The Self-Presentation of a Discipline: History of Psychology in the United States between Pedagogy and Scholarship

Abstract

Criticism of scholarship in the history of psychology from historians and philosophers of science is certainly not new. In 1966, for example, Robert M. Young characterized the field as “an avocation with very uneven standards”, limited primarily to biographies of great psychologists, extended reviews of the literature and the uncritical chronicling of the rise of scientific psychology, based on a narrowly preconceived model of scientific development (1). Recent criticism has renewed all of these charges, particularly the last. Walter Weimer, a psychologist interested in the philosophy of science, accuses the writers of historical textbooks of ‘crypto-justificationism’, of describing the ‘evolution’ of their discipline as a continuously progressive path to the present. Weimer sees a close connection here between the history of psychology as traditionally written and the operationalist version of logical empiricism, the dominant philosophy of science in American psychology since the 1940s. In his view, both theorists and historians of psychology have continued to subscribe to a view of science which is “unbelievably out of date”, if not “the blackest of metatheoretical lies” (2).