Mike Palij wrote: > ... I am actually thinking about psychologists who > are held in high esteem and presented as a type of "hero" for other > psychologists to be proud of and as an example to be emulated. > One can think of many examples, old and recent, of people who > are seen as having made a significant contribution in some form, > for example, William James is often spoken as a "founding father" > of American psychology but this is usually done with a selective > presentation of his activities and beliefs, that is, those activities > of James that psychologists might be proud of are promoted and > emphasized that those activities and beliefs that they may be embarassd > by, such as his belief in spiritualism and his promotion of it, not so > much.
Indeed. I found that Louis Menand's _The Metaphysical Club_ was a wonderful antidote to William James hero-worship. And he does it without bashing James so much as just showing how his mental foibles (esp. his chronic indecisiveness) were as much a part of his philosophy as were his mental strengths. > In the case of Sir Ronald Fisher, Stephen Jay Gould tried > to reconcile the apparent genius of his contribution to statistics > and genetics with his sincere beliefs in and promotion of eugenics > as a solution of society's problems (i.e., promoting scientific > racism). Are they comparable cases involving psychologists? > A lot of them. For instance, James McKeen Cattell was a strong eugenicist. Indeed, the reason he opposed conscription so adamantly during WWI (so adamantly that it got him fired from Columbia, to a first approximation), was based on his belief that it would result in a high kill-off of genetically superior youth, thereby undermining the American gene pool in the long term. The case of Terman is well-known too. Lashley and Watson were both deeply (though not often publicly) racist. The only prominent early American psychologist I can think of who strongly and publicly opposed eugenics was John Dewey. By the way, Karl Pearson so admired the Germans that he changed the spelling of his first name (from Carl). > The question then arise: Why to psychologists, especially teachers, > seem to engage in a form of the confirmation bias in presenting > psychologists whom someone or group has considered "significant"? > This is an critical issue for historians of science, who are chronically horrified by what typically passes for historical scholarship among scientists. The problem is, of course, that when scientists turn their hand to writing about the past of their discipline, they almost always do it in an intellectualist and celebratory mode. That is, first, the main aim is to cover the intellectual developments, but little else (except perhaps a bit of mythologized biography -- like Newton's falling apple), because, as they like to say, it is the *ideas* (usually the "discoveries") that matter, not whether the scientist was married or single, liberal or conservative, good or evil, etc. But it also serves to hide away aspects of a scientist's life that might not seem so praiseworth today (such as, e.g., Newton's alchemical and religious obessions, Darwin's apparent hypochondria, James' spiritualism, or [to take a more recent example] R. B. Cattell's white supremacism). Second, scientists who write history almost always do it in order to "inspire" younger scientists to emulate the "greats" of times past, so they extol (and often exaggerate) the singular nature of their "genius." That is to say, when a scientist tries to write "history" it is often more of a moral exercise than a scholarly one. Over the past 25 years or so, history of science has become a more or less independent discipline, conducted mostly by professional historians, rather than by scientists. And historians traditionally pay great attention to the contexts (intellectual, personal, social, cultural, political) in which various scientific ideas (among other events) arise. But in the process, modern historians of science have alienated a lot scientists who have mistaken their activities for having the primary aim of criticizing scientists and science itself (where not being sufficiently adulatory counts is regarded as being overly critical). This misunderstanding of intentions precipitated the very nasty "Science Wars" of the 1990s. Thankfully, we are mostly over the worst of that silliness now, but it still rears its ugly head from time to time. Chris -- Christopher D. Green Department of Psychology York University Toronto, ON M3J 1P3 Canada 416-736-2100 ex. 66164 chri...@yorku.ca http://www.yorku.ca/christo/ ========================== --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
