Psychology in black and white. The project of a theory-driven science

In The State of Things, the director Munro intuits that the core of human experience is not experiential and so one has to step back from the experience - to use the black and white - in order to grasp what is essential about it. This book is grounded on such an insight. It aims at laying the foundation of a Psychology in black and white, namely a psychology that welcomes the director Munro’s invitation to consider the difference between the experience of reality and the reality of experience and as a result, recognizes the need to re-think itself in terms of theory-driven science. I am aware of the fact that the project of a theory-driven psychology is quite a radical proposal compared to the data-driven, evidence-based line predominant in contemporary psychology. A theory-driven psychology is a psychology that gives up concepts defined in terms of phenomenical experience, to model from within the objects and categories it takes as the target and means of its investigation. This involves pursuing an abstract form of knowledge quite remote from the concreteness of daily experience - namely, learning to see the psychological object in black and white. As more developed sciences show, this distance is not the problem, but the solution: it is just what is required to enable science to go beyond what appears and grasp the core of human experience.