Theoretical Issues in Psychology

1. Theoretical Issues in Psychology Philosophy of science and Philosophy of Mind for Psychologists space for cover B&LdeJ

2. Chapter 5 Sociology and psychology of science • Science as a human activity • Ideology and ‘critical theory’ • Social history of science • Social nature of knowledge and the strong programme • Sociology of scientific practice • The ‘science wars’ • Psychology of science • The social and psychological nature of knowledge B&LdeJ

3. Sociology of science Point of departure is the social relativity of scientific knowledge: to what extent do social processes contribute to the development of knowledge? How social factors help to explain: the content of scientific knowledge; the organization (infrastructure) of science; the allocation of means. These studies are also called: Science Studies or Science of Science B&LdeJ

4. Sociology of science • Context of Discovery: scientist is situated in a historical and social context. • Marx: ‘ideology’. • Mannheim: ‘sociology of knowledge’. • Frankfurter Schule – Habermas. • After Kuhn: sociology of science in full bloom. • Barnes and Bloor (Edinburgh): ‘The Strong Programme’. B&LdeJ

5. Context of discovery • The historical origins of theories. • The social and historical context. • The subjective side of research. • The social influence on theories. • Historiography: sometimes called ‘Externalism’ or ‘Contextualism’. B&LdeJ

6. Ideology: historical background Karl Marx (1845): false consciousness of the socio-economic dominant class, justifying the status quo i.e. the ideas of capitalism. Karl Mannheim (1936): sociology of knowledge: all knowledge is determined by social-economic factors. Frankfurter Schule – JürgenHabermas (1968): science & technology as ideology: critique on existing science & technology. B&LdeJ

7. Science and Technology as IdeologyJürgen Habermas Science and technology have become ideologies they have led to technical-instrumental rationality and objectivism; s&t serve interests, are instruments for control; they legitimate the system of domination; instrumental rationality is ‘half’ rationality; this criticism of ideology constitutes its unmasking. The liberating force is communicative rationality, domination-free communication. The way to truth is not objectivism (correspondence) but consensus. This means a shift from the Marxian primacy of production to the primacy of communication. B&LdeJ

8. ‘The Strong Programme’ (Bloor and Barnes) The 4 tenets for the sociology of knowledge (1976) • Causality: be aware that all sciences are • caused by social (economic, political, cultural, • psychological) factors. • Keep up impartiality with respect to truth and • falsity, rationality or irrationality, succes or failure. • Symmetricality(equivalence): invoke the • same causes for success and for error in science. • Reflexivity: these patterns of explanation • should also be applicable to sociology itself. B&LdeJ

9. Sociology of science from macro-research: broad social influences; classical Sociology of Sc. (Merton) to micro-research: ‘anthropological’ research in the scientific laboratory (Latour and Woolgar) B&LdeJ

10. The constructivist perspective • Beliefs are created and adopted in a group’s thinking processs. • Facts are socially constructed, are products of negotiation. • The ‘laboratory’ as a social organisation. • Scientists operate in a preconstructed artifactual reality. • Social processes as constitutive of the production and acceptance of knowledge claims. • Therefore: • anthropological method: sharing the daily life of scientists; • Latour & Woolgar(1979): Laboratory Life. • Knorr-Cetina (1983). • discourse analysis: systematic investigation of the social production of scientific discourse; • Mulkay et al. (1983). B&LdeJ

11. Represention and object: a fallacy Steve Woolgar (1988) • A traditional fallacy: distinction between representation and object, between knowledge and facts. • On the contrary, there is an intimate interdependence between them. • The representation precedes the represented object. • There is no object out there and beyond us qua observers, and separate from our practice. B&LdeJ

12. Scientific practice a.o. Pickering, Hacking • Shift from knowing to practice, from representation to intervention (Hacking). • Data are not so much theory-laden, but are material artifacts. • The practical scientist tunes his theory to data, to the instruments, to the interpretations. • Theory, data, instruments, interpretations are interdependent. • Once again, it means that objectivity is constructed. • Hacking: realism not about theories, but about practice. B&LdeJ

13. Science Wars • Science Wars: scientists contra social-constructionists • ‘Deconstruction’, unmasking of authoritative and classical texts, routine in american arts faculties (‘lit crit’), French philosophy. • Gross and Levitt, Higher Superstition (1994): ‘deconstruc-tionists dislike science’. • Sokal Hoax (practical joke) • Nonsense physics accepted as ‘serious’ deconstruction by journal. • Ridicules social constructionism. • (A. Sokal, ‘Transgressing the boundaries. Toward a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity’, Social Text, 1996) B&LdeJ

14. Psychology of science • Social-psychological studies of science as a societal enterprise: e.g., infrastructure and laboratories; political influences; allocation of means. • Social-psychological studies of knowledge-acquisition: social factors of scientific cognition; the social nature of ‘discoveries’; networking. • Cognitive-psychological studies of scientific thinking and reasoning; creativity; the genius; discovery. B&LdeJ