科学心理学的观念及其范畴含义解析

关于心理学作为科学的观念或理想普遍兴起于19世纪下半叶,正是对这个观念或理想的百余年历史的追求和实践,塑造了现代意义上的科学心理学及其历史作为整体的基本面貌,并决定了科学心理学观念的两种范畴含义及其差异,具体表现为在心理学作为科学的整体背景中它的现象学传统或道路与它的科学主义传统或道路之间的对峙关系。历史分析表明,对科学心理学观念的范畴含义的理解和实现,与关于科学观念的范畴含义的探索和理解是密切关联、相互制约的。以人类思维的理论形态的历史转换为背景,我们发现,关于心理学作为科学的观念,只有实现为现象学意义上的科学,才能真正实现它自身;但主流的科学主义传统则要把心理学实现为自然科学,由此实现的科学心理学,只能是对心理学作为科学的观念的异化。     

Must the Scientific Realist be a Rationalist?

Marc Alspector-Kelly claims that Bas van Fraassen’s primary challenge to the scientific realist is for the realist to find a way to justify the use of some mode of inference that takes him from the world of observables to knowledge of the world of unobservables without thereby abandoning empiricism. It is argued that any effort to justify such an “inferential wand” must appeal either to synthetic a priori or synthetic a posteriori knowledge. This disjunction turns into a dilemma for the empirically-minded realist as either disjunct leads to unwanted consequences. In this paper, I split the horns of this dilemma by arguing that the realist can justify one particular such mode of inference – abduction – without committing himself to rationalism. The realist may justify this mode of inference by appealing to the analytic a priori axioms of the probability calculus. I show that Peter Lipton’s tripartite defense of abduction constitutes such a method of justification.     

‘Historicising Common Sense’

This essay is an expanded set of comments on the social psychology papers written for the special issue on History and Social Psychology. It considers what social psychology, and particularly the theory of social representations, might offer historians working on similar problems, and what historical methods might offer social psychology. The social history of thinking has been a major theme in twentieth and twenty-first century historical writing, represented most recently by the genre of ??cultural history??. Cultural history and the theory of social representations have common ancestors in early twentieth-century social science. Nevertheless, the two lines of research have developed in different ways and are better seen as complementary than similar. The theory of social representations usefully foregrounds issues, like social division and change over time, that cultural history relegates to the background. But for historians, the theory of social representations seems oddly fixated on comparing the thought styles associated with positivist science and ??common sense??. Using historical analysis, this essay tries to dissect the core opposition ??science : common sense?? and argues for a more flexible approach to comparing modes of thought.     

V. M. BEKHTEREV IN RUSSIAN CHILD SCIENCE, 1900S–1920S: “OBJECTIVE PSYCHOLOGY”/“REFLEXOLOGY” AS A SCIENTIFIC MOVEMENT

In the early 20^th century the child population became a major focus of scientific, professional and public interest. This led to the crystallization of a dynamic field of child science, encompassing developmental and educational psychology, child psychiatry and special education, school hygiene and mental testing, juvenile criminology and the anthropology of childhood. This article discusses the role played in child science by the eminent Russian neurologist and psychiatrist Vladimir Mikhailovich Bekhterev. The latter's name is associated with a distinctive program for transforming the human sciences in general and psychology in particular that he in the 1900s labelled “objective psychology” and from the 1910s renamed “reflexology.” The article examines the equivocal place that Bekhterev's “objective psychology” and “reflexology” occupied in Russian/Soviet child science in the first three decades of the 20^th century. While Bekhterev's prominence in this field is beyond doubt, analysis shows that “objective psychology” and “reflexology” had much less success in mobilizing support within it than certain other movements in this arena (for example, “experimental pedagogy” in the pre‐revolutionary era); it also found it difficult to compete with the variety of rival programs that arose within Soviet “pedology” during the 1920s. However, this article also demonstrates that the study of child development played a pivotal role in Bekhterev's program for the transformation of the human sciences: it was especially important to his efforts to ground in empirical phenomena and in concrete research practices a new ontology of the psychological, which, the article argues, underpinned “objective psychology”/“reflexology” as a transformative scientific movement.     

