Abstract
This article explores historical sociology as a complementary source of knowledge for scientific research, considering barriers and facilitators to this work through reflections on one project. This project began as a study of the emergence and reception of the infant disorganized attachment classification, introduced in the 1980s by Ainsworth's student Mary Main, working with Judith Solomon. Elsewhere I have reported on the findings of collaborative work with attachment researchers, without giving full details of how this came about. Here, I will offer personal reflections arising from the process, and my work in what Hasok Chang has called history as "complementary science."
Highlights
Chang (2004, 2017) has argued that there are three kinds of benefits that may be gained for science from work in history and historical sociology: i) increasing scientists’ critical awareness of the contingency of their present ideas and practices; ii) recovery of relevant ideas that have been lost with changing paradigms; iii) use of awareness of contingency, and recovery of ideas, to develop new hypotheses for testing
A second factor that helped lower the barriers to critical collaboration was my relative fluency with the writings of attachment researchers, which formed an odd kind of relevant expertise for developmental science
Chang identified three kinds of benefits that may be gained for science from work in history and historical sociology: increasing scientists’ critical awareness; recovery of former ideas and showing their contemporary relevance; and identification of hypotheses for testing
Summary
Chang (2004, 2017) has argued that there are three kinds of benefits that may be gained for science from work in history and historical sociology: i) increasing scientists’ critical awareness of the contingency of their present ideas and practices; ii) recovery of relevant ideas that have been lost with changing paradigms; iii) use of awareness of contingency, and recovery of ideas, to develop new hypotheses for testing (what Chang terms “extension”). Epistemology, and culture – as well as potentially differences in the facets of reality itself that disciplines treat – have long been discussed as potential factors that make interdisciplinarity a complex endeavor (e.g. Mittelstrass 1993; Garforth & Kerr 2011) In their landmark book Callard and Fitzgerald (2016) offer an especially sustained and powerful look at the barriers to critical collaboration within interdisciplinary work, and ways that interdisciplinary can prove an unhelpful or counterproductive aspiration. I would identify four factors that, in the case of my work, lowered the barriers that normally block historians and sociologists from forms of interdisciplinarity felt to be mutually beneficial, and capable of contributing to complementary science These factors are: 1) Perceived problems in the reception and standing of the disorganized category; 2) My potential to offer “technical referred contributory expertise”; 3) Compatible philosophies of time between historical inquiry and attachment research; and 4) The distributed skills of colleagues.
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