How Psychology Lost Its Mind.

Inventing Human ScienceEighteenth-Century Domains, 1995

Psychology considered as a natural science began as Aristotelian "physics" or "natural philosophy" of the soul. C. Wolff placed psychology under metaphysics, coordinate with cosmology. Near the middle of the eighteenth century, Krueger, Godart, and Bonnet proposed approaching the mind with the techniques of the new natural science. At nearly the same time, Scottish thinkers placed psychology within moral philosophy, but distinguished its "physical" laws from properly moral laws (for guiding conduct). British and French visual theorists developed mathematically precise theories of size and distance perception; they created instruments to test these theories and to measure visual phenomena such as the duration of visual impressions. By the end of the century there was a flourishing discipline of empirical psychology in Germany, with professorships, textbooks, and journals. The practitioners of empirical psychology at this time typically were dualists who included mental phenomena within nature.

Biology and Philosophy, 1988

Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice, 2016

I examine some of the key scientific precommitments of modern psychology, and argue that their adoption has the unintended consequence of rendering a purely psychological analysis of mind indistinguishable from a purely biological treatment. And, because these precommitments sanction an "authority of the biological," explanation of phenomena traditionally considered the purview of psychological analysis is fully subsumed under the biological. I next evaluate the epistemic warrant of these precommitments and suggest that there are good reasons to question their applicability to psychological science. I conclude that experiential aspects of reality (reflected in mental construct terms such as memory, belief, thought, and desire) give us reason to remain open to the need for psychological explanation in the treatment of mind.

Integrative psychological & behavioral science, 2018

The turn of qualitative inquiry suggests a more open, plural conception of psychology than just the science of the mind and behavior as it is most commonly defined. Historical, ontological and epistemological binding of this conception of psychology to the positivist method of natural science may have exhausted its possibilities, and after having contributed to its prestige as a science, has now become an obstacle. It is proposed that psychology be reconceived as a science of subject and comportment in the framework of a contextual hermeneutic, social, human behavioral science. Thus, without rejecting quantitative inquiry, psychology recovers territory left aside like introspection and pre-reflective self-awareness, and reconnects with traditions marginalized from the main stream. From this perspective psychology might also recover its credibility as a human science in view of current skepticism.

hardcover); ISBN 978-0-203-87931-3 (e-book). $190.00

Journal of Clinical Psychology, 2004

Psychology," like many abstract terms, is difficult to define precisely. Henriques' (this issue, pp. 1207-1221) argument that psychology, though unified and coherent, actually spans two realms-psychological formalism ("the science of mind," this issue, p. 1211) and human psychology ("the science of human behavior at the individual level," this issue, p. 1208)seems likely to improve the clarity of the concept. The strongest contribution of his analysis may be its placing "psychology" in the larger conceptual framework of the Tree of Knowledge taxonomy.

Annual Review of Psychology, 2013

When we look at an ordinary textbook of history of psychology, we read that the history of the discipline begins in the 19th century, usually with Wundt – sometimes with Fechner, seldom with Herbar; and that before that there was the long philosophical past, Bacon, Descartes, and Locke. Sometimes we find some mention of the Greek philosophy, but between Aristotle and the philosophers of the 16th century we have only the dark. In my opinion, things are different. Beginning with the last quarter of the 16th century, psychology defines itself as a distinct field of scientific knowledge, as a branch of the physics, apt to study not only the lower parts of the soul (vegetative and sensitive), but also the higher ones (intellective soul), reserved in the scholastic tradition to metaphysics. This happened in a specific field of the philosophical inquiry, the Ramism, with Freigius (1575). He printed the word psychologia as the label of this new domain of knowledge for the first time. (The w...

A Companion to the History of American Science, 2015

We should not forget the power of the laboratory itself to shape a discipline and perpetuate certain ways of knowing. Labs are assemblages of equipment and trained personnel, coordinated in specific ways to ask very particular questions of the world. They attract funding (to the lab and the university), if the lab produces reliable results; and this selective process in turn shapes the sorts of future questions that can be reliably asked and answered. In this way labs exercise both a catalytic and normalizing function over the field (Kuhn, 1996, 23-42). They garner funds and grow the profession but also direct research with increasing inertia in particular directions. They inherit their ways of working from other practitioners past and present (mentors, colleagues and competitors), and are moreover symbols of the growth and power of the discipline (Capshew, 1992, 132). And while laboratories seem on the one hand to be the pinnacle of objective science--highly controlled, hermetically closed spaces, magic-carpet-fact-generators that float above the din and disorder of culture—they in fact import whole worldviews and systems of assumptions that become a tacit part of their everyday functioning. Latour has remarked in this regard that “no one can say where the laboratory is and where the society is” (Latour, 1983, 154). For this reason--the porous boundaries between lab and society--we also should not fail to take note of how psychology’s rapid emergence as a laboratory science in the US coincided with a particularly volatile period of industrial growth and urbanization in US history known as the Progressive Era. Thus psychology was emerging as a laboratory science in the United States right when the cultural value of science and the scientific expert were dramatically on the rise. Psychologists felt they could offer powerful solutions to many of these social problems, but first they had to complete the reformation of psychology itself. Psychology had to be pried once and for all from the hands of philosophy and allowed to stand confidently alongside biology, chemistry and physics as a natural science in its own right. But making psychology amenable to laboratory study meant turning away from the more subjective, noetic qualities of mind, and instead focusing on the quantifiable, observable aspects of behavior.