On the theoretical foundations of Soviet psychology

Conclusion We are now in a position to examine the claim that Pavlovian physiology and Marxist-Leninist philosophy form two complementary systems.There is certainly a similarity between the Leninist theory of reflection and Pavlov's theory of higher nervous activity. Both present so-called psychic phenomena as a reaction of the organism to the stimuli of the outer world and both insist that this reflection is not a passive reception of impressions but is an active response on the part of the organism.Again both systems are monist; they are united in excluding the possibility of having recourse to a non-material substance as the basis for psychic phenomena. But for Pavlov this exclusion is a scientific axiom while for Marxism-Leninism it is founded on philosophical materialism. However, the most important difference between Pavlov's theories and Marxism-Leninism on this point is that Pavlov's approach to psychic is fundamentally mechanistic and reductionist whereas that of Marxism-Leninism is dialectical and consequently anti-reductionist and anti-mechanist. Soviet psychology is, in consequence, founded partly on a mechanist system which is not materialist in the full sense of the word, and partly on a materialist system which is definitely not mechanist. From this point of view there is a definite discrepancy between the two traditions on which Soviet psychology is founded and which goes a long way towards explaining many of the inconsistencies in Soviet psychological theory.     

'Courage Not Under Fire': Realism,Anti-realism,and the Epistemological Virtues

This article offers a critical perspective on two lines of thought in recent epistemology and philosophy of science, namely Michael Dummett?s anti-realist approach to issues of truth, meaning, and knowledge and Bas van Fraassen?s influential programme of ?constructive empiricism?. While not denying the salient differences between them (the one a metaphysical doctrine premised on logicolinguistic considerations, the other a thesis primarily concerned with the scope and limits of empirical inquiry) it shows how they converge on a sceptical outlook concerning the realist claim that truth might always transcend the restrictions of some given (or indeed some future best-possible) state of knowledge. The author puts the case that such sceptical arguments, if followed through consistently, must involve giving up all claim to account for our knowledge of the growth of scientific knowledge. He also takes issue with Dummett?s idea of truth as nothing more than a matter of ?warranted assertibility? and with van Fraassen?s likewise verificationist conception of empirical warrant as the most we can have by way of epistemic justification. Thus it is wrong to suppose that the realist is merely indulging in a display of ?courage not under fire? when she assumes ontological commitments in excess of the observational data. This disavowal of realism in favour of a theory which ?saves the (empirical) appearances? has a less-than-distinguished prehistory in the range of compromise strategies adopted by upholders of a dominant metaphysics or world-view, starting out with the orthodox Catholic attempt to defuse the implications of the heliocentric hypothesis advanced by Copernicus and Galileo. Such theological motives are nowadays not so prominent although ? it is suggested ? they do emerge at certain points in Dummett?s writing. More constructively, this article presents a case for objectivism with regard to scientific truth and also for inference to the best causal explanation ? on both the micro- and the macrophysical scale ? as the only approach with an adequate claim to make sense of the history of advancements in scientific knowledge to date.     

中国神话中的具身心理学思想探索

西方“具身认知”心理学与赋存在中国文化里的以“天人合一”为核心的“体知”心理学思想息息相通, 而中国文化又有其独异于西方文化的“身体”智慧。文化的源头实为神话。追根溯源, 本文主要从具身认知的视阈中将中西方神话中“身体”的角色两相比照, 首先从本体论维度以现象学诠释的方法来描述神话的身体母体是如何生成的, 并以天地开辟神话、万物肇始神话和人类起源神话为例揭示中国“身体”的本体论特色—— 一元论; 其次再从空间维度以概念隐喻的理论来剖析神话的身体现象学场域是如何延展的, 并从物我同一角度、天人交感角度和人神相通角度来彰显中国“身体”的空间维度特色——气论; 最后再从时间维度以社会建构理论来解构神话的身体是如何在时间场域中流变的; 并从社会、文化和历史三个层面来表达中国“身体”的时间维度特色——易论。通过从中国神话故事中挖掘中国传统文化中独有的“具身智慧”, 以期为建立中国人自己的科学心理学起抛砖引玉之用。     

Political Psychology as Discipline and Resource

Around the 1960s, political psychology was developed as a field of knowledge that attempted to interrelate scientific psychology and political phenomena. However, social and academic conditions are very different today. More and more, political psychology is becoming a protagonist, as much in the internal context of psychology as in the external context of its relations with the social world. Thus, political psychology can now be seen as a resource relating psychological knowledge to social practice, and relating psychological processes to social action. Political psychology is the interface that puts psychology and society in contact. The development of political psychology in Spain provides an example of this alternative view of the field.     

