La epistemología estratégicauna propuesta para la psicología y las ciencias del comportamiento

Abstract

This article introduces a proposal for the psychology and the behavioral sciences called strategic epistemology. This proposal is based on the need for a coherent approach of different disciplines or strategies in this context for the real understanding of psychological processes like the learning process, the memory, the consciousness, among others. It starts in the inherent limitations of the orthodox approaches of psychology (radical behaviorism) and neurosciences (reductionist neuro-philosophy). The strategic epistemology was inspired by the proposal of integration of descending (psychology) and ascending (neuroscience) strategies for understanding the learning process, raised by John E. R. Staddon and Jose Lino Oliveira Good in 1991. Its purpose is to expand to all the fundamental processes of individual behavior in the form of multilevel theoretical models that are dynamic and neurobiologically plausible. In this sense, a discipline like psychology becomes a fundamental strategy of the molar and descending type, which starts from the individual as a whole and must be coupled with neuroscience as a molecular and ascending type of strategy that starts from the nervous system. Reductionism, in that sense, is finally overcome in both directions.