This essay attempts to show the decisive importance of the “scientific discipline” for any historical or sociological analysis of modern science. There are two reasons for this:

1. A discontinuity can be observed at the beginning of modern science: the “discipline,” which up until that time had been a classificatorily generated unit of the ordering of knowledge for purposes of instruction in schools and universities, develops into a genuine and concrete social system of scientific communication. Scientific disciplines as concrete systems (Realsysteme) arise as a result of (a) the communicative stabilization of “scientific communities” at the end of the eighteenth century and the formation of “appropriate” roles and organizational structures (in universities); (b) the structural differentiation of the new scientific disciplines from the established professions (law, theology, medicine) in Europe; (c) the formation of scientific communication in the standardized form of scientific publication; the distinction of the separate action-type “scientific research” and the differentiation of these two elementary acts of all future scientific endeavor in relation to each other.

2. The scientific discipline as primary unit of the internal differentiation of science has, since its genesis, been stabilized by two conditions: (a) The fact of a science differentiated into a plurality of (competing, mutually stimulating) disciplinary perspectives becomes the chief causal factor underlying the developmental dynamism of modern science; (b) Similar to the way in which the discipline functions as a cognitive address within the system of science, science also links the discipline up as a structural unit (utilized in both systems) with curricular structures in the system of education — i.e., it is stabilized by the central system/environment relation of science.

It is no longer necessary to defend current historiography of psychology against the strictures aimed at its early text book incarnations in the 1960s and 1970s. At that time, Robert Young (1966) and others denigrated then standard textbook histories of psychology for their amateurism and their justifications propaganda for specific standpoints in current psychology, disguised as history. Since then, at least some textbooks writers and working historians of psychology have made such criticisms their own (Leahey 1986; Furumoto 1989). The demand for textbook histories continues nonetheless. Psychology, at least in the United States, remains the only discipline that makes historical representations of itself in the form of “history and systems” courses an official part of its pedagogical canon, required, interestingly enough, for the license in clinical practice (see Ash 1983).1 In the meantime, the professionalization of scholarship in history of psychology has proceeded apace. All of the trends visible in historical and social studies of other sciences, as well as in general cultural and intellectual history, are noe present in the historical study of psychology. Yet despite the visibility and social importance of psychology's various applications, and the prominence of certain schools of psychological thought such as behaviorism and psychoanalysis in contemporary cultural and political debate, the historiography of psychology has continued to hold a marginal position in history and social studies of science.

In the controversy in 1989 over the reported achievement of cold nuclear fusion, parts of the physics and chemistry communities were opposed in both a theoretic and a professional competition. Physicists saw the chemists' announcement as an incursion into territory allocated to their own discipline and strove to restore the interdisciplinary boundaries that had previously held. The events that followed throw light on the manner in which scientists' knowledge claims and metascientific beliefs are affected by their membership of disciplinary communities. In particular, the controversy offers evidence for a constructivist reinterpretation of the “division of nature into levels,” which is customarily held to underpin the division of science into disciplines.

Naturalization confers authority on beliefs, conventions, and claims, but what kind of authority? Because the meaning of nature has a history, so does that of naturalization:naturalization is not the same tactic when marshaled in, say, eighteenth-century France and in late nineteenth-century Britain. Although the authority of nature may be invoked in both cases, the import of that authority depends crucially on whether nature is understood normatively or descriptively, within the framework of the natural laws of jurisprudence or within that of the natural laws of mechanics. During the early modern period, the denotative center of gravity of the word “nature” shifted dramatically. Writings about the female intellect are particularly well suited to reflect and focus these changes for three reasons: first, as with so many aspects of gender identity, what was distinctively female about women's way of thinking was usually alleged to be part and parcel of their “nature”; second, thepolitical and social implications of the female intellect were debated heatedly and in unprecedented detail, particularly in France; and third, the actual content of beliefs about what traits sex the intellect as female remained relatively constant during this period, despite sharp differences of opinion over their putative “natural” causes. The female intellect was naturalized not once but repeatedly, and therein lies its value for a history of naturalization.

Kuhnian phases of paradigmatic development correspond to characteristic variations of citation measures. These correlations can in turn be predicted from a simple model of human information processing when applied to the common environments of scientists. By combining a scientometric and a human information processing approach to the history of scientific thought, structures of disciplinary development, and in particular paradigmatic cycles, can be more reliably assessed than before. Consequently, the quantitative historian of science is liberated to some extent from the vagaries of qualitative judgment, as exemplified by traditional narrative type approaches to the history of science.

