Constructing Scientific Psychology is the first full-scale interpretation of the life and work of the major American neuropsychologist Karl Lashley that sets Lashley's creation of a laboratory-centered, decisively materialistic science of brain and behavior in its scientific and social contexts. The book places Lashley's neuropsychology at the heart of two controversies that polarized the sciences of mind and brain in the U.S. in the first half of the twentieth century.
Science as Psychology reveals the complexity and richness of rationality by demonstrating how social relationships, emotion, culture, and identity are implicated in the problem-solving practices of laboratory scientists. In this study, the authors gather and analyze interview and observational data from innovation-focused laboratories in the engineering sciences to show how the complex practices of laboratory research scientists provide rich psychological insights, and how a better understanding of science practice facilitates understanding of human beings more generally. The study focuses not on dismantling the rational core of scientific practice, but on illustrating how social, personal, and cognitive processes are intricately woven together in scientific thinking. The book is thus a contribution to science studies, the psychology of science, and general psychology.
An account that analyzes the dynamic reasoning processes implicated in a fundamental problem of creativity in science: how does genuine novelty emerge from existing representations? How do novel scientific concepts arise? In Creating Scientific Concepts, Nancy Nersessian seeks to answer this central but virtually unasked question in the problem of conceptual change. She argues that the popular image of novel concepts and profound insight bursting forth in a blinding flash of inspiration is mistaken. Instead, novel concepts are shown to arise out of the interplay of three factors: an attempt to solve specific problems; the use of conceptual, analytical, and material resources provided by the cognitive-social-cultural context of the problem; and dynamic processes of reasoning that extend ordinary cognition. Focusing on the third factor, Nersessian draws on cognitive science research and historical accounts of scientific practices to show how scientific and ordinary cognition lie on a continuum, and how problem-solving practices in one illuminate practices in the other. Her investigations of scientific practices show conceptual change as deriving from the use of analogies, imagistic representations, and thought experiments, integrated with experimental investigations and mathematical analyses. She presents a view of constructed models as hybrid objects, serving as intermediaries between targets and analogical sources in bootstrapping processes. Extending these results, she argues that these complex cognitive operations and structures are not mere aids to discovery, but that together they constitute a powerful form of reasoning—model-based reasoning—that generates novelty. This new approach to mental modeling and analogy, together with Nersessian's cognitive-historical approach, make Creating Scientific Concepts equally valuable to cognitive science and philosophy of science.
That sciences are guided by explicit and implicit ties to their surrounding social world is not new. Jaan Valsiner fills in the wide background of scholarship on the history of science, the recent focus on social studies of sciences, and the cultural and cognitive analyses of knowledge making. The theoretical scheme that he uses to explain the phenomena of social guidance of science comes from his thinking about processes of development in general--his theory of bounded indeterminacy--and on the relations of human beings with their culturally organized environments. Valsiner examines reasons for the slow and nonlinear progress of ideas in psychology as a science at the border of natural and social sciences. Why is that intellectual progress occurs in different countries at different times? Most responses are self-serving blinders for presenting science as a given rather than understanding it as a deeply human experience. For Valsiner, scientific knowledge is cultural at its core. Major changes have occurred in contemporary sciences--collective authorship, fragmentation of knowledge into small, quickly published (and equally quickly retractable) journal articles, and the counting of numbers of such articles by institutions as if that is a measure of "scientific productivity." Scientists are inherently ambivalent about the benefit of these changes for the actual development of knowledge. There is a gradual "takeover" of the domain of scientific knowledge creation by other social institutions with vested interests in defending and promoting knowledge that serves their social interests. Sciences are entering into a new form of social servitude.
Constructing the Subject traces the history of psychological research methodology from the nineteenth century to the emergence of currently favored styles of research in the second quarter of the twentieth century. Kurt Danziger considers methodology to be a kind of social practice rather than simply a matter of technique. Therefore his historical analysis is primarily concerned with such topics as the development of the social structure of the research relationship between experimenters and their subjects, as well as the role of the methodology in the relationship of investigators to each other in a wider social context. The book begins with a historical discussion of introspection as a research practice and proceeds to an analysis of diverging styles of psychological investigation. There is an extensive exploration of the role of quantification and statistics in the historical development of psychological research. The influence of the social context on research practice is illustrated by a comparison of American and German developments, especially in the field of personality research. In this analysis, psychology is treated less as a body of facts or theories than a particular set of social activities intended to produce something that counts as psychological knowledge under certain historical conditions. This perspective means that the historical analysis has important consequences for a critical understanding of psychological methodology in general.
