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/
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