Descriptive psychology

Descriptive psychology (DP) is primarily a conceptual framework for the science of psychology. Created in its original form by Peter G. Ossorio at the University of Colorado at Boulder in the mid-1960s, it has subsequently been the subject of hundreds of books and papers that have updated, refined, and elaborated it, and that have applied it to domains such as psychotherapy,artificial intelligence, organizational communities,spirituality,research methodology, and theory creation.

Descriptive Psychology is the intellectual discipline that makes explicit the implicit structure of the behavioral sciences. It concerns conceptual, pre-empirical and theory-neutral formulations identifying the full range of a subject matter. The concern with full inclusion, with clarifying the full set of possibilities, is a hallmark of Descriptive Psychology. The pre-empirical work is accomplished by identifying and interrelating the essential concepts, the vital distinctions, that characterize all possible instances of a subject matter. The empirical project, on the other hand, involves finding the specific possibilities and patterns that actually occur. Descriptive Psychology separates the conceptual and empirical from the theoretical.

Descriptive Psychology explicates the Person Concept as the fundamental structure of the behavioral sciences. The Person Concept is a single, coherent concept which involves the interrelated concepts of Individual Person, Behavior, Language and World. Descriptive Psychology establishes rules of construction, composition and relationship that articulate how these concepts are interconnected.

The original impulse for the creation of DP was dissatisfaction with mainstream approaches to the science of psychology. Of particular importance was the perception that psychology had paid insufficient attention to the pre-empirical matters essential to good science, and especially to the creation of a foundational conceptual framework such as other sciences possessed. Later authors noted that this lack of a conceptual scaffolding was responsible for the fragmentation of psychology; i.e. for its lack of any unifying, broadly accepted "standard model."

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