Plenary Speaker: AMEDEO GIORGI

Friday 12th August, 9.15 - 10.15 am

The Role of Values in Human Scientific Psychology
The thematic concern of this meeting of the 2005 International Human Science Research Conference is the question of "Values". It is an appropriate theme for values are embedded in human existence. Because of the strong influence of positivism in the 20th Century, the claim was often made that "science was value free". That is, one could strip reality of all "values" and simply discover the brute reality that was beneath the human encrustations to see what reality was like without human attributions. But if it is intrinsically human to dwell with values, can it be possible for the human sciences to eliminate values while studying human beings? Certain psychologies of the 19th and 20th centuries that accepted positivism and the natural scientific paradigm thought so, and they seemed to have dominated the day. However, a careful look at the history of psychology will show that psychologists have often tried to introduce values into psychology but that their efforts were not heeded by the majority of psychologists. This presentation will review some of these attempts, and in any case, the position of the presentation will be that a human science psychology cannot avoid the question of values and an attempt will be made to show that the inclusion of values does not undermine the status of psychology as a science. More importantly, the positive contribution of values for the development of an authentic psychology will be delineated.

Biography
Amedeo P. Giorgi received his Ph.D. in experimental psychology from Fordham University in 1958. He worked as a human factors specialist for Dunlap and Associates for several years and then moved on to an academic career teaching at Manhattan College, Duquesne University, and University of Quebec at Montreal and currently at Saybrook Graduate School in San Francisco. He studied phenomenological philosophy and developed the application of the phenomenological method for psychological problems based upon the work of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. He has directed over 100 dissertations that have used the method on all sorts of psychological problems and he has published over 100 articles on the phenomenological approach to psychology. He has been invited to lecture on phenomenological psychology in Europe, Asia, Latin America, Australia and South Africa. He is the founder and original editor (25 years) of the Journal of Phenomenological Psychology and the author of Psychology as a Human Science.