This is still ultimately a research within the field of the behavior sciences, and as such the laws of human behavior apply, where behaviorism offers a far more successful theoretical framework than personality psychology.
Nobody is denying that people have personalities btw. Not even true behavioralists do that, they simply argue from reductionism that personality can be explained with learning contingencies and the reinforcement history. Very few people are true behavioralists these days though, but within the behavior sciences, scientists are much more likely to borrow missing factors (i.e. things that learning contingencies fail to explain) from fields such as cognitive science (or even further to neuroscience) and (less often) social science.
What I am arguing here, however, is that the appeal to personality is unnecessary when explaining behavior.
As for figuring out what personality is, that is still within the realm of philosophy. Maybe cognitive science will do a better job at explaining it than psychometricians have done for the past century. I certainly hope so, it would be nice to have a better model of human behavior. But I think even if we could explain personality, it still wouldn’t help us here. At best we would be in a similar situation as physics, where one model can explain things traveling at the speed of light, while another model can explain things at the sub-atomic scale, but the two models cannot be applied together.
This is still ultimately a research within the field of the behavior sciences, and as such the laws of human behavior apply, where behaviorism offers a far more successful theoretical framework than personality psychology.
Nobody is denying that people have personalities btw. Not even true behavioralists do that, they simply argue from reductionism that personality can be explained with learning contingencies and the reinforcement history. Very few people are true behavioralists these days though, but within the behavior sciences, scientists are much more likely to borrow missing factors (i.e. things that learning contingencies fail to explain) from fields such as cognitive science (or even further to neuroscience) and (less often) social science.
What I am arguing here, however, is that the appeal to personality is unnecessary when explaining behavior.
As for figuring out what personality is, that is still within the realm of philosophy. Maybe cognitive science will do a better job at explaining it than psychometricians have done for the past century. I certainly hope so, it would be nice to have a better model of human behavior. But I think even if we could explain personality, it still wouldn’t help us here. At best we would be in a similar situation as physics, where one model can explain things traveling at the speed of light, while another model can explain things at the sub-atomic scale, but the two models cannot be applied together.