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The author skillfully crafts the argument that any philosophy of psychology that in principle precludes the possibility of objective psychological knowledge and truth also undermines an agency founded on rational interpretive grounds. An especially timely critique, as concerns about psychology's fragmentation mount and attempts at unification proliferate.

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CHOICE Review

In this carefully argued, clearly structured book, Held (Bowdoin College) examines a current debate in the philosophy of psychology involving the two main approaches to epistemology and ontology that underlie the human sciences. The familiar extremes are the modernist-objectivist-realist position, which seeks to extend the philosophies of natural science to the human sciences, and the postmodernist-relativist-antirealist repudiation of that view. Held's focus is the theoreticians who have staked out a middle ground in order to avoid the excesses of each extreme. Middle Ground Theorists (MGTs) support both a realism that is "truth-tracking" (yet not objective) and an "agentic ontology." Their aim is to ground psychological knowledge without sacrificing human agency, or self-determination. To justify her categorization of these theorists as MGTs, Held quotes heavily from a number of works by psychological theorists and philosophers. This book is valuable for its clarification of the terms used in the debate (e.g., realism, objectivism, relativism); its demarcation of the various philosophical positions; its careful analysis of the similarities and differences of three influential MGT positions (hermeneutics, social constructionism, and neopragmatism); and its critique of those positions. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty. P. Newberry California State University, Bakersfield