The history of psychology, like other human science subjects, should attend to the meaning of words understood as relationships of reference and value within discourse. It should seek to identify and defend a history centered on representations of knowledge. The history of the word “inhibition” in nineteenth-century Europe illustrates the potential of such an approach. This word was significant in mediating between physiological and psychological knowledge and between technical and everyday understanding. Further, this word indicated the presence of a common discourse structuring ways of thought about order, whether in technology, moral activity, or experimental psycho-physiology. Writing history as the history of discourse suggests several difficulties; these are considered briefly. Nevertheless attention to language and meaning makes it possible to integrate the history of psychology with intellectual history and thereby to broaden its potential audience.

In different contexts, beginning with different concerns, Pavlov, James, and Freud tried to achieve a neurophysiological explanation of mind, and suffered defeat. James and Freud acknowledged the defeat and attempted, in radically different ways, to construct an interim psychology, hoping that neural explanation would be achieved in the future. Pavlov came to the effort in his fifties, after decades of research that took for granted a sharp separation between neurophysiology and psychology. He changed his mind as he noticed the descent of his discipline from study of whole-body and organ functions to concentration on the neuron and the molecule. Pavlov thought to save the discipline from chaos by providing laws of “higher nervous activity” to serve as an organizing framework. Hence his stubborn refusal to acknowledge the obvious errors in his supposed neural explanation of conditioned reflexes. The Russian context of ideological division and extreme social conflict reinforced the unwitting retreat of Pavlov and his school into a scientistic counterculture, while claiming to be developing the ultimate neural explanation of the mind. In countries of less extreme conflicts, classical conditioning continued to be a focal point of discord between psychologists who accept the inevitability of mentalist concepts and neuroscientists who insist that they must be avoided. In any context, neural explanation of mental phenomena has been a project that is impossible to avoid and impossible to accomplish.

The Doctor of Philosophy, a nonmedieval academic figure who spread throughout the globe in the Modern Era, and who emblemized the transformation of academic knowledge into the “pursuit of research,” emerged through a long and tortuous path in the early modern Germanies. The emergence and recognition of the Doctor of Philosophy would be correlative with the nineteenth-century professionalization of the arts and sciences. Throughout the Early Modern Era, the earlier Doctors and older “professional” faculties from the medieval university — Theology, Law, and Medicine — opposed recognition of the Doctor of Philosophy. In Saxony, the forces of “medievalism” were able to block recognition of the Doctor of Philosophy, and they retained the degraded Master of Arts or Philosophy as the highest degree in arts and sciences. Forces of “modernism” prevailed, however, in Austria and Prussia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In Austria, the Doctor of Philosophy arrived as a wholly modern figure, the creation of a nice dossier and a civil service examination: the medieval “juridical” persona became a modern “bureaucratic” persona. Between this bureaucratic modernism of the Austrians and corporatist medievalism of the Saxons, the Prussians pursued a via media. Unlike the Saxons, they recognized the Doctor of Philosophy; but unlike the Austrians, they did not completely bureaucratize the candidate's persona. The Prussians demanded from the candidate a “work of research,” a doctoral dissertation, which exhibited the aesthetic qualities of the Romantic artist: originality and personality.

Psychology has been frequently subjected to the criticism that it is an unreflexive science — that it fails to acknowledge the reflexive properties of human action which influence psychologists themselves as well as their subjects. However, even avowedly unreflexive actions may involve reflexivity, and in this paper I suggest that the practices of psychology include reflexive ones. Psychology has an established tradition of silence about the self-awareness and sell-consciousness of its actors, whether those actors are experimenters, theorists, or participants (subjects) in research, yet this silence has been established and maintained through sophisticated exercises in self-regard — through sustained reflexive work. Historical analysis reveals some of the ways in which psychologists recognized and then neglected, covered over, or denied reflexivity. Study of those instances where psychologists have engaged in self-conscious reflection or have attended to the sell-consciousness of research subjects indicates both the dangers of reflexivity to governing investigative practices and the resilience which psychology has built against reflexive work. Canonized procedures for scientific work reproduce selves of experimenters and subjects alike, selves who acknowledge only part of their reflexive engagements. Historians of psychology have a special opportunity (and obligation) to explore the reflexive dynamics of investigative practices, and, hence, to theorize about scientists, along with their actions and interactions, just as we theorize about science, its products, and its evolution.

In this paper it will be shown that Newton's Principia gives an explication of and an argument for the first Law of Motion, that seems to be outside the scope of today's philosophy of science but was familiar to seventeenth-century commentators: The foundation of classical mechanics is possible only by recurrence to results of a successful technical practice. Laws of classical mechanics gain their meaning as well as their claims to validity only when considered as statements about artifacts whose production belongs to the shared know-how of a scientific community.

The notion that experimentation provides an appropriate means for acquiring valid knowledge about some aspects of social reality has always depended on certain presuppositions about the nature of social reality and about the role of expenment in knowledge acquisition. In this paper I examine historical changes in these presuppositions from the beginnings of social psychological experimentation to the period after World War II.

