Anarchism and the Growth of the Behavioural Sciences: Subjectivism and Objectivism of the Scientific Methods

Scholarship and knowledge creation in the behavioural sciences have often grown through critiques and counter-critiques, but the existing literature has not sufficiently documented this. The paper argues that the behavioural sciences, akin to the natural sciences, have the hallmark of entirely different intellectual countercurrents that shape the evolutionary trends of their scholarship. The content analysis was used in the study. The paper anchors its analysis on argumentation theory. The paper raises and discusses the overwhelming contour lines of incongruence and lack of consensus that have punctuated and characterised the course of scholarship within this field. The paper points to the considerable challenges of the development of conceptualisation, the problem of deriving, maintaining, and sustaining objectivity, verifying inferences, and extracting data from the human mind and subjective facts to be proved through tests of significance. The study paints a picture of the behavioural sciences scholarship in that, at least, observations lend understanding to competing attention for a place by theories, principles, hypotheses, methodologies, assumptions, techniques, and paradigms that rest upon the definer or researcher’s cultural, social, and ideological milieu. The paper advances three methods: prediction using models, explainability of theory, and testability and coherence of methods as approaches needed to ensure objectivity and universality of methods, methodologies, models, and behavioural sciences theories. Received: 14 January 2026 / Accepted: 26 February 2026 / Published: March 2026