Christopher Green | York University (original) (raw)
Books by Christopher Green
Although sport psychology did not fully mature as a recognized discipline until the 1960s, pionee... more Although sport psychology did not fully mature as a recognized discipline until the 1960s, pioneering psychologists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, making greater use of empirical research methodologies, sought to understand mental factors that affect athletic performance. Though the psychologists behind the studies described here worked independently of one another and charted their own distinct courses of inquiry, their works, taken together, provided the corpus of precedents and foundations on which the modern field of sport psychology was built. The essays collected in this volume tell the stories not only of these psychologists and their subjects but of the social and academic context that surrounded them, shaping and being shaped by their ideas.
The modern view of the mind is the result of thousands of years of thought, discussion, and exper... more The modern view of the mind is the result of thousands of years of thought, discussion, and experimentation. This volume examines how the foundations of this concept were laid in the ancient world, focusing on the role of ^Ipsyche^R in the thought of the most influential philosophers, poets, and physicians from archaic Greece to the fall of Rome. The authors show how the various processes we now group together under the general rubric psychology—such as thought, emotion, desire, and will—began as relatively disparate parts of the Greek conceptual scheme, only converging gradually over the course of centuries into what we now call mind. By reconstructing what the ancient Greeks and Romans understood by terms such as psyche, phrenes, and nous, this survey of the early development of psychological thought highlights the legacies of their accounts, which can still be found embedded in modern psychological assumptions.
Table of Contents:
* Introduction
Early Greek Poetry of Mind and Soul
The Emergence of Philosophy
The Classical Greek Philosophy of Mind and Soul
Aristotle's Account of the Psychê
Hellenistic Philosophy of the Mind and Soul
The Medical Tradition
The Roman Empire: Christianity and Neoplatonism
At the end of the 18th century, leading minds of the age believed that psychology was inherently ... more At the end of the 18th century, leading minds of the age believed that psychology was inherently constrained from rising to the level of a natural science. By the beginning of the 20th century, scientific psychology was pervasive. How did this change occur so quickly? The Transformation of Psychology: Influences of 19th-Century Philosophy, Technology, and Natural Science reveals some of the intellectual, social, technological, and institutional currents and practices that were commonplace during the 19th century that fostered a radical reappraisal of the scientific possibilities for psychology.
Whereas the "standard" historical narrative focuses on Fechner's psychophysics, Helmholtz's physiology, and Wundt's physiological psychology, this volume explores a collection of diverse areas of study that attempted to render psychology scientific. Readers will encounter many fascinating currents of thought, from eugenics and mathematical beauty to prognosticators and phrenologists in this rich and insightful book.
Table of Contents
Contributors
Acknowledgments
Introduction
—Christopher D. Green, Marlene Shore, and Thomas Teo
1. Eugenics and Other Victorian "Secular Religions"
—Raymond E. Fancher
2. Practical Phrenology as Psychological Counseling in the 19th Century United States
—Michael M. Sokal
3. Sealing Off the Discipline: William Wundt and the Psychology of Memory
—Kurt Danziger
4. Psychology and Memory in the Midst of Change: The Social Concerns of Late-19th-Century North American Psychologists
—Marlene Shore
5. The Psychology of Mathematical Beauty in the 19th Century: The Golden Section
—John G. Benjafield
6. Cause Into Function: Ernst Mach and the Reconstruction of Explanation in Psychology
—Andrew S. Winston
7. Charles Babbage, the Analytical Engine, and the Possibility of a 19th-Century Cognitive Science
—Christopher D. Green
8. Instincts and Instruments
—Katharine Anderson
9. Philosophic Doubts About Psychology as a Natural Science
—Charles W. Tolman
10. Karl Marx and Wilhelm Dilthey on the Socio–Historical Conceptualization of the Mind
—Thomas Teo
11. Early Development and Psychology: Genetic and Embryological Influences, 1880–1920
—Fredric Weizmann
Index
About the Editors
Papers by Christopher Green
Canadian Psychology, Aug 1, 2018
Using a computer program called "Statcheck," a 2016 digital survey of several prestigious America... more Using a computer program called "Statcheck," a 2016 digital survey of several prestigious American and European psychology journals showed that the p-values reported in research articles failed to agree with the corresponding test statistics (e.g., F, t, χ 2) at surprisingly high rates: nearly half of all articles contained at least one such error, as did about 10% of all null hypothesis significance tests. We investigated whether this problem was present in Canadian psychology journals and, if so, at what frequency. We discovered similar rates of p-value errors in Canadian journals over the past 30 years. However, we also noticed, a large number of typographical errors in the electronic versions of the articles. When we hand corrected a sample of our articles, the per-article error rate remained about the same, but the per test rate of errors dropped to 6.3%. We recommend that, in future, journals include explicit checks of statistics in their editorial processes.
