This paper sketches a historical account of interdisciplinarity. A central claim advanced is that the modern array of scientific and humanistic disciplines and interdisciplinarity emerged together; both are moving targets, which must therefore be studied historically in relation to one another as institutionalized practices. A second claim is that of a steadily increasing complexity; new fields emerged on the boundaries of existing disciplines beginning in the late nineteenth century, followed by multi- and transdisciplinary initiatives in the twentieth, and finally transdisciplinary (...) programmatic research in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The latter two phases in this development have been driven primarily by funding agencies seeking to move the sciences in particular directions deemed socially or politically desirable (in dictatorships as well as democracies), while the existing disciplines remained in place and new ones came into being. Such policy initiatives have transformed both disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity in unanticipated ways. The question whether multi- or transdisciplinary arrangements produce epistemically better science or scholarship appears not to have been raised, let alone examined, by the policy actors driving their creation. (shrink)

History of Science in History. This position paper discusses the position of history of science within the field of history and presents arguments for maintaining and expanding that position in future.

Until recently, the development of the modern sciences has usually been described as a continuous unfolding of constantly expanding and differentiating research institutions on the one hand, and the accumulation of more and better knowledge on the other. The changes that have occurred both in scientific institutions and in the direction and content of research in the course of revolutions or comparable political changes pose significant challenges to such accounts. I would like to propose an interactive approach to this issue. (...) Instead of accepting a linear, deterministic model of scientific change as a result of political upheaval, I suggest that such political changes present an array of challenges to and possibilities for the interruption, redirection, reconstruction or effortful continuation of research. The central claim is that scientific development in times of political upheaval has proceeded in Germany primarily by means of increasing cooperation of scientists with the state, involving a process that I call the technologization of basic research. But this is not always a one-sided affair involving the subordination of science to practical politics or to ideology. Rather, I argue, what occurs is themobilization or reconstruction of physical, institutional, financial, cognitive and/or rhetorical resources. Such mobilizations can proceed in various directions: the state or agencies within it can mobilize scientists as resources in the interest of achieving certain political aims; scientists can convert themselves into such resources (or claim that they are doing so); or both things can happen at once. The approach is exemplified by examining continuities and changes in the situations of the sciences following the major turning points of 20th-century German history, symbolized by the dates 1918, 1933, 1945 and 1990. Considered in particular are: scientific changes in Germany following the Nazi takeover and creative innovations by émigré scientists working in different cultural settings; the massive transfer of scientific resources after Nazi Germany's defeat and attempts to carry on and reconstruct science in the two postwar German states; and the massive reorganization of scientific institutions in eastern Germany after unification. The examples come primarily from biology and experimental psychology, but physical sciences and particular branches of technology are considered as well. (shrink)

This is an interdisciplinary collection of new essays by philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists and historians on the question: What has determined and what should determine the territory or the boundaries of the discipline named "psychology"? Both the contents - in terms of concepts - and the methods - in terms of instruments - are analyzed. Among the contributors are Mitchell Ash, Paul Baltes, Jochen Brandtstädter, Gerd Gigerenzer, Michael Heidelberger, Gerhard Roth, and Thomas Sturm.

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 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. 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.1In 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. (shrink)

The article introduces a special section about history of science in Central and Eastern Europe before and after the fall of Communism, and sketches a conceptual framework within which the three papers in the section can be understood together. This introduction provides information about the workshop from which the papers were recruited, and continues with more general considerations on the nationalization of scientific knowledge in the territories of the Habsburg empire and its successor states. In the second half of the (...) introduction, themes addressed by all three papers in the special section are named and discussed briefly. (shrink)

What roles have instruments played in psychology and related disciplines? How have instruments affected the dynamics of psychological research, with what possibilities and limits? What is a psychological instrument? This paper provides a conceptual foundation for specific case studies concerning such questions. The discussion begins by challenging widely accepted assumptions about the subject and analyzing the general relations between scientific experimentation and the uses of instruments in psychology. Building on this analysis, a deliberately inclusive definition of what constitutes a psychological (...) instrument is proposed. The discussion then takes up the relation between instrumentation and theories, and differentiates in greater detail the roles instruments have had over the course of psychology’s history. Finally, the authors offer an approach to evaluating the possibilities and limitations of instruments in psychology. (shrink)

This is a review of a book that tries to re-establish mind-body dualism by using (a) empirical research on near-death experiences, placebo effects, creativity, claiming even that parapsychology should become a respected part of science, and (b) Frederic W. H. Myers' (1843-1901) metaphor of the brain as a kind of receiving device that records what the irreducible mind sends as messages. Among other things, we criticize the lack of philosophical clarity about mind-body relation, and question the book's tendency to refer (...) to past and current parapsychological literature as reliable. (shrink)

In video games, identification with avatars—virtual entities or characters driven by human behavior—has been shown to serve many interpersonal and intraindividual functions but our understanding of the psychological variables that influence players' avatar choices remains incomplete. The study presented in this paper tested whether players' preferred style of avatar creation is linked to the magnitude of self-perceived discrepancies between who they are, who they aspire to be, and who they think they should be. One-hundred-and-twenty-five undergraduate gamers indicated their preferred avatar (...) creation style and completed a values measure from three different perspectives: their actual, ideal, and ought selves. The average actual/ideal values discrepancy was greater among those who preferred idealized avatars vs. those who preferred realistic avatars. The average actual/ought values discrepancy was greater among those who preferred completely different avatars vs. those who preferred realistic avatars. These results, therefore, offer additional evidence that self-discrepancy theory is a useful framework for understanding avatar preferences. (shrink)

Both language and genes evolve by transmission over generations with opportunity for differential replication of forms. The understanding that gene frequencies change at random by genetic drift, even in the absence of natural selection, was a seminal advance in evolutionary biology. Stochastic drift must also occur in language as a result of randomness in how linguistic forms are copied between speakers. Here we quantify the strength of selection relative to stochastic drift in language evolution. We use time series derived from (...) large corpora of annotated texts dating from the 12th to 21st centuries to analyse three well-known grammatical changes in English: the regularization of past-tense verbs, the introduction of the periphrastic ’do’, and variation in verbal negation. We reject stochastic drift in favour of selection in some cases but not in others. In particular, we infer selection towards the irregular forms of some past-tense verbs, which is likely driven by changing frequencies of rhyming patterns over time. We show that stochastic drift is stronger for rare words, which may explain why rare forms are more prone to replacement than common ones. This work provides a method for testing selective theories of language change against a null model and reveals an underappreciated role for stochasticity in language evolution. (shrink)

Even though science strives to transcend national differences, scientists in the multi-national, multi-lingual, multi-ethnic Habsburg Empire could hardly avoid being caught up in a web of competing ethnic, national, and imperial interests. Where should their identities and loyalties lie and where should they seek support for their work? At the level of the empire as a whole? One of its component kingdoms or principalities? Other institutions? What audience should they write for, and in what language? Or, from the point of (...) view of their patrons, how could science be used to promote unity and develop culture and identity? This fine essay collection on The Nationalization of Scientific Knowledge in the Habsburg Empire, 1848–1918 explores a variety of solutions with which scientists and scientific institutions experimented.The editors’ introduction, by Mitchell Ash and Jan Surman, is most concerned with the historiography of nationalism, nation formation, center–periphery relations, and po .. (shrink)