The Politics Of Error - A Reply To Dyck

The principal thesis of McGartland and Polgar (1994) is that for mainstream psychology to be a coherent and applicable discipline it needs to include, in a formal way, both positivist and interpretive methodologies and the data produced by them. In his comments on this article Dyck (1994) has demonstrated a failure to understand the nature of the relationship between positivist and interpretative methodologies, and has misrepresented the arguments used in exemplars to illustrate and support the above thesis. The point ignored by Dyck is that interpretive analyses of subjectivity and interactions in particular social contexts, such as when analysing the ''errors'' in the present debate, contain a richness of information that is unavailable when viewing the same events from an exclusively positivist perspective.