culture, politics, and science. Maslow’s account of the scientist’s mind—especially the creativity possessed by a “strong man”—sounds very similar to the “open mind” of the human, scientist, and model American citizen that was gaining traction in the salons and research centers where the new cognitive science was coming into existence (Cohen-Cole, 2014, pp. 141–214). During the 1960s, a discourse developed in psychology that could sustain a scientifically descriptive account of human nature as an object of study, a normative ideal for the conduct of scientists, and a model of a good citizen in a pluralistic society. Finally, the example of Maslow shows that using indigenous epistemologies to analyze psychologists’ understanding of science is fruitful. It also shows how an indigenous epistemology can be wielded as criticism of the status quo in the psychologist’s discipline—Maslow’s Psychology of Science (1966) was not only a description of science, it was also his treatise on how to reform what he perceived as rigid behavioristic psychology and “humanize” it. In the rest of the article, I will illustrate how a different naturalized indigenous epistemology is used to call for another reform within the replication crisis debates.

Science is/should be governed by rationality! What rationality and what science though? What rationality? The indigenous epistemology forming in the recent reform debates is that of the scientists’ irrationality. It was taken as a model of human reason from the rationality wars of the 1990s. The “model” is not formally explicated, but it spells out a few important elements. The first is that humans do not conform to rules of formal logic and probability theory when making inferences. Psychologist-scientists, being human, are prone to the same biases. Among different psychologists discussing human rationality, “not conforming” means different things. Some provide normative interpretations of the kind that say that the discrepancy between human thinking and logic/probability theory means that humans are irrational; while the less normative ones state that human thinking is well-adapted for thinking about problems that differ from those traditionally framed by 20th-century logic and probability theory.8 For psychology’s reformers, this distinction is extremely relevant, whether acknowledged or not, because they see any deviation from logic and probability theory as a threat to scientific rationality. However, the second element of the indigenous epistemology tells us that science is not only an exercise in individual reasoning, it is a community enterprise. Many biased psychologist-scientists communicate to make inferences and construct reasonable arguments as a community. The problem, spurring the reformers to reform, is that the rules and norms of that social construction of knowledge (“reasonable arguments”) are broken in two related ways: they allow psychologists to apply formal logic and probability theory in an unsound way and, in the more extreme version, may even incentivize psychologists to do so. The reformers believe that (a) scientific thinking is a set of rules for the application of formal logic and probability theory but (b) that application is socially mediated and instituted. Thomas Sturm (2012), in his analysis of the rationality wars, calls this “a fundamentally correct and important insight” of the “bounded rationality” approach to human inference in general: “[B]ecause reasoning often has to proceed on the basis of very little information and large amounts of uncertainty, it makes little sense to expect logic or probability theory alone to be sufficient in a comprehensive normative theory of rationality” (p. 78). The reformers are only indirectly after a normative theory of rationality—they need one to reform psychology alongside its norms. For the reformers, the normative theory of rationality is not yet an object of research, but a tool for reforming the discipline. And here, I think, there is room for criticism because they complement their indigenous epistemology of irrationality with an outdated model of science as a system. Before moving to a discussion of what this “science system” is and ought to be, a clarification is in order regarding “bounded rationality.” The view that rationality is bounded, in the sense of Herbert Simon and Gerd Gigerenzer (for an in-depth discussion, see Gigerenzer & Selten, 2002), means that (scientific) problem-solving is bounded by the uncertainty of the environment, limitations of human cognition, and the finite time at the disposal of the problem-solver. Using heuristics is a necessary strategy because of the interaction between humans’ cognitive limitations, the uncertain environment, and the time constraint. What the reformers seem to argue is not only that the science system needs to be redesigned into an environment that does not produce uncertainty in itself, but that at the same time acts as a corrective for the cognitive limitations of individual scientists.9 Science as a social system would act as a corrective if it exhibited the features philosophers of science have identified as crucial components of the scientific method. In other words, if the philosophers have produced a reconstruction that turns science as a social process into an exercise in logic and probability theory, then the reformers argue for refurbishing the current scientific system along those lines, so it