Download Free Constructing Scientific Psychology Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Constructing Scientific Psychology and write the review.

Constructing Scientific Psychology is the first full-scale interpretation of the life and work of the major American neuropsychologist Karl Lashley that sets Lashley's creation of a laboratory-centered, decisively materialistic science of brain and behavior in its scientific and social contexts. The book places Lashley's neuropsychology at the heart of two controversies that polarized the sciences of mind and brain in the U.S. in the first half of the twentieth century.
Science as Psychology reveals the complexity and richness of rationality by demonstrating how social relationships, emotion, culture, and identity are implicated in the problem-solving practices of laboratory scientists. In this study, the authors gather and analyze interview and observational data from innovation-focused laboratories in the engineering sciences to show how the complex practices of laboratory research scientists provide rich psychological insights, and how a better understanding of science practice facilitates understanding of human beings more generally. The study focuses not on dismantling the rational core of scientific practice, but on illustrating how social, personal, and cognitive processes are intricately woven together in scientific thinking. The book is thus a contribution to science studies, the psychology of science, and general psychology.
An account that analyzes the dynamic reasoning processes implicated in a fundamental problem of creativity in science: how does genuine novelty emerge from existing representations? How do novel scientific concepts arise? In Creating Scientific Concepts, Nancy Nersessian seeks to answer this central but virtually unasked question in the problem of conceptual change. She argues that the popular image of novel concepts and profound insight bursting forth in a blinding flash of inspiration is mistaken. Instead, novel concepts are shown to arise out of the interplay of three factors: an attempt to solve specific problems; the use of conceptual, analytical, and material resources provided by the cognitive-social-cultural context of the problem; and dynamic processes of reasoning that extend ordinary cognition. Focusing on the third factor, Nersessian draws on cognitive science research and historical accounts of scientific practices to show how scientific and ordinary cognition lie on a continuum, and how problem-solving practices in one illuminate practices in the other. Her investigations of scientific practices show conceptual change as deriving from the use of analogies, imagistic representations, and thought experiments, integrated with experimental investigations and mathematical analyses. She presents a view of constructed models as hybrid objects, serving as intermediaries between targets and analogical sources in bootstrapping processes. Extending these results, she argues that these complex cognitive operations and structures are not mere aids to discovery, but that together they constitute a powerful form of reasoning—model-based reasoning—that generates novelty. This new approach to mental modeling and analogy, together with Nersessian's cognitive-historical approach, make Creating Scientific Concepts equally valuable to cognitive science and philosophy of science.
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.
Constructing the Subject traces the history of psychological research methodology from the nineteenth century to the emergence of currently favored styles of research in the second quarter of the twentieth century. Kurt Danziger considers methodology to be a kind of social practice rather than simply a matter of technique. Therefore his historical analysis is primarily concerned with such topics as the development of the social structure of the research relationship between experimenters and their subjects, as well as the role of the methodology in the relationship of investigators to each other in a wider social context. The book begins with a historical discussion of introspection as a research practice and proceeds to an analysis of diverging styles of psychological investigation. There is an extensive exploration of the role of quantification and statistics in the historical development of psychological research. The influence of the social context on research practice is illustrated by a comparison of American and German developments, especially in the field of personality research. In this analysis, psychology is treated less as a body of facts or theories than a particular set of social activities intended to produce something that counts as psychological knowledge under certain historical conditions. This perspective means that the historical analysis has important consequences for a critical understanding of psychological methodology in general.
In recent years an increasing dissatisfaction with methods and thinking in psychology as a science can be observed. The discipline is operating under the tension between the traditional quantitative and the new qualitative methodologies. New approaches emerge in different fields of psychology and education—each of them trying to go beyond limitations of the mainstream. These new approaches, however, tend to be “historically blind” – seemingly novel ideas have actually been common in some period in the history of psychology. Knowledge of historical trends in that context becomes crucial because analysis of historical changes in psychology is informative regarding the potential of “new/old and forgotten” approaches in the study of psyche. Some approaches in psychology disappeared due to inherent limitations of them; the others disappeared due to purely non-scientific reasons. And some new approaches were rejected long ago for well-justified scientific reasons. This book brings together contributions from leading scholars in different fields of psychology – cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, cultural psychology, methodology of psychology. Each of the contributors discusses methodological issues that were more thoroughly understood more than half a century ago than they are now. Overall, the contributions support the idea that in important ways 60 years old psychology was far ahead of the most recent trends in mainstream psychology.
The creation of this book stems largely from the current centennial cele bration of the founding in Leipzig of Wundt's psychological laboratory. Wundt is acknowledged by many as one of the principal founders of experimental psychology. His laboratory, his journal, and his students were all influential in the transmission of the new psychology from Germany to all parts of the world. Nevertheless, until recently, psychol ogists and historians of science hardly recognized the scope and breadth of Wundt's influence, not to mention his contributions.! It was first through E. B. Titchener, and then through Titchener's student, E. G. Boring, that psychology got to know the somewhat biased and distorted picture of this great German psychologist. The picture painted by Titch ener and Boring was unquestionably the way they saw him, and the way they wished to use him as a part of the scientific psychological Zeitgeist of their time.
An examination of children’s causal reasoning capacities and how those capacities serve as the foundation of their scientific thinking. Young children have remarkable capacities for causal reasoning, which are part of the foundation of their scientific thinking abilities. In Constructing Science, Deena Weisberg and David Sobel trace the ways that young children’s sophisticated causal reasoning abilities combine with other cognitive, metacognitive, and social factors to develop into a more mature set of scientific thinking abilities. Conceptualizing scientific thinking as the suite of skills that allows people to generate hypotheses, solve problems, and explain aspects of the world, Weisberg and Sobel argue that understanding how this capacity develops can offer insights into how we can become a more scientifically literate society. Investigating the development of causal reasoning and how it sets the stage for scientific thinking in the elementary school years and beyond, Weisberg and Sobel outline a framework for understanding how children represent and learn causal knowledge and identify key variables that differ between causal reasoning and scientific thinking. They present empirical studies suggesting ways to bridge the gap between causal reasoning and scientific thinking, focusing on two factors: contextualization and metacognitive thinking abilities. Finally, they examine children’s explicit understanding of such concepts as science, learning, play, and teaching.
In this new millenium it may be fair to ask, "Why look at Wundt?" Over the years, many authors have taken fairly detailed looks at the work and accomplishments of Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920). This was especially true of the years around 1979, the centennial of the Leipzig Institute for Experimental Psychology, the birthplace of the "graduate program" in psychology. More than twenty years have passed since then, and in the intervening time those centennial studies have attracted the attention and have motivated the efforts of a variety of historians, philosophers, psychologists, and other social scientists. They have profited from the questions raised earlier about theoretical, methodological, sociological, and even political aspects affecting the organized study of mind and behavior; they have also proposed some new directions for research in the history of the behavioral and social sciences. With the advantage of the historiographic perspective that twenty years can bring, this volume will consider this much-heralded "founding father of psychology" once again. Some of the authors are veterans of the centennial who contributed to a very useful volume, edited by Robert W. Rieber, Wilhelm Wundt and the Making of a Scientific Psychology (New York: Plenum Press, 1980). Others are scholars who have joined Wundt studies since then, and have used that book, among others, as a guide to further work. The first chapter, "Wundt before Leipzig," is essentially unchanged from the 1980 volume.
The 2nd edition of Historical and Conceptual issues in Psychology offers a lively and engaging introduction to the main issues underlying the emergence and continuing evolution of psychology.