Chapter 1 Flashcards
Who wrote the most influential modern history of psychology?
Edwin G. Boring (1886-1968) and it continues to dominate as the most influential.
What did Boring’s history comprise of?
> Boring’s history concerned itself primarily with the growth of the scientific, experimental side of psychology since the nineteenth century.
> However, he noted that it was impossible to understand these developments without placing them in their own historical context.
> He found it necessary, therefore, to begin his history before the nineteenth century
What did the “person” approach to Boring’s account mean?
> This approach emphasizes the role of the creative individual in moving history along.
> On this account, the history of psychology is primarily the stories of those outstanding people who have contributed to it and changed it by doing so.
What did the “Zeitgeist” approach to Boring’s account mean?
> This approach emphasizes each person’s work in relation to the cultural context within which it takes place.
> Also called “spirit of the times”
What was the construct proposed for historian Frank Manuel to represent historical processes?
> Proposed the progressive versus the cyclical:
> Progressive: “on the one hand the historical world seen as movement either to a fixed end, or to an indefinite end that defines itself in the course of the progression, history as novelty creating and always variant;”
> Cyclical: “on the other hand circularity, eternal recurrence, return to the begin-ning of things, sheer reiteration or similar recapitulation.
What was Manuel’s take on Ixion’s Wheel or Jacob’s Ladder?
Manuel (1965: 4) suggests that Ixion and Jacob be taken as personifications of this polarity.
Is psychology progressive or cyclical?
> it is entirely possible that psychology both progresses and is cyclical.
> Ideas may keep being “rediscovered,” but at the same time those ideas may be under-stood in progressively more sophisticated ways. (Piaget) A spiral may be a useful symbol of such a process in which ideas recur, but at higher and higher levels.
What is Laurel Furomoto’s (1989: 11) new history of psychology:
> new history emphasized the notion that scientists often operate in a subjective fashion, under the influence of a variety of extra-scientific factors.
> Also . . . the new history rejected the traditional view of scientific activity as a continuous progression from error to truth, and opted instead for a model that depicts scientific change as a shift from one world view to another—world views that are linked to theoretical commit-ments involving esthetic as well as metaphysical considerations
Discussions of psychological research methods towards the end of the twentieth century tended to emphasize what?
> the complexity of the research process
> Many acknowledged that the facts may not speak for themselves, but may need to be understood from within a particular theoretical framework.
Many historians and philosophers of science have argued that the process of scien-tific inquiry contains a…
Subjective aspect.
What did Thomas Kuhn believe about the structure of scientific revolutions?
> Kuhn concludes that the development of these disciplines had not been smooth.
> It was not that they had simply grown and developed by accumulating data that guided the development of an adequate theory.
In contrary to Kuhn’s view, how did scientific revolutions actually occur?
> On the contrary, scientific disciplines appeared to develop discon-tinuously—during long periods almost all workers in a discipline had the same beliefs about the methods, data, and theory that were appropriate for their discipline.
> However, at certain critical junctures, radical upheavals occurred and entire scientific communities changed their minds about what the proper methods, data, and theory should be for their discipline.
What is a paradigm?
The set of fundamental beliefs that guide workers in a scientific discipline
When do revolutionary periods occur?
Revolutionary periods occur in which a new paradigm is emerging and an old paradigm is being overthrown.
What does Kuhn believe about paradigms?
Kuhn argues that paradigms shape the scientist’s view of the world.
> Kuhn likens this state of affairs to cases in which we can see different patterns in the same situation. I.e., Hanson’s bird or antelope demonstration.
Hanson’s demonstration is intended to make a point. What is the point?
> The two contexts are analogous to two different theories. Each of the “theories” suggests a different interpretation of the same fact.
> Each “theory” is equally consistent with the data. In general, the theoretical context within which we interpret data may determine how those data are seen.
> Conflicting interpretations of the same data are entirely possible, perhaps even inevitable.
How does Paul Feyerabend’s example portray the different contexts history can have?
> The general idea is simply that no theory extends across the entire range and different theories compete to explain some of the same data
> Another important feature of the history of psychology is that some theories (for example, T1 and T4 ) do not overlap at all, meaning that what one theory explains is not regarded as data by the other theory and vice versa.
What has been a recurrent problem in the history of psychology?
the specification of the boundaries of the discipline in terms of what is “in” and what is “out.”
From a Kuhnian perspective, the establishing of a single paradigm means what?
> that a discipline becomes a nor-mal science in which the workers share a united view of what constitutes the suitable prob-lems and methods for their discipline. This inevitably means that certain data are regarded as illegitimate.
What were two important works that represented feminism in history of psychology?
The Second Sex ([1949] 1989) by Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), the perspectives of women were brought to bear on every aspect of contemporary culture, including psychology.