could act as a corrective for biased thinking. The brunt of the reform falls onto the kind of reconstruction of the science system that psychologists recognize as best, and to that, I will turn next. What science? The episode that brought issues of replicability in psychology truly under the spotlight was the publication of the collaborative replication study by the Open Science Collaboration (2015) in Science. The humble conclusion of the paper which later led to some of the most fundamental criticism of 21st-century psychological science is a good place to look for reconstructions of the science system that the reformers find persuasive: After this intensive effort to reproduce a sample of published psychological findings, how many of the effects have we established are true? Zero. And how many of the effects have we established are false? Zero. Is this a limitation of the project design? No. It is the reality of doing science, even if it is not appreciated in daily practice. Humans desire certainty, and science infrequently provides it. (p. aac4716-7) Their multilab study was a huge endeavor which, by their own evaluation, was vital for the functioning of science. Still, for the reformers, the replication effort is the result of scientists just going about their business: “Scientific progress is a cumulative process of uncertainty reduction that can only succeed if science itself remains the greatest skeptic of its explanatory claims” (Open Science Collaboration, 2015, pp. aac4716-7). The fallibilist description of science as “uncertainty reduction” has two distinct overtones—first of the indigenous epistemology of human irrationality I have described in this paper; and second, of conceptions of science as a collection of empirical and theoretical propositions connected by rules of formal logic and probability theory. In that view, science is a collection of propositions produced and checked by the scientific method. This view is not surprising, considering the first six citations in their paper: four to three philosophers of science: Carl Hempel (1968; Hempel & Oppenheim, 1948), Imre Lakatos (1970), and Wesley Salmon (1999); one to the psychologist-philosopher Paul Meehl (1990); and one to John Platt’s (1964) highly influential paper “Strong Inference.” The perfect illustration for the view of science that has traction among the reformers comes from Figure 1 in Munafò et al.’s (2017) manifesto. The figure’s caption reads as follows: Threats to reproducible science. [emphasis in original] An idealized version of the hypothetico-deductive model of the scientific method is shown. Various potential threats to this model exist (indicated in red), including lack of replication, hypothesizing after the results are known (HARKing), poor study design, low statistical power, analytical flexibility, P-hacking, publication bias and lack of data sharing. Together these will serve to undermine the robustness of published research, and may also impact on the ability of science to self-correct. (after para. 2) Each of these threats endangers one or more steps of the hypothetico-deductive model. The steps presupposed by the model, that are shown in the figure, unfold in the following repeating circle: (a) generate and specify hypothesis, (b) design study, (c) conduct study and collect data, (d) analyze data and test hypothesis, (e) interpret results, and (f) publish and/or conduct next experiment. As the arrow between the last step and the first indicates, a scientist adds to the network by publishing, and she generates and specifies hypotheses by consulting what is published. Science is described algorithmically, as a type of data production.10 That interpreted data is used as evidence to decrease uncertainty. The vehicle for that interpreted evidence is a journal article. For the reformers, science as a system of knowledge is a network of empirical statements, theoretical constructs, and operationalizations that connect them. This network is maintained by the scientific method—a consistent set of inductive practices for producing data and making inferences about them. “Cumulative scientific progress” is the ordering, expansion, and checking of this network. Its practical (albeit imperfect) proxy is the scientific literature. Is the reform movement, then, only the newest attempt to make psychology conform to some logical empiricists’ views of the proper functioning of science? Consequently, is what Laurence Smith (1986) persuasively argued against in his book about neobehaviorism happening today? I don’t think so, because the reformers are a plural group of practicing scientists who don’t necessarily belong to the same epistemological club. Sometimes they cite and discuss Carl Hempel, at other times Karl Popper or Imre Lakatos, then Paul Meehl, Mertonian sociological analyses, methodologists like De Groot, and hero-scientists like Feynman. The reformers use these philosophies as a backdrop they find attractive enough for describing scientific practice. The reform requests are informed by their indigenous epistemology of irrationality, but the question what was science before it got reformed, and what will some future science be after, is much more opaque. In that opaqueness—using a very unsystematic number of examples of what is science from older analytical philosophy of science—I see the biggest intellectual and practical weakness of the reform movement. Intellectual