After a varied pre-university career that included schools in Kenya, England,
Scotland, and Swaziland, Nigel went to the University of Cape Town where he took a B.Sc
and M.Sc in Psychology, studied for an honours in the Logic and Philosophy of Science,
and lectured in psychology. Following this he went to Oxford (Magdalen College and the
Department of Experimental Psychology) from where he got a D.Phil, under the supervision
of Brian Farrell in Oxford and then, after coming to Australia in 1977, externally with
David Armstrong. Since then he has tutored and lectured in psychology at Macquarie
University, worked as a child psychologist for the New South Wales Department of Health,
and since 1985 has been a lecturer, then senior lecturer, and now associate professor in
psychology at Wollongong. In November 2010 he shifted to working for the university part
time. Research and Academic Life His research interests are primarily theoretical and
metatheoretical, on the conceptual foundations of psychology and on psychological
explanation. His intellectual direction has been formed by a perverse urge to swim
against the stream of orthodoxy, an increasing conviction of the value of realism, a
thoroughgoing Australian realism, to psychological theory, and the sense that much of
psychology’s claimed progress on the hardest of all problems, understanding the mind, is
bogus: often mere careerism dressed up as science. His research aim is - against the
anti-realist and constructivist trends of modern psychology - to slip realist conceptual
analyses and theoretical critiques past journal editors and into print. He can claim a
modest success in this, having published on psychoanalysis, methodology, motivation,
clinical psychology, meaning, constructivism, and cognitive psychology. (He tries
toremain, however, on good terms with the Department’s constructivists.) Correspondingly,
his teaching is aimed at helping students understand that true science is critical
inquiry, rather than the acceptance and application of theoretical and methodological
dogma; that as for the things that they’re liable to read in the (psychology) bible, it
ain’t necessarily so.
