Afterword

How might we summarise this book's answer to the question of realism's contribution to psychology and the question of what a realist psychology can offer? What lies ahead for the development of a realist psychology? And what are the obstacles that remain? Broadly speaking, realism offers psychology a coherent metatheoretical framework which, in challenging the assumptions and agenda of much of current mainstream psychology, and then cutting a path between the scientism of that mainstream and the antiscience of the mainstream's opponents, is radical and farreaching. Realist work provides a much-needed re-examination of psychology's two central concepts-cognition and motivation-and it pursues this within the context of a broader view of science as critical inquiry. The result is a realist psychology whose programme for psychology across both its subject matter and its methods is iconoclastic and deflationary in many respects, but in other respects constructive and integrative.