It was late nineteenth-century crowd psychology that provided the theoretical inspiration fo the first systematic steps in the application of expermental methods to the investigation of social psychological problems. The basic question addressed by these early experiments was derived from the individualistic social ontology of crowd psychology. It was this ontology that made the microcosm of the experimental situation appear relevant to social reality outside this situation.

In the 1940s experimental social psychology was briefly influenced by a nonindividualistic social ontology for which group phenomena were real. In the work of Kurt Lewin this was linked to an anti-inductivist conception of experimentation derived from Gestalt psychology and the philosophy of Ernst Cassirer. However, this model proved to be utterly unassimilable by American social psychology which was dominated by an individualistic social ontology and an inductivist philosophy of experimentation that mutually supported each other.

Many find it “notoriously difficult to see how societal context can affect in any essential way how someone solves a mathematical problem or makes a measurement.” That may be because it has been a habit of western scientists to assert their numerical schemes were untainted by any hint of anthropomorphism. Nevertheless, that Platonist penchant has always encountered obstacles in practice, primarily because the stability of any applied numerical scheme requires some alien or external warrant.

This paper surveys the history of measurement standards, physical dimensions and dimensionless constants as one instance of the quest to purge all anthropomorphic taint first in the metric system, then in the dimensions provided by the atom, then in physical constants intelligible to extraterrestrials, only then to end up back at overt anthropomorphism in the late 20th century. This suggests that the “naturalness” of natural numbers has always been conceptualized in locally contingent cultural terms.

Scientific tools—measurement and calculation instruments, techniques of inference—straddle the line between the context of discovery and the context of justification. In discovery, new scientific tools suggest new theoretical metaphors and concepts; and in justification, these tool-derived theoretical metaphors and concepts are morelikely to be accepted by the scientific community if the tools are already entrenched in scientific practice.

Techniques of statistical inference and hypothesis testing entered American psychology first as tools in the 1940s and 1950s and then as cognitive theories in the 1960s and 1970s. Not only did psychologists resists statistical metaphors of mind prior to the institutionalization of inference techniques in their own practice; the cognitive theories they ultimately developed about “the mind as intuitive statistician” still bear the telltale marks of the practical laboratory context in which the tool was used.

In the liberal democratic capitalist societies of “the West,” psychological know-how has made itself indispensable, not only in the regulation of domains from the factory to the family but also in the ethical systems according to which citizens live their lives. We cannot fully understand the role that psychology has come to play in terms of the application of science, the diffusion of ideas, or the entrepreneurial activities of a profession. Rather, we need to see psychology as making possible forms of expertise that have a particular capacity to graft themselves onto the practices of all those concerned with the conduct of conduct. Psychology operates within these practices to make individuals who are calculable, to make intersubjective spaces that are manageable, to simplify the heterogeneous tasks of authorities and to underpin them with an ethico-therapeutic rationale. Psychology has also come to infuse contemporary “technologies of the self,” with its promises to restore persons to freedom and autonomy. These features of the “techne” of psychology are intrinsically linked to the problematics of liberal democracies, which seek to govern through privacy, rationality, and autonomy. And if the expert technologies of psychology have come to play such a significant role in the regulation of conduct in the West, we should not be surprised if psychological expertise is a beneficiary of current transformations of the societies of Eastern Europe.

Kurt Lewin's essay “Gesetz und Experiment in der Psychologie” of 1927, published in this issue of SiC for the first time in English translation, and his “Der Übergang von der aristotelischen zur galileischen Denkweise in Biologie und Psychologie” (in the English version: The Conflict between Aristotelian and Galilean Modes of Thought in Contemporary Psychology) of 19311 have together contributed most to shape his image as a metatheorist (or philosopher) of psychology. A careful examination of what has occasionally been called the “Lewinian tradition,”2 however, reveals that Lewin's metascientific contributions have been much more influential in Europe than in the United States, where he lived and taught as a Jewish refugee from 1934 until his early death on 2 February, 1947.

The Copernican revolution with which Kant transformed the question of whether knowledge is possible into the query as to how knowledge is possible, constitutes one stage in the development of epistemology from a speculative to an observational science — i.e., one that proceeds from the investigation of concrete, existent objects rather than from a small number of presupposed concepts. This path, leading from speculation to examination of the concrete objects of research — for epistemology, to the investigation of the various individual sciences — is long and arduous, and even now it has been traversed only a small part of the way. Although epistemological research has for a long time had some relation to mathematics and physics, and a more concrete exploration of biology and the humanities has recently been launched as well, we undoubtedly still stand at the very beginning of this enterprise. One major task for the epistemological inquiry into a specific discipline is bound up with tracing the course of development of that science — in particular, the radical shifts and readjustments in a science that promise to furnish the epistemologist with valuable information. Seen from this angle, psychology also currently deserves the special attention of epistemology.