History of Psychology, 2000
The British Journal of Aesthetics, 2001
Canadian Psychology / Psychologie canadienne, 2022
New Ideas in Psychology, 2017
Psychology has a long tradition of creating lists of the most eminent members of the discipline. ... more Psychology has a long tradition of creating lists of the most eminent members of the discipline. Such lists are typically created under the assumption that there is a general answer to the question of eminence, covering all psychologists everywhere. We wondered, however, to what degree perceived eminence depends on the individual's particular demographic situation. Specifically, are different historical figures "eminent" to people of different genders, ages, and geographical locations? We tested this by asking a wide swath of people e mostly psychologists e who they think has had the most impact on the discipline of psychology, historically. We used an online game in which "players" were shown a series of pairs of significant figures from psychology's past and asked to select which had had the greater impact. We then converted these selections into a ranked list using the Elo rating system. Although our overall rankings had considerable similarity with traditional efforts, we also found that rankings differed markedly among different demographic groups, undermining the assumption of a general measure of eminence that is valid for all.
125 years of the American Psychological Association., 2018
The American Psychological Association (APA) began 125 years ago as a small club of a few dozen m... more The American Psychological Association (APA) began 125 years ago as a small club of a few dozen members in the parlor of its founder, G. Stanley Hall. In the decades since, it has faced many difficulties and even a few existential crises. Originally a scientific society, it spent the decades between the world wars figuring out how to accommodate the growing community of applied psychologists while still retaining and enhancing its scientific reputation. After World War II, with an expanded mandate, it developed formal training models for clinical psychologists and became an important player in legal cases pertaining to civil rights and other social justice issues. With practitioners taking an ever-greater role in the governance of the organization in the late 1970s, and the financial viability of the association in doubt in the 1980s, many psychological scientists felt the need to create a separate organization for themselves. The 1990s and early 2000s brought more challenges: declining divisional memberships; a legal dispute over fees with practitioners; and a serious upheaval over the APA Board of Directors’ cooperation with governmental defense and intelligence agencies during the “war on terror.” These clashes appear to have precipitated a decline in the association’s membership for the first time in its history. The APA has faced many storms over its century-and-a-quarter, but has, thus far, always ultimately found a way forward for itself, for its members, and for the wider discipline of psychology. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved
Journal of the history of the behavioral sciences, 2014
In order to better understand the broader trends and points of contention in early American psych... more In order to better understand the broader trends and points of contention in early American psychology, it is conventional to organize the relevant material in terms of "schools" of psychology-structuralism, functionalism, etc. Although not without value, this scheme marginalizes many otherwise significant figures, and tends to exclude a large number of secondary, but interesting, individuals. In an effort to address these problems, we grouped all the articles that appeared in the second and third decades of Psychological Review into five-year blocks, and then cluster analyzed each block by the articles' verbal similarity to each other. This resulted in a number of significant intellectual "genres" of psychology that are ignored by the usual "schools" taxonomy. It also made…
The Future of the Cognitive Revolution, 1997
Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 2003
Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 2013
Traditionally, American psychology at the turn of the twentieth century has been framed as a comp... more Traditionally, American psychology at the turn of the twentieth century has been framed as a competition among a number of "schools": structuralism, functionalism, behaviorism, etc. But this is only one way in which the "structure" of the discipline can be conceived. Most psychologists did not belong to a particular school, but they still worked within loose intellectual communities, and so their work was part of an implicit psychological "genre," if not a formalized…
History of Psychology, 2005
