---
title: "Tree of knowledge system"
chunk: 3/5
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_knowledge_system"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:37:35.269263+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

== The "problem of psychology" ==
The ToK System emerged as a consequence of Henriques wrestling with what he calls "the problem of psychology". Henriques argues that the most difficult problem in psychology as a discipline is that while there is incredible diversity offered by different approaches to psychology, and there is no consensus model of what psychology actually is. Specifically, Henriques argues that the field lacks a clear definition, an agreed upon subject matter, and a coherent conceptual framework. The problem has been long standing, identified as the "crisis" by Lev Vygotsky in the mid 1920s. 
Henriques further argues that the patent tendency of psychology has been toward theoretical and substantial fragmentation and increasing insularity among the "specialties." In other words, the discipline has fragmented into different schools of thought and methodology, with no overall framework to interpret and integrate the research of different areas. At its best, the different approaches are a strength of psychology; different approaches lead to novel ideas, and prevent psychologists from clinging to a paradigm that fails to explain a phenomenon. At its worst, adherents of one particular school cling to their beliefs concerning the relative importance of their research and disregard or are ignorant of different approaches. In most cases, individual psychologists have to determine for themselves which elements of which perspective to apply, and how to integrate them into their overall understanding.
Henriques argues that the problem of psychology is a central feature of modern knowledge systems. In A New Unified Theory of Psychology, he described it as follows:

The problem of psychology is the joint observation that the field cannot be coherently defined and yet it connects more deeply than any other discipline to the three great branches of learning. Taken together, these observations suggest that the problem of psychology is a profound problem in academia at large. This conclusion is bolstered by the fact that as psychology has lumbered along acquiring findings but not foundational clarity, the fragmentation of human knowledge has grown exponentially. All of this suggests that the question, "What is psychology?" is profoundly important, one of the central questions in all of philosophy. Asking the right questions is often the most important step in getting the right answer. My interest in psychotherapy integration ultimately led me to ask the question, "What is psychology?”. Although I had no idea at the time, it turns out that this is the right question. And, as startling as it sounds, because psychology connects to so many different domains, the correct answer to it opens up a whole new vision for integrating human knowledge.
The reason for psychology's fragmentation, according to the ToK System, is that there has been no meta-theoretical frame that allows scholars to agree on the basic questions that need to be addressed. As such, the different schools of thought in psychology are like the blind men who each grab a part of the elephant and proclaim they have discovered its true nature. With its novel depiction of evolving dimensions of complexity, the ToK allows scholars finally to see the elephant. In his 2003 Review of General Psychology paper, Henriques used the ToK System with the attempt to clarify and align the views of B.F. Skinner and Sigmund Freud. These luminaries were chosen because when one considers their influence and historical opposition, it can readily be argued that they represent two schools of thought that are the most difficult to integrate. Henriques used the meta-perspective offered by the ToK to argue how one can retain the key insights from each school of thought, identify errors and points of confusion, and integrate the insights into a coherent whole.
Cultural and personality psychologist, Michael Katzko, however critiques Henriques' position on "the problem of psychology":

There is a very good reason for skepticism regarding the repeated claims that the one unique problem of psychology, applicable across the entire discipline, has been identified and that the ToK System solves it. The reason is given by the detail with which alternatives have been worked out, be they historical studies of institutional development or critical commentaries on the rhetorical structure of psychology's literature.

=== Solution ===
The problem of psychology, according to the ToK, is its conceptual incoherence, which Henriques identifies by the following: 

(1) There is no agreed upon definition.
(2) There is no agreed upon subject matter.
(3) There is a proliferation of overlapping and redundant concepts.
(4) There are a large number of paradigms with fundamentally different epistemological assumptions.
(5) Specialization continues to be increasingly emphasized at the expense of generalization and thus the problem of fragmentation only grows.
When the various conceptions of psychology (e.g., behavioral, humanistic, cognitive) are viewed through the lens of the ToK System, psychology spans two different dimensions of complexity: the mental and the cultural. In other words, the discipline has historically spanned two fundamentally separate problems: 

(1) the problem of animal behavior in general, and
(2) the problem of human behavior at the individual level.
If, as previously thought, nature simply consisted of levels of complexity, psychology would not be crisply defined in relationship to biology or the social sciences. And, indeed, it is frequently suggested that psychology exists in an amorphous space between biology and the social sciences. However, with its dimension of complexity depiction, the ToK System suggests that psychology can be crisply defined as the science of mind, which is the third dimension of complexity. Furthermore, because human behavior exists in the fourth dimension, psychology must be divided into two broad scientific domains of 