What is the status of psychology in the structure of scientific revolution of Thomas Kuhn?

-- Gil (lumwakang@yahoo.com), August 13, 2002

Answers

Franz Samelson discusses Watson's behavior as a major Kuhnian revolution in the following article/book chapter: the change focused on the definition of what was real--prior to Watson introspection was thought to give direct contact with what was real (psychic contents). A fascinating discussion!

Samelson, F. (1988). Struggle for scientific authority: The reception of Watson's behaviorism, 1913-1920. In L. D. Benjamin, Jr. (Ed.), A history of psychology: Original sources and contemporary research (pp. 407-424). New York: McGraw-Hill.

-- Hendrika Vande Kemp (hendrika@earthlink.net), August 13, 2002.

Although psychologists have become almost obsessed with the attempt to map the history of their own discipline on to the model put forward by Kuhn mainly for astronomy and physics, Kuhn himself said that all the social sciences were, at best, preparadigmatic and, thus, that his model did not apply to them. The various approaches to psychology are just "schools of thought." One of the most obvious departures from the Kuhnian model is that psychology has never been captured by a single "paradigm." Behaviorism had its heyday, but was never the sole psychological approach. It existed side-by-side through the 1930-1950s with psychoanalytic, psychometric, and neuroscientific approaches. What is more, as R. S. Woodworth once noted, the vast majority of psychologists did not identify exclusively with any one school, they "sat in the stands," as he put it, watching the "bands" march around field, noting various aspects of their performances that apppealed to them and repelled them. Before behaviorism (and overlapping with it) there was the school (note the term) of functionalism, but only in the U.S., and it was not universally accepted even there. Germany had many different approaches, each centered, more or less, on a particular individual at a particular uiniversity. Today the cognitive school is highly influential, but it is hardly a paradigm in the Kuhnian sense. There are many who reject it, and many more for whom it does not address relevant issues.

Perhaps even more important, why focus on Kuhn alone as a model? Influential as he has been, he is but one of many historian-philosophers of science. Few in the field now accept his view without reservations. Havea look at people like Larry Laudan, Ronald Giere, Nancy Cartwright, Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Harry Collins, Ian Hacking. The field has come along way since 1962.

-- Christopher Green (cgreen@chass.utoronto.ca), August 13, 2002.