This new book proposes a way out of the crisis by letting go of the idea that psychology needs ‘new’ foundations or a new identity, whether biological, discursive, or cognitive. The psychological is not narrowly confined to any one aspect of human experience; it is quite literally ‘everywhere’. Drawing on a range of influential thinkers including Michel Serres, Michel Foucault, AN Whitehead, and Gilles Deleuze, the book proposes a strong process-oriented approach to the psychological, which studies ‘events’ or ‘occasions.’.

This introduction to the Common Knowledge symposium titled “Comparative Relativism” outlines a variety of intellectual contexts where placing the unlikely companion terms comparison and relativism in conjunction offers analytical purchase. If comparison, in the most general sense, involves the investigation of discrete contexts in order to elucidate their similarities and differences, then relativism, as a tendency, stance, or working method, usually involves the assumption that contexts exhibit, or may exhibit, radically different, incomparable, or incommensurable traits. Comparative studies are required to (...) treat their objects as alike, at least in some crucial respects; relativism indicates the limits of this practice. Jensen argues that this seeming paradox is productive, as he moves across contexts, from Lévi-Strauss's analysis of comparison as an anthropological method to Peter Galison's history of physics, and on to the anthropological, philosophical, and historical examples offered in symposium contributions by Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Marilyn Strathern, and Isabelle Stengers. Comparative relativism is understood by some to imply that relativism comes in various kinds and that these have multiple uses, functions, and effects, varying widely in different personal, historical, and institutional contexts that can be compared and contrasted. Comparative relativism is taken by others to encourage a “comparison of comparisons,” in order to relativize what different peoples—say, Western academics and Amerindian shamans—compare things “for.” Jensen concludes that what is compared and relativized in this symposium are the methods of comparison and relativization themselves. He ventures that the contributors all hope that treating these terms in juxtaposition may allow for new configurations of inquiry. (shrink)

This article analyzes the demarcations made within psychology as a feature of the “memory wars”—the current controversy around “recovered” or “false” memory. As it is played out inside professional psychology, the dispute features clinical practitioners acting largely as proponents of recovered memory and experimentalists as proponents of false memory. Tracing a genealogy of this dispute back to a pair of original sites, we show how the traditions’engagement in three modes of scientific demonstration varies systematically in terms of the modes of (...) social relation inherent in their epistemic practices and the kinds of “reliable witness” these practices produce. We conclude that whereas the experimentalist tradition is able to transporttheir produced witnesses from oneto anothersite of demonstration with relative ease, the clinical tradition has much greater difficulty in doing so and thus has to engage in a variety of compensatory demonstrative strategies. (shrink)

The ‘mathematical imaginary’ at work in psychology is central to the contingent history of the discipline, but is also responsible for considerable confusion and ambiguity around the ontological assumptions of psychological theories and models. Rather than reject the mathematical altogether, this article argues for an alternative form of mathematical description in psychology through the use of topology. Drawing on DeLanda’s topological account of the virtual, the relationship between psychology and ontology is progressively questioned in relation to memory. Henri Bergson’s conception (...) of duration and the pure past is juxtaposed with the topological psychology of Kurt Lewin and its notion of life space as a manifold with n-dimensions. Using a diagrammatic strategy developed by Mullarkey, an actualist account of the virtual is used to hold these distinct bodies of work together. Psychological events may be given a ‘thick description’ through the identification of topological relations and invariants. The interplay between the actual entities that are afforded in experience can be seen to be virtualized as planes of irreality. A topological approach to psychology offers the opportunity of replacing the taxonomy of essences common to the discipline with a dynamic account of invariance through homeomorphism. (shrink)

This commentary on Isabelle Stengers's article, “Comparison as a Matter of Concern” is an assessment of her stance toward experimental psychology. At the various points in her work where she considers that discipline, she tends to accuse it of failing to embrace the “risk” that she sees as defining the “collective games” of science. Brown invokes the behavioral approach to experimental psychology of the early to mid-twentieth century to contextualize Stengers's treatment of continuous comparison conducted by scientists around “matters of (...) concern.” Her use of the metaphor of predator/prey relationships between practices is seen as reversing the usual direction of critique within psychology, such that experimental psychology appears to have, in the Wistar rat, an object grounding a community that is capable of performing continuous comparison, which its critics contrastingly lack. Stengers's ecological view of practices may then ultimately lead to a reappraisal of branches of the human sciences, such as experimental psychology, which she tends, on occasion, to dismiss. (shrink)