In the 1830s, Charles Babbage worked on a mechanical computer he dubbed the Analytical Engine. Al... more In the 1830s, Charles Babbage worked on a mechanical computer he dubbed the Analytical Engine. Although some people around Babbage described his invention as though it had authentic mental powers, Babbage refrained from making such claims. He does not, however, seem to have discouraged those he worked with from mooting the idea publicly. This article investigates whether (1) the Analytical Engine was the focus of a covert research program into the mechanism of mentality; (2) Babbage opposed the idea that the Analytical Engine had mental powers but allowed his colleagues to speculate as they saw fit; or (3) Babbage believed such claims to be fanciful, but cleverly used the publicity they engendered to draw public and political attention to his project. Charles Babbage (1791-1871) was the inventor of a number of mechanical devices that were intended to compute mathematical and logical functions. 1 The two most famous are the Difference Engine, dating from the 1820s, which was to have calculated and printed basic mathematical tables of various kinds, and the Analytical Engine. The Analytical Engine, for which designs began in the mid-1830s, was a much more ambitious project because it was to have employed then-recent developments in abstract symbolic algebra, thereby extending its range into the logical realm rather than being limited to the strictly mathematical. Neither machine was ever completed, though Babbage built two small models of the Difference Engine. For many decades now, it has not been uncommon to find Charles Babbage named in both popular and scholarly publications as one of the primary "forefathers" of computer science. This trend began with the public pronouncements of Howard Aiken, the designer of the Harvard Mark I "computer" in the 1940s, who repeatedly paid homage to Babbage and claimed to have been the one to finally fulfill "Babbage's Dream," as he often put it. More recently, there has been a trend to cite Babbage as a father of compu
Journal of the history of the behavioral sciences, Jan 10, 2016
There are many different ways to assess the significance of historical figures. Often we look at ... more There are many different ways to assess the significance of historical figures. Often we look at the influence of their writings, or at the important offices they held with disciplinary institutions such as universities, journals, and scholarly societies. In this study, however, we took a novel approach: we took the complete memberships, ca. 1900, of four organizations-the American Psychological Association, the Western Philosophical Association, the American Philosophical Association, and the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology-and visualized them as a network. We then identified individuals who "bridged" between two or more of these groups and considered what might be termed their "centrality" to the psychological-philosophical community of their time. First, we examined these figures qualitatively, briefly describing their lives and careers. Then we approached the problem mathematically, considering several alternative technical realizations of &quo...
History of Psychology, 2004
's philosophy professor, passed away suddenly while in the midst of a public debate over the meri... more 's philosophy professor, passed away suddenly while in the midst of a public debate over the merits of hiring Canadians in preference to American and British applicants for faculty positions. As a result, the process of replacing Young turned into a continuation of that argument, becoming quite vociferous and involving the popular press and the Ontario government. This article examines the intellectual, political, and personal dynamics at work in the battle over Young's replacement and its eventual resolution. The outcome would have an impact on both the Canadian intellectual scene and the development of experimental psychology in North America. In 1889 the University of Toronto was looking to hire a new professor of philosophy. The normally straightforward process of making a university appointment, however, rapidly descended into an unseemly public battle involving not just university administrators, but also the highest levels of the Ontario government, the popular press, and the population of the city at large. The debate was not pitched solely, or even primarily, at the level of intellectual issues, but became intertwined with contentious popular questions of nationalism, religion, and the proper place of science in public education. The impact of the choice ultimately made would reverberate not only through the university and through Canada's broader educational establishment for decades to come but, because it involved James Mark Baldwin-a man in the process of becoming one of the most prominent figures in the study of the mind-it also rippled through the nascent discipline of experimental psychology, just then gathering steam in the United States of America. The events described here have been outlined before (see, e.g.
History of psychology, 2015
This study investigated the intellectual structure of early American psychology by generating 3 n... more This study investigated the intellectual structure of early American psychology by generating 3 networks that collectively included every substantive article published in Psychological Review during the 15-year period from the journal's start in 1894 until 1908. The networks were laid out so that articles with strongly correlated vocabularies were positioned close to each other spatially. Then, we identified distinct research communities by locating and interpreting article clusters within the networks. We found that, from the first 5-year time block to the second, psychological specialties rapidly differentiated themselves from each other. Between the second and third 5-year time blocks, however, the number of specialties shrunk. We discuss the degree to which this shift may have been attributable either to a change in the journal's editorship in 1904, or to a broader crisis of confidence, beginning that same year, in the use of "consciousness" as the discipline&#...
