Discursive psychology and the boundaries of sense

There are problems in applying the methodology of the natural sciences to problems in psychology. This has led to a rethinking of psychology as the study of discursive practices, including the semantics of working vocabularies and the rules governing orderly thought and action. This has an affinity with analytical philosophy. At the same time it suggests a reinterpretation of older psychological research. First-order experiments study psychological phenomena, but second-order experiments, now very common, study how people describe imaginary situations, and their reactions to them, so that it is essentially a study of discursive practices. Wittgenstein's use of the word 'grammar' suggests a convenient term for clusters of working rules. Philosophers have identified similar clusters of propositions, as a priori but synthetic propositions, expressing principles of order imposed on raw material by human beings. Psychologists have identified contingent universals which have such an ordering function. The revelation of the historical and cultural variability of such grammars opens up the possibility of richer self-understanding and of the repatteming of life systems.