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Could Presentism in the Histories of Psychology Actually be Futuristic?
Abstract
Disputes about the origins of psychology in the history of the discipline are functional not for our understanding of the past, but as normative signs that regulate the construction of ideas in the future. We introduce the notion of open-ended normativity that regulates the development of a given discipline towards its future. Hence the question of the cultural origins of psychology becomes contested in the 21st century as an important topic. It proves that the history of psychology is an active participant in the making of psychology, as it is creating its future.
... It is not as big a problem as it might at first appear since it is usual in these situations for commentators to move the discussion away from the topic of target article to other topics that are of greater interest to them, and which they know more about, but it seems to have happened to an inordinate degree here. The most blatant example is the comment by Valsiner and Brinkmann (2015) which they begin by saying that they will not talk about the history of psychology, which is what the target article was about, but will talk about the future of psychology instead. Others have done the same without being as open about it. ...
... One could easily get the impression from Valsiner and Brinkmann (2015) that the various accounts of psychology's origins are simply origin myths that are equally valid (or invalid). This point is underlined later on the piece where they refer to psychology's Balleged birthplace^ (Valsiner and Brinkmann 2015). ...
... One could easily get the impression from Valsiner and Brinkmann (2015) that the various accounts of psychology's origins are simply origin myths that are equally valid (or invalid). This point is underlined later on the piece where they refer to psychology's Balleged birthplace^ (Valsiner and Brinkmann 2015). They consequently offer a form of epistemological relativism that no serious historian would endorse. ...
This article is a reply to the comments on my target article, “Presentism and diversity in the history of psychology” (Brock Psychological Studies, 60, 2015a). The most controversial aspect of the article by far was my views on what it is appropriate to call, “psychology” and what it is not. Having established that psychology has its origins in Europe, I refer to the efforts of psychologists from outside the Western world to construct an “indigenous psychology”. I conclude by discussing the view of Staeuble (2006) that the disciplinary order of the social sciences is “Eurocentric” in that it reflects the assumptions of the culture in which it was produced. As long as psychologists outside the Western world continue to unquestioningly adopt a disciplinary order that reflects its cultural origins in the West, and even insist on projecting it backwards onto their own intellectual traditions, the process of indigenisation will be incomplete.
... One example is a "target" article that I recently published in the Indian journal, Psychological Studies in which I argued that the ancient wisdom of India and China should not be viewed as "psychology" but should be understood in its historical context(Brock, 2015b). All the psychologists who commented on the article were vehemently opposed to this view(Hopkins, 2015;Paranjpe, 2015;Valsiner & Brinkmann, 2015).3 Personal communication of February 28, 2016. ...
In 1994, Kurt Danziger published an article in Theory & Psychology with the title, "Does the history of psychology have a future?" The article attracted a great deal of controversy and is now listed on the journal's website as one of the most cited articles in its history. After providing a synopsis of Danziger's article, I discuss some of the issues that emerged from the controversy that followed its publication. I also ask whether the position of the history of psychology has changed in the intervening years. We are already in the future that Danziger discussed, even if it is only the near future, and the situation may look different from here. After pointing out that Danziger himself has changed his views on this subject, I suggest that it does look different. The editorial ends with an introduction to the articles in the special issue and some reflections on the importance of understanding the context in which historians of psychology work. (PsycINFO Database Record
Providing an entry on the history of psychology for the online encyclopaedia, Wikipedia has proved to be more problematic than one might expect. In particular, someone who goes under the internet name, ‘Jagged_85’ inserted claims to the effect that most of the major developments in the history of psychology have their origins in the medieval Arab world. Similar claims and at least one attempt to challenge those claims have appeared in the professional literature. A special issue of the online newsletter, Advances in the History of Psychology devoted to this topic has also appeared under the title, “Presentism in the Service of Diversity?” The term, “presentism” has several meanings but it usually refers to projecting the views of the present onto the past instead of making a serious attempt to understand how historical figures themselves understood the world. The present paper endorses the view that the claims of authors like ‘Jagged_85’ constitute presentism in the usual sense of the term. It also offers suggestions for how diversity without this type of presentism might be achieved.
