Time and psychological explanation /

Thomas Kuhn showed that paradigms act as pretheoretical assumptions. Slife shows that Newton's concept of linear time has come to be reified as a paradigm insofar as it is accepted, without thought (and therefore uncritically) by lay people and psychologists alike. This is true despite the fact that psychology embraces a great many Kuhnian-type anomalies (i.e., concepts and findings that do not fit into a linear-time framework). In very convincing fashion, Slife provides a devastating critique of linear time and its five implications for scientific explanation, i.e., objectivity, continuity, linearity, universality, and reductionism. Moreover, he reviews with insight and inspiration the major temporal assumptions in developmental psychology, personality theory, psychological methodology, cognitive psychology, individual therapy, group therapy, and family therapy. Slife concludes by describing a couple of alternatives to the linear paradigm: organismic holism and hermeneutic temporality. Neither alternative is the solution, but by challenging Newton's framework, Slife reminds readers that the linear model is only one possibility, and one that does not account for much of what is known about temporality. Advanced undergraduates and above. M. G. Flaherty; Eckerd College