Child development, Jan 31, 2015
Self-regulation is of interest both to psychologists and to teachers. But what the word means is ... more Self-regulation is of interest both to psychologists and to teachers. But what the word means is unclear. To define it precisely, two studies examined the American Psychological Association's system of controlled vocabulary-specifically, the 447 associated terms it presents-and used techniques from the Digital Humanities to identify 88 closely related concepts and six broad conceptual clusters. The resulting analyses show how similar ideas are interrelated: self-control, self-management, self-observation, learning, social behavior, and the personality constructs related to self-monitoring. A full-color network map locates these concepts and clusters relative to each other. It also highlights some of the interests of different audiences, which can be described heuristically using two axes that have been labeled abstract versus practical and self-oriented versus other-oriented.
Theory & Psychology, 1992
Unfortunately, this story has fairly little to do with operational definitions as they were propo... more Unfortunately, this story has fairly little to do with operational definitions as they were proposed in the 1920s, and, further, there is fairly little in the way of rigorous argument to recommend it. Nevertheless, it has been propagated from one generation of psychologists to the next ...
Although sport psychology did not fully mature as a recognized discipline until the 1960s, pionee... more Although sport psychology did not fully mature as a recognized discipline until the 1960s, pioneering psychologists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, making greater use of empirical research methodologies, sought to understand mental factors that affect athletic performance. Though the psychologists behind the studies described here worked independently of one another and charted their own distinct courses of inquiry, their works, taken together, provided the corpus of precedents and foundations on which the modern field of sport psychology was built. The essays collected in this volume tell the stories not only of these psychologists and their subjects but of the social and academic context that surrounded them, shaping and being shaped by their ideas.
The modern view of the mind is the result of thousands of years of thought, discussion, and exper... more The modern view of the mind is the result of thousands of years of thought, discussion, and experimentation. This volume examines how the foundations of this concept were laid in the ancient world, focusing on the role of ^Ipsyche^R in the thought of the most influential philosophers, poets, and physicians from archaic Greece to the fall of Rome. The authors show how the various processes we now group together under the general rubric psychology—such as thought, emotion, desire, and will—began as relatively disparate parts of the Greek conceptual scheme, only converging gradually over the course of centuries into what we now call mind. By reconstructing what the ancient Greeks and Romans understood by terms such as psyche, phrenes, and nous, this survey of the early development of psychological thought highlights the legacies of their accounts, which can still be found embedded in modern psychological assumptions.
Table of Contents:
* Introduction
Early Greek Poetry of Mind and Soul
The Emergence of Philosophy
The Classical Greek Philosophy of Mind and Soul
Aristotle's Account of the Psychê
Hellenistic Philosophy of the Mind and Soul
The Medical Tradition
The Roman Empire: Christianity and Neoplatonism
At the end of the 18th century, leading minds of the age believed that psychology was inherently ... more At the end of the 18th century, leading minds of the age believed that psychology was inherently constrained from rising to the level of a natural science. By the beginning of the 20th century, scientific psychology was pervasive. How did this change occur so quickly? The Transformation of Psychology: Influences of 19th-Century Philosophy, Technology, and Natural Science reveals some of the intellectual, social, technological, and institutional currents and practices that were commonplace during the 19th century that fostered a radical reappraisal of the scientific possibilities for psychology.
Whereas the "standard" historical narrative focuses on Fechner's psychophysics, Helmholtz's physiology, and Wundt's physiological psychology, this volume explores a collection of diverse areas of study that attempted to render psychology scientific. Readers will encounter many fascinating currents of thought, from eugenics and mathematical beauty to prognosticators and phrenologists in this rich and insightful book.