weakness because it uses a thoroughly compromised system of thinking about science. Practical weakness because such a simplistic “logic of science” view is neither persuasive nor efficient. No actual science works like that, neither physics nor biology nor psychology. Scholarly fields that investigate science today, like philosophy/history/sociology of science, have moved away from the late 19th and early 20th-century conception of science as special because of the scientific methods that scientists use. As Paul Hoyningen-Huene puts it, since the last third of the 20th century, the “belief in the existence of scientific methods” that are specially equipped for producing infallible knowledge “has eroded” (2008, p. 168). Since there is no consensus about a universal system of scientific methods, the reformers are fitting their indigenous epistemology to an abstraction that has no real import for psychology as a science. They are rebuilding the rundown castle of their discipline from Chambers’ (2017) metaphor into a castle in the sky—one that works but has never existed. More to the point, the reformers’ indigenous and naturalized epistemology of irrationality is thoroughly incompatible with Popper, his logical empiricist predecessors, and all other non-naturalistic epistemologies.11 The reformers are after an epistemological system that prescribes “excellence in reasoning,” while the philosophies they use aim at providing justification of knowledge claims.12 Rhetorically, most seem to profess Popperianism or some brand of logical positivism, but in practice, they are developing a psychological naturalized epistemology. If with anything, the reformers’ indigenous epistemology might be compatible with Latourian readings of science, or other post-Kuhnian sociological or historical reconstructions that they almost never invoke. At least those views see scientific practice as thoroughly social and historical. Especially when we take into account that the kind of naturalism discussed in this paper is actually psychological—focusing on observable features of human psychology and behavior that have import for knowledge production. When the naturalistic position is expanded in a more “ecumenical” way (Fuller, 1988, p. 19), including the empirical accounts of science of sociologists and historians of science, suddenly the reformers’ take on what science is/ought to be has the potential to introduce a reformed kind of “psychologism.” Their newfound psychologism, carefully argued for, could become productive both for normative and descriptive accounts fashioned by meta-disciplines like sociology of science, history of science, and Science, Technology, and Society Studies (STS).13 The peculiarity of all the reformers’ potentially incompatible positions being mustered side by side, enlisted in arguments they were not really suited for, shows how destabilizing the whole discussion around the replication crisis is for psychologists. Practicing scientists go looking for philosophers’ prescriptions when the earth is shaking. Moreover, I would argue that there’s another reason why such a plurality of potentially incompatible philosophical reconstructions of science can coexist in the same reform movement, and that has to do with psychology as a discipline in the late 20th century. Psychologists since World War II have settled on a methodological standardization of their discipline (Danziger, 1990; Flis & van Eck, 2018). The disciplinary consensus on the use of methods and inferential statistics has kept the burgeoning discipline together. It has also neutralized most fundamental discussions about the nature of psychological research, state of psychological theories, and the internal consistency of psychological science. Some discussions did happen in the period since World War II (e.g., the one centered on null hypotheses significance testing), but it was constrained to specialist methods and statistics talk. Squarely atheoretical and anti-metaphysical, scientific psychology was secure in its methodological identity. Even more so because the methods were refined and increased in sophistication and skill requirements—the rise of structural equation modelling and Bayesian statistics being two great examples. Data could be produced, articles could be written, and careers could be made. Literature reviews and meta-analyses would provide a semblance of a structure that promised some future in which the inundation of empirical studies was being integrated into a consistent whole. The replication crisis seems to have destabilized that secure methodological identity. In the most extreme scenarios of the ongoing crisis, not only is the accumulated literature potentially untrustworthy, so are the research practices that produced it. Psychologists have come to realize that their scientific methods are less than what their graduate schools taught. Methods aren’t straightforward. They are messy and contingent. And the reformers are saying that contingent mess begs for reform. Late-20th-century psychologists’ focus on methods is also the reason why I thus far have avoided the fact that reformers expend most of their energy talking about methods and statistics. Both are important, but the kind of problems opened up by the replication crisis go deeper, to the fundamental historical and philosophical definitions of the rationality and the science psychologists use to guide and construct those methods.

