Mike Palij wrote:
> So, who is giving a better accounting of the status of science studies
> and the history of science area: Daston or Ekbia? Frankly, after
> reading the one article by Daston, I have significant doubts that
> science studies or history of science have any relevance to
> psychologists.
Well, then you may (or may not) be interested in the article about
Titchener that I have forthcoming in the history of science journal,
/Isis/. It takes the recent account of the history objectivity written
by Daston and Peter Galison, and re-examines the course of Titchener's
career -- viz., his insistence that analytic introspection was the only
way forward for scientific psychology. Certain turns of phrase that
Titchener used in defending introspection that seem rather odd or even
laughable to modern ears suddenly begin to make sense in light of
then-current developments in the understanding of objectivity.
As for your disaffection with Daston writing, Mike, it seems to me that
we all (if we fancy ourselves "scholars" rather than just
"psychologists") need to be able to read and appreciate different
"registers" of academic writing. Daston does not write like a
psychologist, to be sure. But that isn't necessarily a bad thing.
Writing styles in different disciplines have their own histories, and
their own uses. Historians are much more likely to circle around a topic
for a little while, exploring its nooks and crannies (perhaps this is
why the book, rather than the journal article, is still the preferred
vehicle of historians and other humanists). By contrast, experimental
psychologists (eager to sound like what they fancy physicists sound
like) like to quickly declare they have found the essence of a
phenomenon, and then just as quickly move on to other matters (all too
often having left most of the interesting subtleties behind for future
researchers to stumble upon). It is true that the historian's
meanderings can be frustrating if one is not really interested in the
subject, or doesn't know enough about it to pick up the allusions, and
is just hoping to quickly scan it for "essential" tidbits. By the same
token, psychologists' writing can seem to outsiders like a headlong run
to the all-important p-value, rather than being aimed at attaining
actual knowledge of the matter at hand. I'm am sometimes put in mind of
cartoonish, pith-helmeted Victorians marching along the Nile pointing
here and there with their walking sticks and declaring "Pyramid!"
"Sphinx!" "Temple!" and at the end of the walk thinking they have "done"
Egypt. We all have our foibles.
> Or, outside of Ekbia, do people in science studies and history of
> science not study psychology?
Now here's an interesting question. One of the ironies of history of
science as a discipline is that, traditionally, it has implicitly
recapitulated exactly the hierarchy of the sciences that it spends some
of its time criticizing -- historians of physics at the top, historians
of chemistry the middle, historians of biology lower down (though this
has changed somewhat in recent years with the explosive rise of "Darwin
studies"). History of the social sciences has always been looked at
somewhat askance ("Are those 'really' sciences?"). Thus, history of
psychology has always resided more comfortably in its own special
societies and associations (e.g., Cheiron) than in the broader history
of science associations. One of the things I have been trying to
accomplish over the course of my career (along with people much "bigger"
than me, like Michael Sokal, the key specialist on James McKeen Cattell)
is to help bring history of psychology into mainstream history of
science (I'll leave the histories of sociology and anthropology to
others). And there is, now, a "Forum for the History of the Human
Sciences" within the larger "History of Science Society," so some
progress has been made on that front.
Science Studies is somewhat different matter (though my understanding of
the dynamics there is somewhat limited because it is not where I spend
my time). Psychology has long been in their sights because psychology
has always been viewed as what might be called the "collaborator"
discipline by the other social sciences. That is, psychology has long
been seen as the most eager to attempt to adopt the sensibilities of the
natural sciences, the quickest jump into bed with government, military,
and corporate interests when opportunity knocks, and the least likely to
articulate a coherent critique of the status quo. (Whether sociologists
and anthropologist have felt this way because they, in reality, more
"pure," or simply because the same opportunities have rarely been
afforded their disciplines is a matter for study.) Looking down the
"other end of the tube," so to speak, the psychological study *of
science* has never really been a player in Science Studies in the way
that sociology of science and anthropology of science have been. Partly
this has been due to the reasons of distrust mentioned earlier in this
paragraph. More importantly, however, psychology is seen (rightly, for
the most part) as adopting a number of "individualist" assumptions about
the practice of science (and of human behavior more broadly) that are
not shared by sociology and anthropology (whether those assumptions are
right or wrong is a separate matter). So there would be farily little
overlap in interests between the two groups.
Regards,
Chris
--
Christopher D. Green
Department of Psychology
York University
Toronto, ON M3J 1P3
Canada
416-736-2100 ex. 66164
[email protected]
http://www.yorku.ca/christo/
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