Table of Contents
Contributors
Acknowledgments
Introduction
—Christopher D. Green, Marlene Shore, and Thomas Teo
1. Eugenics and Other Victorian "Secular Religions"
—Raymond E. Fancher
2. Practical Phrenology as Psychological Counseling in the 19th Century United States
—Michael M. Sokal
3. Sealing Off the Discipline: William Wundt and the Psychology of Memory
—Kurt Danziger
4. Psychology and Memory in the Midst of Change: The Social Concerns of Late-19th-Century North American Psychologists
—Marlene Shore
5. The Psychology of Mathematical Beauty in the 19th Century: The Golden Section
—John G. Benjafield
6. Cause Into Function: Ernst Mach and the Reconstruction of Explanation in Psychology
—Andrew S. Winston
7. Charles Babbage, the Analytical Engine, and the Possibility of a 19th-Century Cognitive Science
—Christopher D. Green
8. Instincts and Instruments
—Katharine Anderson
9. Philosophic Doubts About Psychology as a Natural Science
—Charles W. Tolman
10. Karl Marx and Wilhelm Dilthey on the Socio–Historical Conceptualization of the Mind
—Thomas Teo
11. Early Development and Psychology: Genetic and Embryological Influences, 1880–1920
—Fredric Weizmann
Index
About the Editors
Canadian Psychology, Aug 1, 2018
Using a computer program called "Statcheck," a 2016 digital survey of several prestigious America... more Using a computer program called "Statcheck," a 2016 digital survey of several prestigious American and European psychology journals showed that the p-values reported in research articles failed to agree with the corresponding test statistics (e.g., F, t, χ 2) at surprisingly high rates: nearly half of all articles contained at least one such error, as did about 10% of all null hypothesis significance tests. We investigated whether this problem was present in Canadian psychology journals and, if so, at what frequency. We discovered similar rates of p-value errors in Canadian journals over the past 30 years. However, we also noticed, a large number of typographical errors in the electronic versions of the articles. When we hand corrected a sample of our articles, the per-article error rate remained about the same, but the per test rate of errors dropped to 6.3%. We recommend that, in future, journals include explicit checks of statistics in their editorial processes.
History of Psychology, 2000
The British Journal of Aesthetics, 2001
Canadian Psychology / Psychologie canadienne, 2022
New Ideas in Psychology, 2017
Psychology has a long tradition of creating lists of the most eminent members of the discipline. ... more Psychology has a long tradition of creating lists of the most eminent members of the discipline. Such lists are typically created under the assumption that there is a general answer to the question of eminence, covering all psychologists everywhere. We wondered, however, to what degree perceived eminence depends on the individual's particular demographic situation. Specifically, are different historical figures "eminent" to people of different genders, ages, and geographical locations? We tested this by asking a wide swath of people e mostly psychologists e who they think has had the most impact on the discipline of psychology, historically. We used an online game in which "players" were shown a series of pairs of significant figures from psychology's past and asked to select which had had the greater impact. We then converted these selections into a ranked list using the Elo rating system. Although our overall rankings had considerable similarity with traditional efforts, we also found that rankings differed markedly among different demographic groups, undermining the assumption of a general measure of eminence that is valid for all.
125 years of the American Psychological Association., 2018
The American Psychological Association (APA) began 125 years ago as a small club of a few dozen m... more The American Psychological Association (APA) began 125 years ago as a small club of a few dozen members in the parlor of its founder, G. Stanley Hall. In the decades since, it has faced many difficulties and even a few existential crises. Originally a scientific society, it spent the decades between the world wars figuring out how to accommodate the growing community of applied psychologists while still retaining and enhancing its scientific reputation. After World War II, with an expanded mandate, it developed formal training models for clinical psychologists and became an important player in legal cases pertaining to civil rights and other social justice issues. With practitioners taking an ever-greater role in the governance of the organization in the late 1970s, and the financial viability of the association in doubt in the 1980s, many psychological scientists felt the need to create a separate organization for themselves. The 1990s and early 2000s brought more challenges: declining divisional memberships; a legal dispute over fees with practitioners; and a serious upheaval over the APA Board of Directors’ cooperation with governmental defense and intelligence agencies during the “war on terror.” These clashes appear to have precipitated a decline in the association’s membership for the first time in its history. The APA has faced many storms over its century-and-a-quarter, but has, thus far, always ultimately found a way forward for itself, for its members, and for the wider discipline of psychology. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved
Journal of the history of the behavioral sciences, 2014
In order to better understand the broader trends and points of contention in early American psych... more In order to better understand the broader trends and points of contention in early American psychology, it is conventional to organize the relevant material in terms of "schools" of psychology-structuralism, functionalism, etc. Although not without value, this scheme marginalizes many otherwise significant figures, and tends to exclude a large number of secondary, but interesting, individuals. In an effort to address these problems, we grouped all the articles that appeared in the second and third decades of Psychological Review into five-year blocks, and then cluster analyzed each block by the articles' verbal similarity to each other. This resulted in a number of significant intellectual "genres" of psychology that are ignored by the usual "schools" taxonomy. It also made…