Naturalized indigenous epistemologies The controversial position of naturalism in epistemology is a recurrent theme in this paper. It is even more controversial in the Western tradition as a whole. At the beginning of the 20th century, Gottlob Frege and Edmund Husserl cautioned against “psychologism,” warning logicians not to muddle their explanations with discussions of human thinking. No wonder it appears again in psychology at the end of the century—the controversy known as the Psychologismus-Streit was the cultural context that gave rise to German experimental psychology to begin with.14 Since Wundtian experimental psychology was appropriated into the American traditions of the early 20th century piecemeal, it could serve as a “dephilosophized” model for both the new scientific psychology that developed during the 20th century, and survive to this day as its origin myth. By dephilosophized, I mean that experimental psychology in America was shorn from its complex philosophical foundations, which in Wundt’s mature phase included an ontologically monist theory of mind; a methodologically plural approach to the subject matter (Völkerpsychologie and experimental psychology); and a clearly defined relationship between empirical psychology, its epistemological justifications, and a way for using empirical psychology to build a metaphysics and ultimately Wundt’s Weltanschauung.15 Later, when psychology established itself as a scientific discipline largely disinfected from Wundt-type philosophical foundations and methods of introspection, logical empiricists at large were constructing a system of scientific theories arising from the opposition between synthetic and analytic propositions. Between propositions bringing empirical data and propositions expressing logically valid truths, they hoped all knowledge could be reconstructed. By the middle of the century, neither scientists nor philosophers had any use for psychological descriptions of thinking or philosophical reconstructions of metaphysics. Formal logic and empirical facts dispensed with both. Then, Quine’s (1951) criticism of logical empiricism opened a brief window for a psychologically informed naturalistic epistemology in the philosophical tradition. In epistemology proper, this window was short-lived, as most epistemologists after Quine thought and still think that “naturalism in epistemology is impossible or self-refuting or self-undermining” (Bishop & Trout, 2004, p. 23). In the newly formed discipline of analytic philosophy of science (Reisch, 2005), the criticism of logical empiricism caused a ruckus. Popper’s falsificationism was provided as an alternative, then heavily criticized by the likes of Paul Feyerabend and Michael Polanyi or received extensions in the work of Imre Lakatos and neo-Popperians. Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962 signaled and expressed the eclipse of the analytic tradition, and the rise of sociologists and historians of science who occupied themselves with socially contingent scientific practice as their object of interest. Psychologically informed naturalism in epistemology, thus, did not survive among philosophers nor among the historians and the sociologists. A kind of epistemological naturalism could survive outside of academic philosophy, history, and sociology of science. As I try to show in this paper, naturalism wasn’t only a possible position for psychologists, but a necessary one because they based the indigenous epistemologies on their theories about human thinking and behavior. Science was a product of human psychology. The only question was: What was the current version of the scientific description of the human mind and behavior informing that view? Experimental psychology, after the 1960s and 1970s, went through the cognitive revolution. The revolution drastically changed some programs of research, influenced others, and, with its multidisciplinarity, led some psychologists into the newly developed cognitive science. The wider discipline of psychology also expanded enormously, with the application of a stable core of experimental and correlational methods (Flis & van Eck, 2018) serviced by a controversial brand of inferential statistics (Gigerenzer et al., 1990, pp. 203–234). In the 2000s, numerous lines of methodological criticism from within psychology and without (the wider “science of science” perspective and Open Science) started taking explicit form and culminated in the replication crisis. The stable methodological core was exposed to fundamental criticism, and by extension this criticism cast serious doubt on the enormous literature of many communities of psychologists that have been expanding for decades. Experimental social psychology was hit the hardest, but the criticism affects all areas that have internalized the research designs, theories of measurement, and inferential statistics of late-modern psychology. In this article, three examples of indigenous epistemologies were identified as naturalized epistemological positions that grew from psychologists’ research programs during the second part of the 20th century. I would like to highlight a few features that make these epistemologies indigenous and naturalized. They are indigenous because they were philosophical formulations about knowledge production that weren’t imagined from the outset as philosophical positions. Contrasting