Educational Psychology: Between an Epistemic Rock and a Hard Place

Abstract

A recent criticism of psychology and educational psychology in particular charges that these disciplines face an epistemological dilemma. Specifically, the criticism contends that many, perhaps most psychological knowledge claims are either analytic in the pejorative sense of trivially true by definition or arbitrary in the sense of highly contingent and, therefore, ungeneralizable. The analytic knowledge claims of educational psychology, however, can be construed more charitably as “necessary truths” or axioms about human behaviour that imply important, contingent, and reasonably general empirical consequences.