Actualizing Potentials: Learning through Psychology's Recurrent Crises

doi:10.1017/CBO9780511610400.013

11 - Actualizing Potentials: Learning through Psychology's Recurrent Crises

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 December 2009

Michael Cole and

Jaan Valsiner

Edited by

David B. Pillemer and

Sheldon H. White

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Michael Cole: Affiliation:
Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition, University of California, San Diego
Jaan Valsiner: Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, Clark University, Worcester, MA
David B. Pillemer: Affiliation:
University of New Hampshire
Sheldon H. White: Affiliation:
Harvard University, Massachusetts

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Summary

It was presumably the philosopher George Santayana who commented that those who do not know the past are doomed to repeat it. Yet study of the history of psychology has rarely, if ever, been used as a tool by social scientists to help them avoid the pitfalls of the past. Instead, social scientists use the study of the history of the discipline as a tool to plan and organize their work. Sheldon (Shep) White represents a distinctly different model of how to view the history and practice of psychology. In the 1970s, Shep began writing articles on the history of psychology that were pointedly designed to be used by the current practitioners of the discipline to help them to reflect upon their own practices (White, 1976, 1978; Cahan & White, 1992).

The Nature of Knowledge in Science: From Crises to Potentials

Contrary to the fast-paced reporting of science to the lay public – by journalists and scientists – scientific knowledge grows slowly and is subject to various periods of stagnation and even regression. Both evolution and involution in scientific thinking are linked with social events (Danziger, 1990). Usually such periods are filled with the tension created between the avalanche of new ideas (in new contexts) and the rigidities of the previous habits of thought. This tension may emerge along a multitude of parameters – between theory and (social) practice; ways of knowing and religious dogmas (remembering Galileo's troubles about moving celestial objects at his time and arguments about stem cell research in our own); generality and fragmentation within a discipline; and the “stress of interdisciplinarity” – a discipline resisting the incoming streams of ideas from other disciplines.

Type: Chapter
Information: Developmental Psychology and Social Change
Research, History and Policy
, pp. 288 - 313

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511610400.013 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2005

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11 - Actualizing Potentials: Learning through Psychology's Recurrent Crises

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