The Epistemological Goal of Indigenous Psychology

Abstract

Abstract There have been three waves of large-scale academic movements in attempting to include non-Western cultures into psychological research, namely, modernization theory, research on individualism–collectivism, and the indigeniza- tion movement of psychology. In view of the diffi culties encountered by most indig- enous psychologists who adopted the inductive approach of the bottom-up model building paradigm, the author argued for an epistemological goal of indigenous psychology following the principle of cultural psychology: “one mind, many men- talities” (Shweder et al., The cultural psychology of development: One mind, many mentalities. Handbook of child psychology, New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1998); in addition, the author advocated for constructing psychology theories that may represent universal mind of human beings, as well as the particular mentalities of people living in a specifi c culture. Due to the fact that theories of modern social sciences have been constructed on the basis of the Western philosophy of science, indigenous psychologists in non-Western countries have to make three levels of breakthroughs for the sake of attaining such an epistemological goal: philosophical refl ection, theoretical construction, and empirical research. Keywords Indigenous psychology • Bottom-up paradigm • Cultural psychology • Philosophy of science • Inductive approach