About Psychology: Essays at the Crossroads of History, Theory, and Philosophy

2. Where History, Theory, and Philosophy Meet: The Biography of Psychological Objects

19 Chapter Two Where History, Theory, and Philosophy Meet THE BIOGRAPHY OF PSYCHOLOGICAL OBJECTS Kurt Danziger A RECENT VOLUME of contributions to the history of science appeared under the somewhat unusual title, The Biographies of Scientific Objects (Daston, 2000).The papers collected in this volume dealt with the historical trajectory of such “scientific objects” as cytoplasmic particles, the ether, culture, and economic value; in other words, objects from both the natural and the social sciences. Two of the contributions (Kaufmann, 2000; Goldstein, 2000) dealt with objects that have ended up in the domain of psychology, namely, dreams and the self. One might consider them examples of “psychological objects.” The imputation of biographies to “scientific objects” immediately raises two questions: what are scientific objects, and in what sense do they have biographies? To answer the second question first, the use of “biography” here is metaphorical.The familiar genre of biography traces the historical trajectory of individuals (Fancher, 1996). One might also trace the historical trajectory of a group of individuals, for example, humanistic psychologists or 20 About Psychology neobehaviorists. Furthermore, one can explore the historical trajectory of particular investigative practices, for example, introspection (Danziger, 1980; Lyons, 1986), psychological statistics (Danziger, 1987; Gigerenzer, 1993), experimentation (Danziger, 1990; Dehue, 1997, 2001), or forms of instrumentation (Benschop and Draaisma, 2000).Another kind of diachronic study, to which more attention has been paid recently, traces the historical trajectory of objects in the human sciences. Michel Foucault’s genealogical studies (1977a, 1977b) are relatively early, though controversial, examples of this genre that had some notable echoes in the history of psychology (Rose, 1996; Smith, 1992). More recently there have been other examples, such as the one mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, that really owe little or nothing to the influence of Foucault. What is meant by the “biography” of scientific objects is the historical study of how domains of phenomena come to be constituted as such, and how they are transformed into objects of scientific scrutiny and manipulation , how they grow and gain in saliency, and how they change with age and are eventually supplanted or given a new identity. In some cases, of course, the time of their demise has not yet arrived, so that one is describing the past of an object that is still very much with us. That applies, for example, to the two psychological objects mentioned above, dreams and the self. These are with us now, and taken for granted now, but that does not mean that they do not have a past that can be investigated. One reason it seems odd to speak of objects, scientific or otherwise, having biographies is that our histories have been so preoccupied with the acts of individual persons that the material at which these acts were directed has been degraded to the status of mere manipulanda. Individual historical actors may well see them as such, and it is quite proper for their biographers to follow them. But from the broader perspective of the historian, it is clear that the objects at which individual persons direct their efforts are more than just manipulanda.They may be that, as far as the individual working on them is concerned, but they also exist independently of any individual’s efforts. Moreover, they exist historically, that is, they change over time; the scientific object I encounter today is not the same object I would have encountered fifty years ago. The history of these changes is something quite different from the history of any one individual’s contribution to these changes, no matter how significant they were. WHAT ARE SCIENTIFIC OBJECTS? When one speaks of “scientific objects,” one makes use of the root meaning of “object” in several European languages. The meaning is one of putting against or throwing before (Daston, 2000, p.2). So scientific objects are the things that scientists confront as material to be explored, worked on, manipulated , and understood. They may believe these objects to be part of Where History, Theory, and Philosophy Meet 21 “nature,” the ultimate scientific object, but historically one only encounters these objects through the medium of texts, records, and instruments.Those encountered in texts, such as scientific articles or books, are appropriately referred to as “discursive objects.”They would include the gamut of scientific concepts, theories, and hypotheses. But because records, even...