Wundt’s project to recent indigenous epistemologies illustrates this nicely: if we follow Araujo’s (2016) reappraisal, Wundt was developing his empirical psychology with the explicit goal of distilling metaphysically and epistemologically relevant conclusions. He was a philosopher developing psychology as an empirical science in order to inform his metaphysics and epistemology. Contrary to that, the indigenous epistemologies of the neobehaviorists, Maslow, and the current reformers aren’t devised as self-contained philosophical systems. These psychologists stumbled into the philosophical foundations of their science, they didn’t plan for it. The other salient feature of the three indigenous naturalized epistemologies is that they are types of psychological naturalism because they are indigenous to scientific psychology. They all give psychological accounts of scientific knowledge production because they were formulated as extensions of psychological research.16 Here, the similarity between them ends. Maslow was directly opposed to the way neobehaviorists conducted their science. In turn, the current reformers would probably see Maslow’s call for humanizing science as regressive and potentially threatening. My argument is not that all those programs were the same, historical record be damned. I want to draw attention to some of their shared features that should interest us when investigating the way psychologists describe and prescribe scientific practice.

Conclusion I draw the following implications from using indigenous epistemologies as an analytical tool for understanding the reform movement. They are meant as summaries, but also as advice for moving the discussion forward. If you’re an epistemological naturalist, be prepared for a lot of arguments with a lot of people My impression is that psychologists involved in the reform debates aren’t aware that a psychological naturalistic position on how reason works is highly controversial. If not carefully qualified, it will be criticized from almost all communities working on describing science: sociologists will find it abhorrent because it deemphasizes social context, historians because it potentially essentializes something that has historical contingency, and philosophers because it is in conflict with most of their current epistemological positions. Surprisingly, this is precisely why the indigenous epistemology of irrationality could get traction among psychologists and meta-science researchers—they are far removed from all these scholarly communities, so they do not share these views as a matter of education. Does that mean that the indigenous epistemology of irrationality is doomed to be forgotten, like Maslow’s and the neobehaviorists’? The indigenous epistemology of irrationality’s viability is largely tied to two things: (a) the precise model of rationality it inherited from the post-Cold War rationality wars and (b) the model of functioning of the science system that the reformers couple it with. Both (a) and (b) necessarily require the reformers to develop an explicit epistemology that will be consistent with their reconstruction of the science system, before and after reform. They need not become philosophers of science, but they need to conceptually argue for what is scientific psychology without using Popperianism or logical empiricism. In other words, more work needs to be put into specifying what psychology as a science is, extending it beyond lip service to currently popular philosophies of science.17 Which rationality? This is an open question considering the rationality wars have not reached a conclusion. However, I do think that the right direction is moving away from pitting “human biased reasoning” against “unbiased reasoning of formal logic and probability theory.” A good candidate is Mercier and Sperber’s (2017) interactionist approach: “Reason […] is a mechanism of intuitive inferences about reasons in which logic plays at best a marginal role. Humans use reasons to justify themselves and to convince others, two activities that play an essential role in their cooperation and communication” (p. 108). For science reform, this means that the heavily regulated communication system that was taken for granted by scientists for decades is not a given. Conservatively clinging to a journal system (against peer-review reform and Open Science), article structure (against reform of APA style and critical questioning of reporting styles), and methodological prescriptions (e.g., null hypothesis significance testing, but also, more fundamentally, any methodological rule that is taken as a given for decades) needs to be inspected on a case-by-case basis. The same goes for rules of cooperation, or as the reformers call them in the jargon taken over from economists and policy experts, incentive structures. This is not to say that I agree with all the points raised by psychology’s reformers, only with the approach that sees scientific rationality as the property of a complex social system, and not (only) individual scientists. Depending on what goals scientists set for their activities, that complex social system can function optimally, less optimally, or pathologically. Which model of science? I would like to voice stronger disagreement with the reformers’ model of science as a system. To put it polemically, taking inspiration from post-positivist