In this article, I critically discuss the philosophy and psychology of science that are put forward by psychologists involved in the reform debates centered on the so-called "replication crisis" of the 2010s. Following the historian of psychology Laurence Smith, I describe the psychologists' conception of the science system and individual psychology of the scientist as an "indigenous epistemology." By first describing the indigenous epistemology of the reform movement, my aim is to constructively criticize it by making explicit how psychologists psychologize scientific psychology, and pointing to where such psychologizing needs more conceptual work, especially when it uses the work of philosophers of science. In their writing, the reformers tentatively subscribe to various positions on ways of knowing and functioning of the science system which exhibit fundamental inconsistencies. I suggest some ways for improving and deepening the discussion of epistemological positions that are taken in the replication crisis debates.
This study investigated the structure of psychological literature as represented by a corpus of 676,393 articles in the period from 1950 to 1999. The corpus was extracted from 1,269 journals indexed by PsycINFO. The data in our analysis consisted of the relevant terms mined from the titles and abstracts of all of the articles in the corpus. Based on the co-occurrences of these terms, we developed a series of chronological visualizations using a bibliometric software tool called VOSviewer. These visualizations produced a stable structure through the 5 decades under analysis, and this structure was analyzed as a data-mined proxy for the disciplinary formation of scientific psychology in the second part of the 20th century. Considering the stable structure uncovered by our term co-occurrence analysis and its visualization, we discuss it in the context of Lee Cronbach's "Two Disciplines of Scientific Psychology" (1957) and conventional history of 20th-century psychology's disciplinary formation and history of methods. Our aim was to provide a comprehensive digital humanities perspective on the large-scale structural development of research in English-language psychology from 1950 to 1999. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).
This study investigated the structure of psychological literature as represented by a corpus of 676,393 articles in the period from 1950 to 1999. The corpus was extracted from 1269 journals indexed by PsycINFO. The data in our analysis consists of the relevant terms mined from the titles and abstracts of all of the articles in the corpus. Based on the co-occurrences of these terms, we developed a series of chronological visualizations using a bibliometric software tool called VOSviewer. These visualizations produced a stable structure through the five decades under analysis, and this structure was analyzed as a data-mined proxy for the disciplinary formation of scientific psychology in the second part of the 20th century. Considering the stable structure uncovered by our term co-occurrence analysis and its visualization, we discuss it in the context of Lee Cronbach’s “two disciplines of scientific psychology” and conventional history of 20th century psychology’s disciplinary formation and history of methods. Our aim was to provide a comprehensive digital humanities perspective on the large-scale structural development of research in English-language psychology from 1950 to 1999.
This article aims to provide an overview of the historiography of psychology textbooks. In the overview, I identify and describe in detail two strands of writing histories of introductory textbooks of psychology and juxtapose them to provide an integrated historiography of textbooks in psychology. One strand is developed by teachers of psychology—first as a general approach for investigating textbooks in a pedagogical setting, and then later upgraded into a full history of psychology textbooks in America. The other strand follows a more familiar perspective of historians of science and historians of psychology who build on various post‐Kuhnian and post‐Foucauldian perspectives on textbooks. I make an argument for integrating these two views for a more comprehensive historiography of textbooks in psychology, recasting textbooks as objects of research and sources that are interesting sui generis for historians of psychology in their investigations.
The recent reform debates in psychological science, prompted by a widespread crisis of confidence, have exposed and destabilized the so-called myth of self-correction, that is, the problem that most scientists perceive their disciplines as self-correcting without engaging in actual practices that correct the scientific record. In this paper, building on the idea of self-correction as a myth, I propose another myth common to psychological science: the myth of self-organization. The myth of self-organization is the idea that scientific literature will organize itself into something the community adding to it would recognize as systematic knowledge; while the actual members of those communities do not engage in effective ways of organizing it. I argue for the existence of the myth self-organization by taking a historical look at how the scientific literature was construed by psychologists during the 20th century. In my view, the literature, and behaviors of scientists related to it, becomes a social institution exerting influence over the science it belongs to. I conclude with a critical discussion of self-organization through the debates about preregistration and theory formalization in psychology’s reform movement.
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