‘Introspectionism’ and the mythical origins of scientific psychology

According to the majority of the textbooks, the history of modern, scientific psychology can be tidily encapsulated in the following three stages. Scientific psychology began with a commitment to the study of mind, but based on the method of introspection. Watson rejected introspectionism as both unreliable and effete, and redefined psychology, instead, as the science of behaviour. The cognitive revolution, in turn, replaced the mind as the subject of study, and rejected both behaviourism and a reliance on introspection. This paper argues that all three stages of this history are largely mythical. Introspectionism was never a dominant movement within modern psychology, and the method of introspection never went away. Furthermore, this version of psychology’s history obscures some deep conceptual problems, not least surrounding the modern conception of “behaviour,” that continues to make the scientific study of consciousness seem so weird.     

Knowledge Without Contexts? A Foucauldian Analysis of E.L. Thorndike’s Positivist Educational Research

The article discusses the allegedly decontextualized and ahistorical traits in positivist educational research and curriculum by examining its emergence in early twentieth-century empirical education. Edward Lee Thorndike’s educational psychology is analyzed as a case in point. It will be shown that Thorndike’s positivist educational psychology stressed the need to account for the reality of schooling and to produce knowledge of the actual contexts of education. Furthermore, a historical analysis informed by Michel Foucault’s history of the human sciences reveals that there are multiple historical temporalities involved in Thorndike’s educational psychology. This allows a new critical angle to be taken on positivist educational research. The question concerning the contexts of empirical education turns to examining the way the conditions of possibility for scientific knowledge in education involve practices of contextualization as well as paradoxical and self-defeating elements.     

再论我国心理学的分化现象

我国心理学正处于分化过程之中,其中两个明显的例证就是:基础心理学与应用及人文心理学的分化,以及对心理学研究和服务成果的评价标准摆脱SCI的束缚.这背后深层的原因在于,若以科学哲学认识论的视角,人类的知识大致可分为可靠有用的知识和无用虚幻(伪科学)的知识,可靠知识又可进一步分为科学的知识和非科学的知识.心理学从诞生之日起...     

An introduction to Chinese psychology--its historical roots until the present day

In this article the authors review the historical development of Chinese psychology. China's long history as a country immersed in the study of psychological issues is well known and has had an influence on developments in the field of psychology around the world. Modern Chinese psychology, however, was imported from the West and the Soviet Union and has been closely linked with China's social environment and changes of national policy. Today Chinese psychology is still in a preliminary stage. Despite difficulties that may impede its future development, the importance of psychology in the modernization of China has been widely recognized.     

Living in Harmony: Nominalism and the Explanationist Argument for Realism

According to the indispensability argument, scientific realists ought to believe in the existence of mathematical entities, due to their indispensable role in theorising. Arguably the crucial sense of indispensability can be understood in terms of the contribution that mathematics sometimes makes to the super‐empirical virtues of a theory. Moreover, the way in which the scientific realist values such virtues, in general, and draws on explanatory virtues, in particular, ought to make the realist ontologically committed to abstracta. This paper shows that this version of the indispensability argument glosses over crucial detail about how the scientific realist attempts to generate justificatory commitment to unobservables. The kind of role that the Platonist attributes to mathematics in scientific reasoning is compatible with nominalism, as far as scientific realist arguments are concerned.     

中文语境下的“心理”和“心理学”

“心”或“心理”等词语在汉语中有相当长的历史,对这些词语的理解反映了中国人关于“心理”的认识。中文的“心”往往不是指一种身体器官而是指人的思想、意念、情感、性情等,故“心理学”这三个汉字有极大的包容性。任何学科都摆脱不了社会文化的作用,中国心理学亦曾受到意识形态、科学主义和大众常识等方面的影响。近年中国学者对心理学自身的问题进行了反思。从某种意义上说,中国人对“心理”和“心理学”的理解或许有助于心理学的整合,并与其他国家的心理学一道发展出真正的人类心理学     

Understanding the “cognitive revolution” in psychology

In this paper it is argued that the “cognitive revolution” in psychology is not best represented either as a Kuhnian “paradigm shift,” or as a movement from an instrumentalist to a realist conception of psychological theory, or as a continuous evolution out of more “liberalized” forms of behaviorism, or as a return to the form of “structuralist” psychology practiced by Wundt and Titchener. It is suggested that the move from behaviorism to cognitivism is best represented in terms of the replacement of (operationally defined) “intervening variables” by genuine “hypothetical constructs” possessing cognitive “surplus meaning,” and that the “cognitive revolution” of the 1950s continued a cognitive tradition that can be traced back to the 1920s. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Deflationary Metaphysics and the Construction of Laboratory Mice

