Scientific symbiosis represents the mutual benefit of iteratively adopting the perspective of realism and instrumentalism.

son and world, scientist and fact, such that one assumes that fish exist a priori and independent of the scientist’s investigation. Organisms, however, shape their worlds as their worlds reciprocally shape them (Lewontin, 2000). Thus, the scientist who clears land on his or her property for a new tennis court will create the circumstances of a world lacking fish as facts for discovery. Cacioppo et al. (2004) should be credited for bringing attention to the different consequences of the approaches of scientific realism and instrumentalism. It is ironic that they are inadvertently encouraging psychologists, even as a practical lot, to consider the entailments of metatheoretical assumptions. Unification without regard to these assumptions is like appealing for the unification of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and atheism. However, it is a disservice to the field of psychology to pretend that realism and instrumentalism constitute an exhaustive dichotomy, especially one whose resolution entails progress toward scientific truths. If there is to be an iterative deployment of differing epistemological and methodological practices, then one should begin to recognize the significant differences between a psychology informed by scientism and one informed by humanism/phenomenology, specifically with regard to the place of the human being as both scientist and subject. Public policy and scientific practice cannot devalue or ignore the concept of human being. Although the appeal to scientific realism may support one’s anxieties and desires to legitimize the discipline of psychology, it imposes an acceptance of the reducibility and measurement of human beings, when human being is a concept that cannot be measured. Reality consists of the co-presence of organisms and the objects to which they tend, each term mutually exclusive, and realism is the study of the emergent understanding of this dialectic.