This concise reference serves as a companion to traditional research texts by focusing on such essentials as model construction, robust methodologies and defending a compelling hypothesis. Designed to wean Master's and doctorate-level students as well as new researchers from their comfort zones, the book challenges readers to engage in multi-method approaches to answering multidisciplinary questions. The result is a step-by-step framework for producing well-organized, credible papers based on rigorous, error-free data. The text begins with a brief grounding in the intellectual attitude and logical stance that underlie good research and how they relate to steps such as refining a topic, creating workable models and building the right amount of complexity. Accessible examples from psychology and business help readers grasp the fine points of observations, interviewing, simulations, interpreting and finalizing data and presenting results. Fleshed out with figures, tables, key terms, tips, and questions, this book acts as both a friendly lecturer and a multilevel reality check.
The creation of this book stems largely from the current centennial cele bration of the founding in Leipzig of Wundt's psychological laboratory. Wundt is acknowledged by many as one of the principal founders of experimental psychology. His laboratory, his journal, and his students were all influential in the transmission of the new psychology from Germany to all parts of the world. Nevertheless, until recently, psychol ogists and historians of science hardly recognized the scope and breadth of Wundt's influence, not to mention his contributions.! It was first through E. B. Titchener, and then through Titchener's student, E. G. Boring, that psychology got to know the somewhat biased and distorted picture of this great German psychologist. The picture painted by Titch ener and Boring was unquestionably the way they saw him, and the way they wished to use him as a part of the scientific psychological Zeitgeist of their time.
An examination of children’s causal reasoning capacities and how those capacities serve as the foundation of their scientific thinking. Young children have remarkable capacities for causal reasoning, which are part of the foundation of their scientific thinking abilities. In Constructing Science, Deena Weisberg and David Sobel trace the ways that young children’s sophisticated causal reasoning abilities combine with other cognitive, metacognitive, and social factors to develop into a more mature set of scientific thinking abilities. Conceptualizing scientific thinking as the suite of skills that allows people to generate hypotheses, solve problems, and explain aspects of the world, Weisberg and Sobel argue that understanding how this capacity develops can offer insights into how we can become a more scientifically literate society. Investigating the development of causal reasoning and how it sets the stage for scientific thinking in the elementary school years and beyond, Weisberg and Sobel outline a framework for understanding how children represent and learn causal knowledge and identify key variables that differ between causal reasoning and scientific thinking. They present empirical studies suggesting ways to bridge the gap between causal reasoning and scientific thinking, focusing on two factors: contextualization and metacognitive thinking abilities. Finally, they examine children’s explicit understanding of such concepts as science, learning, play, and teaching.
The social psychology of science is a compelling new area of study whose shape is still emerging. This erudite and innovative book outlines a theoretical and methodological agenda for this new field, and bridges the gap between the individually focused aspects of psychology and the sociological elements of science studies. Presenting a side of social psychology that, until now, has received almost no attention in the social sciences literature, this volume offers the first detailed and comprehensive study of the social psychology of science, complete with a large number of empirical and theoretical examples. The volume's introductory section provides a detailed analysis of how modern social psychology might apply to the study of science. Chapters show how to analyze science in terms of social cognition, attribution theory, attitudes and attitude change, social motivation, social influence and social conformity, and intergroup relations, weaving extensive illustrations from the science studies literature into the theoretical analysis. The nature and role of experimentation are discussed, as are metaanalytic methods for summarizing the results of multiple studies. Ways to facilitate the generalization of causal inferences from experimental work are also examined. The book focuses on such topics as interactions among small groups of scientists, and the impact of social motivation, influence, and conformity on scientific work. Also covered are scientists' responses to ethical issues in research, differences in cognitive style distribution, creativity in research and development, and the sociologists's view of the social psychology of science and technology. In addition, the book provides two annotated bibliographies, one on the philosophy of science and the other on social psychology, to guide readers in both disciplines to salient recent works. Valuable to the entire science studies community, this text will be of special interest to philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, and historians of science interested in the nature of knowledge development in science. Because of its novel application of social psychological theories and methods, this book will be useful as a primary text or a secondary text in courses on science studies in psychology, sociology, or philosophy departments.
The 2nd edition of Historical and Conceptual issues in Psychology offers a lively and engaging introduction to the main issues underlying the emergence and continuing evolution of psychology.