The Future of the Cognitive Revolution, 1997
Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 2003
Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 2013
Traditionally, American psychology at the turn of the twentieth century has been framed as a comp... more Traditionally, American psychology at the turn of the twentieth century has been framed as a competition among a number of "schools": structuralism, functionalism, behaviorism, etc. But this is only one way in which the "structure" of the discipline can be conceived. Most psychologists did not belong to a particular school, but they still worked within loose intellectual communities, and so their work was part of an implicit psychological "genre," if not a formalized…
History of Psychology, 2005
In the 1830s, Charles Babbage worked on a mechanical computer he dubbed the Analytical Engine. Al... more In the 1830s, Charles Babbage worked on a mechanical computer he dubbed the Analytical Engine. Although some people around Babbage described his invention as though it had authentic mental powers, Babbage refrained from making such claims. He does not, however, seem to have discouraged those he worked with from mooting the idea publicly. This article investigates whether (1) the Analytical Engine was the focus of a covert research program into the mechanism of mentality; (2) Babbage opposed the idea that the Analytical Engine had mental powers but allowed his colleagues to speculate as they saw fit; or (3) Babbage believed such claims to be fanciful, but cleverly used the publicity they engendered to draw public and political attention to his project. Charles Babbage (1791-1871) was the inventor of a number of mechanical devices that were intended to compute mathematical and logical functions. 1 The two most famous are the Difference Engine, dating from the 1820s, which was to have calculated and printed basic mathematical tables of various kinds, and the Analytical Engine. The Analytical Engine, for which designs began in the mid-1830s, was a much more ambitious project because it was to have employed then-recent developments in abstract symbolic algebra, thereby extending its range into the logical realm rather than being limited to the strictly mathematical. Neither machine was ever completed, though Babbage built two small models of the Difference Engine. For many decades now, it has not been uncommon to find Charles Babbage named in both popular and scholarly publications as one of the primary "forefathers" of computer science. This trend began with the public pronouncements of Howard Aiken, the designer of the Harvard Mark I "computer" in the 1940s, who repeatedly paid homage to Babbage and claimed to have been the one to finally fulfill "Babbage's Dream," as he often put it. More recently, there has been a trend to cite Babbage as a father of compu
Journal of the history of the behavioral sciences, Jan 10, 2016
There are many different ways to assess the significance of historical figures. Often we look at ... more There are many different ways to assess the significance of historical figures. Often we look at the influence of their writings, or at the important offices they held with disciplinary institutions such as universities, journals, and scholarly societies. In this study, however, we took a novel approach: we took the complete memberships, ca. 1900, of four organizations-the American Psychological Association, the Western Philosophical Association, the American Philosophical Association, and the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology-and visualized them as a network. We then identified individuals who "bridged" between two or more of these groups and considered what might be termed their "centrality" to the psychological-philosophical community of their time. First, we examined these figures qualitatively, briefly describing their lives and careers. Then we approached the problem mathematically, considering several alternative technical realizations of &quo...
History of Psychology, 2004
's philosophy professor, passed away suddenly while in the midst of a public debate over the meri... more 's philosophy professor, passed away suddenly while in the midst of a public debate over the merits of hiring Canadians in preference to American and British applicants for faculty positions. As a result, the process of replacing Young turned into a continuation of that argument, becoming quite vociferous and involving the popular press and the Ontario government. This article examines the intellectual, political, and personal dynamics at work in the battle over Young's replacement and its eventual resolution. The outcome would have an impact on both the Canadian intellectual scene and the development of experimental psychology in North America. In 1889 the University of Toronto was looking to hire a new professor of philosophy. The normally straightforward process of making a university appointment, however, rapidly descended into an unseemly public battle involving not just university administrators, but also the highest levels of the Ontario government, the popular press, and the population of the city at large. The debate was not pitched solely, or even primarily, at the level of intellectual issues, but became intertwined with contentious popular questions of nationalism, religion, and the proper place of science in public education. The impact of the choice ultimately made would reverberate not only through the university and through Canada's broader educational establishment for decades to come but, because it involved James Mark Baldwin-a man in the process of becoming one of the most prominent figures in the study of the mind-it also rippled through the nascent discipline of experimental psychology, just then gathering steam in the United States of America. The events described here have been outlined before (see, e.g.
