If not for the fortunate surrender to the premise that humans are indeed unpredictable, I would not have so quickly passed the above comment about psychology. In my descriptions I do not seek to simply call psychology a “social” science, but I like to see what method gains the most brilliant insights; and it is from that method that I proceed. Look at economics, where people are starting to, in consideration of the failure of economic “laws” that have caused the economic crises of today, trying to rewrite the entire field of economics by rebutting its basis in “science” and “prediction”, instead attempting to convince economists to see human economic behaviour as something rather more speculative and critical. It would be indeed sexy if psychology was to slant towards a similar orientation, for good, instead of going with “revolutions” and “with the flow”.

But I would not campaign now for such a radical interpretation of psychology; psychology’s affiliation with science, to a certain degree, has up to today allowed it to compete with its “harder” cousins like psychiatry with theories that stem from critical and humanistic origins e.g. the triumph of humanistic psychology in 1960s over biopsychiatry. If not for the basic grounding in the retroductive method of science, it is difficult to consider how psychology could have survived till the 21st century; instead it could have been lumped together with astrology; new-age and various other movements without scientific and public legitimacy. It could even be dismissed immediately as literature or mere philosophy by the people who live in the aftermath of the Enlightenment and conquer of Reason – which, will bring us back a full circle, to perhaps the academic interpretation of the human as a fully scientific being. Hence, I am thankful of all these “artists” in psychology for their contributions finally.