Should psychology aspire to become a singleparadigm discipline? Defend your answer.
Paradigm is “the entire constellation of belief, values, techniques, and shared by the member of the community.” The paradigms are the viewpoints which are commonly shared by most of the members. Psychology should not be aspired to become a single paradigm discipline because it is a multi-paradigm discipline.
Staats describes psychology as a preparadigm or single paradigm approach because in the 20th century most of the schools are competing among themselves to gain the paradigm status. Even now-a-days, there are camps labeled behavioristic, cognitive, psychological, psychoanalytic, evolutionary, and humanistic.
On the other hand, other psychologists like Koch, Henley, Leahey, Royce do not agree with it and claim that it is a discipline that Kuhn described. Mayr also found that psychology always has the coexisting paradigms. They all believed that the view of the several paradigms in psychology is healthy, productive, and inevitable because of the psychology’s diverse subject matter. Therefore, they proposed that the psychology is the multi-paradigm discipline rather than a discipline with single paradigm.