Judith Rich Harris: The Miss Marple of Developmental Psychology

Abstract

ArgumentThis paper contributes to inquiries into scientific personae by employing a rhetorical approach. It analyzes the persuasive strategies of Judith Rich Harris in The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do (1998). Rhetorical analysis of Harris' self-fashioning in this remarkable best-seller and the reactions of the press to her persona demonstrates the resilience of specific archaic cultural repertoires for constructing scientific identities. While historical studies investigate how repertoires for scientific self-fashioning evolve through time, rhetoric reveals how identity models from an earlier age may be appropriated in the present.

Physiology and philhellenism in the late nineteenth century: The self-fashioning of Emil du Bois-Reymond

“…In order to substantiate our claim, we analyze in detail how Emil du Bois-Reymond mobilized philhellenic repertoires to construct the trustworthy scientific persona of the physiologist and ultimately boost the prestige of physiology (Daston and Sibum 2003;Wesseling 2004). We investigate how du Bois-Reymond not only adopted but also adapted philhellenic repertoires, building on previous investigations into rhetorical appropriations of discourse (Almási 2013;Bacon and McClish 2000;Campbell 1986;Lessl 2007;Shugart 1997).…”

“…7 Rowe observes that the mid-nineteenth-century teaching and research practices of Prussian mathematicians, too, were informed by ancient literature and neo-humanist concepts (Rowe 1998, 12). We consider rhetoric a crucial component of scientific practice in general and scientific self-fashioning in particular (Wesseling 2004). We understand "rhetoric" in the neutral sense of "the art of persuasion," rather than the negative sense of manipulative or deceitful use of language.…”

Constructing the persona of a Professional Historian. On Eileen Power's early career persona formation and her year in Paris, 1910-1911

“…My understanding of persona is slightly different, as I use it in the context of biography. In this, I follow historians of science such as Mineke Bosch and Elisabeth Wesseling, who foregrounded the role of gender and other categories of difference in constituting a scientific or scholarly persona (Bosch 2013;Bosch 2016;Wesseling 2003). I am similarly inspired by the work of Steven Shapin (1994), who argued that the performance of a dependable scientific self was a matter of bricolage involving many different roles and repertoires from both inside as well as outside academia.…”

Scientific Personas in Theory and Practice – Ways of Creating Scientific, Scholarly, and Artistic Identities

“…Firstly, our investigations are (following Shapin 1994, 2008, Goffman 1959, Butler 1990, Bosch 2013, 2018 based on the idea of a dynamic relationship between credibility in scientific assertions and the ways in which researchers perform and embody their identities as trusted and credible scientists, and how their personas are influenced and shaped by social categories such as class, gender, ethnicity and/or religious affiliation. Following the literary scholar Lies Wesseling's (2004) analysis of the developmental psychologist Judith Rich Harris, Bosch (2016) shows in an investigation of Dutch historians that rather than a historical cavalcade, it is more fruitful to explore scholarly personas as bricolage where existing, old repertoires, ideals and academic identities are performed, overlap and mix with new ideals, depending on the specific persons and contexts involved.…”