Abstract

This book constitutes a major reinterpretation of the American human sciences at midcentury. Joel Isaac contrasts his approach to histories of the human sciences that cast this area of inquiry as an eternal battle between the ideologically tinged poles of positivism and interpretivism. Isaac seeks to change the tone of such debates by focusing instead on how local practices of pedagogy and research informed a “scientific philosophy” indigenized into different human sciences. In other words, he wants to recover a practice-oriented, midrange philosophy of science and does so by examining practices championed by working scientists. Unlike many histories that focus on a single discipline, he moves with considerable authority among sociology, psychology, philosophy, and history of science. He devotes chapters to the Pareto Circle’s social systems theory and case-based thinking, operationalism in psychology, W. V. O. Quine’s articulation of analytic philosophy, Talcott Parsons’s general theory of action, and Thomas Kuhn’s historicist philosophy of science. Rather than representing a view from nowhere, Isaac demonstrates how these various scientific philosophies were designed to meet concerns particular to Harvard University about the unstable institutionalization of the human sciences, communication across fields, and how best to organize education. Future historians of these disciplines will have to contend with these novel interpretations of the emergent “behavioral sciences,” which are rooted in careful archival research.