by Peter Kahl, 2025-09-21; v2: 2025-09-22
This paper advances a re-founding of psychology as epistemic psychology: the science of human autonomy and dependence under epistemic conditions. Building on earlier work, I argue that psychology has misclassified its own most robust findings. Cognitive dissonance, conformity, and obedience have been treated as anomalies—biases, irrationalities, or pathologies—because the discipline has assumed autonomy as normative and dependence as deviation. Reinterpreted, they are revealed as structural: dissonance as the affective disclosure of finitude, conformity as the exchange of autonomy for recognition, and obedience as authority redefining dissent as disobedience.
On this basis, the paper develops epistemic psychology as both diagnostic and normative. Diagnostic: it provides a three-level model (micro, meso, macro) linking neural dissonance, collective recognition, and institutional architectures of authority. Normative: it advances the concept of fiduciary–epistemic scaffolds, frameworks that transform dependence from clientelist erosion into dignity. The research programme includes reinterpretation of classic experiments, new paradigms to measure epistemic exchanges, comparative cross-cultural studies, clinical applications in psychiatry, and multi-level integration of neuroscience, behavioural studies, and institutional analysis.
The claim is decisive: psychology must move from pathology to ontology, and from description to prescription. Epistemic psychology is both science and ethic, offering a discipline adequate to an age of disinformation, authoritarianism, institutional capture, and psychiatric injustice—an age in which not only the conditions of knowing, but also the conditions of care, must themselves be safeguarded.
cognitive dissonance, epistemic clientelism, epistemic psychology, autonomy, dependence, recognition, authority, fiduciary scaffolds, epistemic justice, conformity, obedience, institutional architectures, disinformation
This is a provisional draft circulated for discussion; readers are welcome to cite it, noting that revisions may follow in later versions.
Kahl, P. (2025). Re-founding psychology as epistemic psychology: The science of autonomy and dependence under epistemic conditions (v2). Lex et Ratio Ltd. GitHub: https://github.com/Peter-Kahl/Re-founding-Psychology-as-Epistemic-Psychology DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17245416
First published in London by Lex et Ratio Ltd, 2025-09-21.
v2 published in London by Lex et Ratio Ltd, 2025-09-22.
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