The transformation of psychology: Influences of 19th-century philosophy, technology, and natural science.

The vocabulary of Anglophone psychology is shared with many other subjects. Previous research using the Oxford English Dictionary has shown that the subjects having the most words in common with psychology are biology, chemistry, computing, electricity, law, linguistics, mathematics, medicine, music, pathology, philosophy, and physics. The present study presents a database of the vocabularies of these 12 subjects that is similar to one previously constructed for psychology, enabling the histories of the vocabularies of these subjects to be compared with each other as well as with psychology. All subjects have a majority of word senses that are metaphorical. However, psychology is not among the most metaphorical of subjects, a distinction belonging to computing, linguistics, and mathematics. Indeed, the history of other subjects shows an increasing tendency to recycle old words and give them new, metaphorical meanings. The history of psychology shows an increasing tendency to invent new words rather than metaphorical senses of existing words. These results were discussed in terms of the degree to which psychology's vocabulary remains unsettled in comparison with other subjects. The possibility was raised that the vocabulary of psychology is in a state similar to that of chemistry prior to Lavoisier.

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Patterns of similarity and difference between the vocabularies of psychology and other subjects.

Benjafield¹

2014

“…Some of these subjects are very old, such as music and philosophy, the only representatives of the humanities in this list. However, in keeping with the fact that psychology came of age in the 19th century (Green, Shore, & Teo, 2001), the words that music and philosophy share with psychology tend to also have senses that are of that century. An interesting example is polymorphous, a musical sense of which was introduced in 1890, well before one of Freud's translators, A.…”

Section: Frequently Occurring Subjectsmentioning

confidence: 95%

The vocabulary of anglophone psychology in the context of other subjects.

Benjafield

2013

Anglophone psychology shares its vocabulary with several other subjects. Some of the more obvious subjects that have parts of their vocabulary in common with Anglophone psychology include biology (e.g., dominance), chemistry (e.g., isomorphism), philosophy (e.g., phenomenology), and theology (e.g., mediator). Using data from the Oxford English Dictionary as well as other sources, the present study explored the history of these common vocabularies, with a view to broadening our understanding of the relation between the history of psychology and the histories of other subjects. It turns out that there are at least 156 different subjects that share words with psychology. Those that have the most words in common with psychology are mathematics, biology, physics, medicine, chemistry, philosophy, law, music, linguistics, electricity, pathology, and computing. Words that have senses in other subjects and have their origins in ordinary language are used more frequently as PsycINFO keywords than words that were invented specifically for use in psychology. These and other results are interpreted in terms of the ordinary language roots of the vocabulary of Anglophone psychology and other subjects, the degree to which operational definitions have determined the meaning of the psychological senses of words, the role of the psychologist in interdisciplinary research, and the validity of psychological essentialism.

“…Date of birth ranged from 1632 to 1933, with date of death ranging between 1704 and 2014. Most writers (135 or 77%) were born in the 19th century, when psychology was beginning to come into its own as subject separate from other disciplines (Green, Shore, & Teo, 2001). Only 8 (5%) members of the sample were born before the 19th century, with 33 (19%) born in the 20th century.…”

Section: A Sample Of Authorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The digital history of the anglophone vocabulary of psychology: An exploration using Zipfian methods.

Benjafield¹

2016

The digital humanities are being applied with increasing frequency to the analysis of historically important texts. In this study, the methods of G. K. Zipf are used to explore the digital history of the vocabulary of psychology. Zipf studied a great many phenomena, from word frequencies to city sizes, showing that they tend to have a characteristic distribution in which there are a few cases that occur very frequently and many more cases that occur very infrequently. We find that the number of new words and word senses that writers contribute to the vocabulary of psychology have such a Zipfian distribution. Moreover, those who make the most contributions, such as William James, tend also to invent new metaphorical senses of words rather than new words. By contrast, those who make the fewest contributions tend to invent entirely new words. The use of metaphor makes a text easier for a reader to understand. While the use of new words requires more effort on the part of the reader, it may lead to more precise understanding than does metaphor. On average, new words and word senses become a part of psychology's vocabulary in the time leading up to World War I, suggesting that psychology was "finding its language" (Danziger, 1997) during this period.