In his brief consideration of non-Western philosophy between 1989 and 1991, Richard Rorty argued that dialogue between Western philosophy and non-Western traditions is not constructive since it almost inevitably involves fundamental misunderstanding, and he even expressed doubt about whether non-Western philosophy exists. This reaction seems out of character, given that Rorty specialized in forging unlikely alliances between philosophers from different Western traditions, and was an enthusiastic advocate of edification through hermeneutic engagement with unfamiliar vocabularies. It is argued here that given Rorty’s conception of philosophy as a literary tradition, he had no reason to exclude non-Western figures, and that his various arguments against the desirability of comparative philosophy–based on the different purposes of different traditions, their different conceptual schemes, and his notion of “transcultural character”–are all inconsistent with more characteristic elements of his thought, as well as independently unconvincing. The underlying reason Rorty adopted this combative stance toward comparative philosophy, it is argued, is that non-Western philosophy undermines his critique of Western philosophy, which depends on a cultural-specificity thesis according to which philosophical problems are rooted in obsolete European social needs. Against this thesis, this article concludes by arguing that philosophy has a natural subject matter.
I am arguing for three links between the biblical creation myth and social theory. First, I am arguing that, by exploiting the story for the social psychological ideas that can be drawn out of it, we have a rich way to appreciate the nuances of the myth. By treating “Adam and Eve” as a parsimonious and memorable form of sociological theorizing, we can effectively appreciate the elaborate, highly tuned, richly coherent, and subtle structure of the myth. We can answer a series of initially enigmatic questions about the logic of the story, and in the process we can bring out some of its neglected features, such as the burden in the final gift. Here empirical theory serves to clarify the hermeneutics of a powerfully appealing element of cultural life.
Next, reversing the perspective, we can reveal the myth as a testable empirical theory. In this article, I can only suggest the promise of such a theory. But this operation draws out theoretical ideas about emotions - such as their dualistic and dialectical character - that are difficult to summarize elegantly without the aid of the symbolic powers of mythical narrative and that point empirical investigation in new directions.
Third, there is the empirical question of the impressive resonance of the story of Adam and Eve. I am arguing that the everyday emergence and decline of emotions, in typically brief, typically inconsequential, social interactional episodes, parallels the metamorphosis described in Genesis. This parallel indicates a ground for the appeal of this creation myth wherever people structure their emotions into socially situated forms, wherever “falls,” literal or figurative, can lead alternatively to shame, laughter, crying, or anger. The narrative structure of everyday emotions is surely not the only nor the most important basis of the appeal of Adam and Eve, but there is a grounding for the resonance of the story, a tacit basis for its pervasive appeal, in the stories that we corporeally convey as we construct socially situated episodes of shame, laughter, anger, and crying.
Something similar was argued by the English and German literary and philosophical Romantics but their claims were far more ambitious. They frequently appreciated biblical stories such as those of the Fall from paradise, the prodigal son, and the tearing of Christ from communal embrace and eventual resurrection, not as history or allegory but as proto-scientific summaries of ongoing human realities. In M. H. Abrams's review, the Romantic “tendency was... to naturalize the supernatural and to humanize the divine.” All the figures and events of the bible were “‘to be seen and felt within you.’”
My position in this essay is neither so grand nor so optimistic. I am arguing that emotions in everyday social life describe a metamorphosis of fall, chaos, and an attempt at graceful reintegration, but not that this process describes all of social life, much less all of history, nor even that it describes what is most fundamental, best, or most elevating in life, as the Romantics might have said. For Schiller, the Fall was “fortunate” because it led to a spiral ascent toward a paradise more grand than the one Adam lost. Our situated emotions routinely lead back to the banalities from which they emerged. Moreover, much of emotional life does not necessarily take the form of bounded narrative episodes; indeed much of what may be most important about social life, in any number of senses, is not characterized by the bouts of crying and anger, phases of shameful feeling, and moments of laughter that this essay addresses. But the story of Eden resonates elaborately in emotionally colorful moments within the mundane prose of routine interaction, just as those sensually vivid experiences are narrated in corporeally distinctive ways. Revisiting Genesis, we can grasp its wisdom reverberating through the workings of emotions in everyday social life.
The Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934) left the Soviet Union only once to attend a conference on the education of the deaf in London. So far almost nothing was known about this trip, which took place in a period when Vygotsky was still completely unknown as a psychologist, both inside his own country and abroad. Making use of a newly discovered notebook, it proved possible to partially reconstruct Vygotsky's journey and stay in London. Vygotsky's very personal remarks show him to have been a very sensitive and spirited man, who was prey to strong emotions during the conference and afterwards. Rather surprisingly, Vygotsky's own paper about the education of the deaf was never presented during the conference and the stay in London appears to have had a limited value for his own scientific development.
Twenty years is a long time in the lives of the authors of a treatise – but a minuscule period in the development of core concepts in a science. When we addressed the issue of the zone of proximal development (ZPD in the English version, but zona blizhaishego razvitia – ZBR – in the original Russian) two decades ago (Valsiner and van der Veer, 1993; van der Veer and Valsiner, 1991) we traced its up-and-coming role in developmental psychology and education. Our goal was to trace the origins of the idea in Lev Vygotsky’s thought in the early 1930s. We partially succeeded in the latter. At that time, it seemed that the notion of ZBR had great promise for developmental psychology and education. Now – two decades later – it still has such promise, which, however, has not been fulfilled. Why? Back in 1993 we detected a number of issues that the ZBR (ZPD) notion forced researchers to tackle: The concept of “zone of proximal development” poses a number of theoretical problems that need to be addressed quite separately from the ongoing social discourse that tries to fit a multitude of approaches under the somewhat mystical umbrella of that concept. First, it entails a reference to a “zone” – essentially a field-theoretical concept – in an era of psychology that has largely forgotten the gargantuan efforts by Kurt Lewin to adopt topology for purposes of psychological discourse. Secondly, the understanding of “development” has been highly varied in contemporary psychological discourse, ranging from loosely formulated ideas about “age-group differences” (or “age effects”) to narrowly definable structural transformation of organisms in irreversible time and within context…Finally – to complicate the matters even further – contemporary psychologists have to wrestle with the qualifier of “proximal” (or “potential,” or “nearest”), as it is the connecting link between the field-theoretic “zone” and the concept of “development” in this complex term. (Valsiner and van der Veer, 1993, p. 36, added emphases)
This volume comprises a number of letters between author Anindita Niyogi Balslev and philosopher Richard Rorty. The letters explore ways to generate a creative and critical crosscultural discourse not only by challenging stereotypes about cultures and subcultures in general and traditions of thought in particular, but by being careful not to abolish the common ground on which stereotypes can be addressed.
The Empire of Chance tells how quantitative ideas of chance transformed the natural and social sciences, as well as daily life over the last three centuries. A continuous narrative connects the earliest application of probability and statistics in gambling and insurance to the most recent forays into law, medicine, polling and baseball. Separate chapters explore the theoretical and methodological impact in biology, physics and psychology. Themes recur - determinism, inference, causality, free will, evidence, the shifting meaning of probability - but in dramatically different disciplinary and historical contexts. In contrast to the literature on the mathematical development of probability and statistics, this book centres on how these technical innovations remade our conceptions of nature, mind and society. Written by an interdisciplinary team of historians and philosophers, this readable, lucid account keeps technical material to an absolute minimum. It is aimed not only at specialists in the history and philosophy of science, but also at the general reader and scholars in other disciplines.
The purpose of this book is to explode the myth that increased specialization leads to greater efficiency. [The author proposes] that increasing specialization has consequences that go far beyond the sphere of economics…Our adherence to increasing specialization is associated with a contemporary tendency to try to find technical solutions to moral problems, such as those associated with the fragmentation of communities. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
"Developmental Psychology in the Soviet Union" is the only comprehensive study of the subject available in the English language.
Through a detailed historical examination of developmental psychology in Russia and the Soviet Union, Professor Valsiner illustrates the interdependence between psychology and its social and cultural environment.
Focusing on two distinct periods—the 1920s and the 1970s-80s—this book gives a detailed overview of empirical research in social and cognitive psychology, and traces the historical continuity of different views.
"Developmental Psychology in the Soviet Union" presents a wealth of new material invaluable to the history of psychology, Sovietology, education, and the sociology of science. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Understanding Vygotsky
- R Van Der Veer
- J Valsiner
- R Veer van der
Cultural otherness: correspondence with Richard Rorty
- A N Balslev
- AN Balslev