If scientific disciplines were countries, psychology would have been engaged in a bloody civil war since its appearance in the last half of the nineteenth century. Moreover, this war is as confusing to those within psychology as it is to those outside it. Put simply, the discipline has suffered from an identity crisis. The root of the crisis is psychology’s unfortunate position straddling the fields of natural and social sciences.
The label ‘natural science’ is most commonly given to subjects such as biology, chemistry or physics, all of which involve the study of natural phenomena thought to be governed by rules and laws of nature. Examples of the outputs from natural sciences are Newton’s laws of motion or Boyle’s law relating the pressure and volume of a gas. The natural sciences have progressed at an astonishing rate and have been championed by scientific greats such as Newton himself.
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