All posts tagged science

Behaviorists as “slightly inebriated men”

January 4, 2008

Describing the shift in mainstream American psychology since William James, Joseph Gilbert writes,

Philosophical spectulation was, with considerable clatter, abandoned as the ultimate in unscientificism…. By the majestically immaterial phenomena of consciousness the Behaviorists were as embarrassed as a group of slightly inebriated men carrying the insensible form of one of their companions across a fashionable hotel lobby.

Academic criticism is usually more genteel, so I found that amusing. Especially since one of my professors was a colleague of B.F. Skinner.

This is from an article in the journal I’m studying, which tries to enlist the ghost of James for the fight between humanistic and behavioristic psychology — since, while the latter was empirical and anti-phenomenological, both James and the humanists embraced idiography and philosophical speculation.

(from “William James in retrospect: 1962″, J. of Humanistic Psych. II:1, Spring 1962, p. 93.)

Live-blogging my research paper

January 3, 2008

I’m writing a research paper on the humanistic psychology movement, due early next week. Specifically, it’s looking at the relationship of the early movement to “science,” which I’ll leave intentionally vague for now. To keep it manageable I’m restricting it to obviously relevant articles in the first 10 years of the movement’s flagship journal.

Blogging tidbits of my notes and drafts could be a colossal time-waster, but I think having an audience might keep me motivated. That’s the shame about papers written for a class — only one person gets to see your work.

For now, just a quote, from the first issue, which expresses one variation on the movement’s goal to be both holistic and scientific:

A truly humanistic psychology is an integration of the historical and contemporary data and theories of psychology…. the psychologist of man is suspicious when a collective psychologist claims that man is only a mechanistic stimulus-response organism. On the other hand, he is as suspicious when personalistic psychologists claim that man is only a personal being without an aspect that is measurable and without adjustment to a collectivity.

(Adrian van Kaam, “Humanistic psychology and culture,” J. of Humanistic Psych. I:1, spring 1961, p. 100)

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