History of psychology, 2015
This study investigated the intellectual structure of early American psychology by generating 3 n... more This study investigated the intellectual structure of early American psychology by generating 3 networks that collectively included every substantive article published in Psychological Review during the 15-year period from the journal's start in 1894 until 1908. The networks were laid out so that articles with strongly correlated vocabularies were positioned close to each other spatially. Then, we identified distinct research communities by locating and interpreting article clusters within the networks. We found that, from the first 5-year time block to the second, psychological specialties rapidly differentiated themselves from each other. Between the second and third 5-year time blocks, however, the number of specialties shrunk. We discuss the degree to which this shift may have been attributable either to a change in the journal's editorship in 1904, or to a broader crisis of confidence, beginning that same year, in the use of "consciousness" as the discipline&#...
Child development, Jan 31, 2015
Self-regulation is of interest both to psychologists and to teachers. But what the word means is ... more Self-regulation is of interest both to psychologists and to teachers. But what the word means is unclear. To define it precisely, two studies examined the American Psychological Association's system of controlled vocabulary-specifically, the 447 associated terms it presents-and used techniques from the Digital Humanities to identify 88 closely related concepts and six broad conceptual clusters. The resulting analyses show how similar ideas are interrelated: self-control, self-management, self-observation, learning, social behavior, and the personality constructs related to self-monitoring. A full-color network map locates these concepts and clusters relative to each other. It also highlights some of the interests of different audiences, which can be described heuristically using two axes that have been labeled abstract versus practical and self-oriented versus other-oriented.
Theory & Psychology, 1992
Unfortunately, this story has fairly little to do with operational definitions as they were propo... more Unfortunately, this story has fairly little to do with operational definitions as they were proposed in the 1920s, and, further, there is fairly little in the way of rigorous argument to recommend it. Nevertheless, it has been propagated from one generation of psychologists to the next ...
Isis, 2010
Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison&amp... more Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison's recent book on the history of scientific objectivity showed that, over the course of the nineteenth century, natural scientists of many stripes became intensely concerned with the issue of the distorting influence that their own subjectivities might be having on their observations and representations of nature. At very nearly the same time, experimental psychology arose specifically to investigate scientifically the nature and structure of subjective consciousness. Although Daston and Galison briefly discussed some basic psychological issues-especially the discovery of differences in human color perception-they did not strongly connect the widespread European concern with scientific objectivity to the rise of experimental psychology. This essay critically examines the theoretical and empirical activities of the experimental psychologist who most energetically strove to discover the structure of subjective conscious experience, Edward Bradford Titchener. Titchener's efforts to produce an objective study of subjectivity reveal important tensions in early experimental psychology and also serve to situate experimental psychology at the center of an important intellectual struggle that was being waged across the natural sciences in the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century.
The American Journal of Psychology, 2007
A third figure also vied for the position, although he was much less well known at the time: Gran... more A third figure also vied for the position, although he was much less well known at the time: Granville Stanley Hall. Through a series of unexpected circumstances, Hall ultimately won the professorship and then used it to leverage an extraordinary career that included his opening the first American research laboratory in psychology, establishing the American Journal of Psychology, becoming president of Clark University, founding the American Psychological Association, and profoundly affecting the character of developmental psychology in America.
The problem with many contemporary criticisms of Chomsky and linguistic nativism is that they are... more The problem with many contemporary criticisms of Chomsky and linguistic nativism is that they are based upon features of the theory that are no longer germane; aspects that have either been superseded by more adequate proposals, or that have been dropped altogether under the weight of contravening evidence. In this paper, rather than rehashing old debates that are voluminously documented elsewhere, we intend to focus on more recent developments. To this end, we have put a premium on references from the 1990s and the latter half of the 1980s. First, we will describe exactly what is now thought to be innate about language, and why it is thought to be innate rather than learned. Second, we will examine the evidence that many people take to be the greatest challenge to the nativist claim: ape language. Third, we will briefly consider how an innate language organ might have evolved. Fourth we will look at how an organism might communicate without benefit of the innate language structure ...