or logical positivist philosophy of science makes for strange bedfellows. Instead of looking toward the different articulations of Popper’s falsificationism or the hypothetico-deductive model, a much more fruitful source of inspiration for the reformers might be the scholarly perspectives that emanated from Kuhn’s break with analytical philosophy of science in the 1960s, like historical epistemology and the different schools of sociology of science. Psychological naturalistic positions are still nominally incompatible with those reconstructions of science, but at least those scholars speak of science as a complex social system, and not an abstract system of statements serviced by a mythical scientific method. Some historians explicitly connect “system” and “network” thinking to how rationality has been researched and redescribed for the past 70 years (Crowther-Heyck, 2015). Individual rationality, the social systems it operates in, and the human sciences that analyze and describe both; intersect recursively. They are not only sources and sufferers of bias. Social science in the late 20th century both produced the talk of systems and networks and was produced by it. The connection between system thinking and rationality has a more proximal precursor than logical positivism in what Crowther-Heyck (2015) calls high- and late-modern system thinking within American social science. The science system, after all, is only one component of the economic system, as is thinking in the terms of systems (or later, networks). From that vantage point, problems with rationality in one seem to be isomorphic to the problems in the other: When the system produced manifest irrationality, inefficiency, and failure … the underlying premise that individual irrationality could be transformed into collective rationality came under heavy fire from every direction. One response was to carry the logic a step further—rationality lay not in any organization of human design, but in the environment, especially the market. So long as information (and money) could flow freely in markets, they would produce rational decisions no matter how irrational or emotional the individual person (or firm, or agency, or government) might be. In many ways, this was a return to an earlier freemarket liberalism, but with a less optimistic view of human nature. (p. 203) The connections between the system-produced rationality of the global economy and global science are trivially true when we think of science as only one part of the economic system. They seem to run even deeper if we recognize the similar faith placed in the “hidden hand of the market” as the one placed in the hidden hand of science (Wray, 2000). Both hands might prove to be articles of faith instead of actual mechanisms for correcting the dysfunction of their respective systems. The descriptions of the market and science as systems seem to share a family resemblance as products of the same late modern social science traditions. Another advantage of turning in the direction of historical and sociological naturalisms are the communities of contemporary historians and philosophers of psychology, historians of the human sciences, and critical psychologists whose work might be a more suitable source of polemics, ideas, and productive intellectual conflict. Coming up with ways for meshing psychological naturalism with that of the sociologists and historians is an open field that might be fruitful not only for normative reform of psychology, but also for descriptive psychology of science. In this paper, I have tried to lead by example: join the reform debates by discussing work from a newer kind of history and philosophy of science/psychology, like that of Jamie Cohen-Cole (2014), Hunter Crowther-Heyck (2015), Erickson and colleagues (2013), Boris Kožnjak (2017), Laurence Smith (1986), and other philosophers and historians. In the same vein, I will conclude with the words of Lorraine Daston (2015) in her commentary of an Isis focus section on history of science and bounded rationality: But if confronted with a choice among rationalities, as many philosophers and scientists now believe themselves to be, would it be more rational to prefer knowledge to knowing, efficient procedures over understanding? A history of rationality that took full account of the protean forms packed into that deceptively singular term cannot make that choice, but it could at least illuminate the options and their origins. (p. 676) Complementing the indigenous epistemology of irrationality with a contingent, messy, historical, social, and plural account of what is science might propel the reform movement in a more constructive direction than the outdated philosophy of science of the mid-century. Who knows, it might even give us a completely new science of psychology!

Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisors, Professor Bert Theunissen and Dr. Ruud Abma, and colleague Dr. Noortje Jacobs for their invaluable help in writing this paper. I would also like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their varied and critical commentary.

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The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Ivan Flis https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0493-8026 Supplemental material

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