The deflationist turn in recent philosophy of science has attracted attention, in part because it promises to end debates about scientific realism. In its recommendation that we leave metaphysics behind to look at practice, deflationism constructs itself as an end-of-philosophy philosophy, accepting knowledge and the evidence for it at face value. Meanwhile, recent work in philosophy, sociology, and history of science that has focused on practice has underscored problems of such an acceptance: much scientific knowledge is not straightforwardly about the natural world, and we would not want it to be. A concrete example from the history of comparative psychology illustrates this point, and illustrates the value of interpretive work on scientific knowledge. A focus on practice, then, does not end metaphysical discussion, but rather regrounds and reshapes it.     

AMERICAN MISSIONARIES TRANSMITTING SCIENCE IN EARLY TWENTIETH‐CENTURY EASTERN TIBET

This article is based on the author's extensive research on the missionaries to Tibet from the Disciples of Christ (Christian Church) USA, and discusses various missionary efforts to transmit scientific and practical knowledge such as medicine, building, and agriculture in Eastern Tibet from 1904–1919. It shows that American missionaries played a prominent and distinctive role in the dissemination of scientific and practical knowledge as a result of their hard work and wisdom. In this sense, they made an important contribution to the development of Tibetan society and the modernization movement in early twentieth‐century Eastern Tibet.     

Soul in the world: symbolic culture as the medium for psyche

Whilst the loss of a sense of living connection with the material world is mainly associated with the scientific revolution in seventeenth century Europe, it can be traced back to Plato's introduction of a hierarchy between soul and body. Jung's attempted solution to this – esse in anima – is ingenious but maintains the Cartesian split by which the aliveness of the world is reduced to a projection of psychic forces (the archetypes). An alternative approach is proposed, rooted in the Aristotelean emphasis on practical activity that sees the soul as a function of our way of being in the world. Human cognition is extended and distributed by our social and material engagement with the world, especially via collective representations whose symbolic character is constitutive of the reality of the world in which we live. Despite the dominance of ‘scientific Cartesian’ representations in the modern Western world, there remain numerous instances of participation mystique that cannot be captured by the Cartesian notion of projection. These indicate an opening to ways of being in the world that may lead us out of the impasse of the Cartesian matrix.     

Choosing the realist framework

There has been an empiricist tradition in the core of Logical Positivism/Empiricism, starting with Moritz Schlick and ending in Herbert Feigl (via Hans Reichenbach), according to which the world of empiricism need not be a barren place devoid of all the explanatory entities posited by scientific theories. The aim of this paper is to articulate this tradition and to explore ways in which its key elements can find a place in the contemporary debate over scientific realism. It presents a way empiricism can go for scientific realism without metaphysical anxiety, by developing an indispensability argument for the adoption of the realist framework. This argument, unlike current realist arguments, has a pragmatic ring to it: there is no ultimate argument for the adoption of the realist framework.     

On the Knowledge of Politics and the Politics of Knowledge: How a Social Representations Approach Helps Us Rethink the Subject of Political Psychology

Fifty years ago, Serge Moscovici first outlined a theory of social representations. In this article, we attempt to discuss and to contextualize research that has been inspired by this original impetus from the particular angle of its relevance to political psychology. We argue that four defining components of social representations need to be taken into account, and that these elements need to be articulated with insights from the social identity tradition about the centrality of self and group constructions in order to develop original insights into political psychological phenomena. First, social representations are shared knowledge, and the way interpretations of the world are collectively elaborated is critical to the way people are able to act within the world. Second, social representations are meta‐knowledge, which implies that what people assume relevant others know, think, or value is part of their own interpretative grid, and that collective behavior can often be influenced more powerfully at the level of meta‐representations than of intimate beliefs. Third, social representations are enacted communication, which means that social influence is exerted by the factors that constrain social practices as much as by the discourse that interprets these practices. Fourth, social representations are world‐making assumptions: collective understandings do not only reflect existing realities but often bring social reality into being. Put together, these four components provide a distinctive theoretical perspective on power, resistance and conflict. The added conceptual value of this perspective is illustrated by showing how it allows revisiting ethnic conflict in the former Yugoslavia. We conclude with implications for research practices and discuss how the proposed model of social representations invites us to define new priorities and challenges for the methods used to study political psychological phenomena.