A Guided Science: History of Psychology in the Mirror of Its Making

ISBN-13: 9781412851916 / Angielski / Miękka / 2013 / 352 str.

Jaan Valsiner

Opis

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.

Spis treści

Preface
Introduction: What Kind of Knowledge—And for Whom?

Part I. Societies and Sciences: Presentations and Histories
1. The Eternal Freedom Movement of Ideas
2. Axiomatic Bases for Experiential (Empirical) Knowledge Construction
3. Objectivity and Social Forgetfulness
4. Pathways to Evidence: Negotiation of Knowledge between Its Producers and Consumers

Part II. The Mirror in the Making: Psychology as a Liminal Science
5. From Enlightenment to Struggle: Psychology and Philosophy in the Search of Wissenschaft
6. The Birth of a Troubled Wissenschaft: Emerging Psychology in Its German Context
7. Between Poetry and Science: Locating Geisteswissenschaft on the Map of Knowledge
8. Psychology in a Perpetual Crisis

Part III. Facing the Future—Transcending the Past
9. Learning from the Fate of Psychology
10. Pathways to Methodologies: Semiotics of Knowledge Construction
11. Globalization and Its Role in Science

General Conclusion: Science under the Influence: Guided Exploration of the Horizons of Knowledge

Bibliography

Index (Compiled by Maaris Raudsepp)

O autorze

Jaan Valsiner