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Ash Coverb.Qxd Psychology’sPsychology’s TerritoriesTerritories Historical and Contemporary Perspectives from Different Disciplines Edited by Mitchell Ash • Thomas Sturm Psychology’s Territories Historical and Contemporary Perspectives from Different Disciplines bB PAGE PROOFS PAGE PROOFS Psychology’s Territories Historical and Contemporary Perspectives from Different Disciplines bB Editors Mitchell G. Ash UniversityPAGE of PROOFS Vienna, Austria Thomas Sturm Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Germany Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities LAWRENCE ERLBAUM ASSOCIATES, PUBLISHERS 2007 Mahwah, New Jersey London Contents Foreword ix Paul B. Baltes About the Contributors xv Members of the Interdisciplinary Working Group xxiv “Psychological Thought and Practice in Historical and Interdisciplinary Perspective” List of IllustrationsPAGE PROOFS xxvi Introduction Psychological Thought and Practice—Historical 1 and Interdisciplinary Perspectives Mitchell G. Ash Part I. Psychological Concepts in Different Domains: Shared or Divided Meanings? Attention 1 The “Fluctuations of Attention” Between Physiology, 31 Experimental Psychology and Psycho-technical Application Sven Lüders v vi > CONTENTS Intention and Will 2 Causality, Intentionality, and the Causation of Intentions: 51 The Problematic Boundary Jochen Brandtstädter 3 A Critique of Free Will: Psychological Remarks on a Social 67 Institution Wolfgang Prinz 4 Freedom and Science! The Presumptuous Metaphysics 89 of Free-Will Disdainers Michael Heidelberger 5 Governing by Will: The Shaping of the Will in Self-Help 111 Manuals Sabine Maasen The Self 6 Scientific Selves: Discerning the Subject and the Experimenter 129 in Experimental Psychology in the United States, 1900–1935 Jill Morawski 7 The Self: ColonizationPAGE in Psychology PROOFS and Society 149 Kenneth J. Gergen 8 The Self Between Philosophy and Psychology: 169 The Case of Self-Deception Thomas Sturm Part II. Roles of Instruments in Psychological Research Instruments as Organizers of Research Practices 9 What Is a Psychological Instrument? 195 Horst Gundlach 10 Asking Questions: Measurement in the Social Sciences 225 Fritz Strack and Norbert Schwarz CONTENTS * vii Instruments at Disciplinary Frontiers: Psychology and the Neurosciences 11 Can the Psyche be Visualized by the Neurosciences? 251 Gerhard Roth, Thomas F. Münte, and Hans-Jochen Heinze 12 Brain Imaging Methods and the Study of Cognitive 275 Processes: Potentials and Limits Rainer M. Bösel 13 Mind Reading, Brain Mirror, Neuroimaging: 287 Insight Into the Brain or the Mind? Michael I. Hagner Instruments as Metaphors for Psychological Objects 14 Tools = Theories = Data? On Some Circular Dynamics 305 in Cognitive Science Gerd Gigerenzer and Thomas Sturm Conclusion 15 Reflexivity Revisited: Changing 343 Psychology’s Frame of Reference James H. CapshewPAGE PROOFS Index of Persons 371 Index of Subjects xxx PAGE PROOFS Foreword Paul B. Baltes PAGE PROOFS This volume is the final publication of the Interdisciplinary Working Group, “Psychological Thought and Practice in Historical and Interdis- ciplinary Perspective,” sponsored by the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities from October 2000 until March 2004. Toset the stage for this volume, I would like to make a few observations about the history and workings of the group. Interdisciplinarity and historical analyses are at the center of the work of most major academies of sciences around the world. This cer- tainly has been true for the primary sponsor of this Working Group, the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities or, in brief, the BBAW. Let me begin by expressing the gratitude of the Working Group to the Berlin-Brandenburg of Sciences not only for supporting this enterprise with financial and infrastructural resources, including funds for conferences and stipends for graduate students, but especially also for the intellectual context, ambience, and input that the structure ix x > FOREWORD and membership of the BBAW have provided. It is part of this Academy that any project undergoes careful planning and evaluations with partic- ipation of groups at several levels of discourse. Aside from this intellec- tual support, it’s especially notable that generous financial support continued, although the finances of the BBAW came under severe con- straints due to a budget crisis of the city-state of Berlin which occurred during the life of the group. In light of these budgetary constraints, we are also very grateful to the German Academy of Science Leopoldina and the Heckmann-Wentzel-Stiftung, which generously provided additional funds to help cover impending budgetary shortfalls and to enable espe- cially the younger participating scholars in the group to move forward with their work. At least two other institutions deserve mention and our gratitude for their cooperative spirit in launching and completing this project: the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and the Max Planck Insti- tute for History of Science (in particular its co-director Hans-Jörg Rheinberger). At critical moments they made two of the projects of the Working Group parts of their respective intellectual agendas. Such co-sponsorships speak to the high level of respect and collegial collabo- ration that the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humani- ties enjoys as an institution. By giving away its intellectual and financial resources, it also receives. The Working Group came to life in the late 1990s, when a Planning Group of the BBAW for the Millennium Year 2000 met, of which I was a member. This PlanningPAGE Group met PROOFS several times to explore special projects with interdisciplinary character and a connection with Berlin, intended in part also to commemorate the three-hundredth anniver- sary of the founding of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. At that time, and with the informal advice of Mitchell Ash, I suggested that the Acad- emy consider a project on the external contextual and interdisciplin- ary connections of psychology. I am not an historian of psychology. However, when presenting the idea to that Committee, I mentioned the role of Berlin in the history of psychology, and also two additional factors that could serve to legitimate such a project. It was my first impression that present-day German academies of science had not acknowledged the increasing presence of the disci- pline of psychology under the umbrella of the sciences, broadly de- fined. There were no special sections in these academies devoted to that discipline. Across the German republic, and not only in the BBAW or the Leopoldina, there were few members of academies of sciences who were psychologists. I thought that these millennium activities might contribute in a small way to remedying this apparent historical lag in recognizing that psychology had arrived as a serious discipline. FOREWORD * xi My second argument was more intuitive than evidence-based. My in- tuition was that this relative neglect was the more surprising since it sug- gested a departure from the past. Not being a historian of psychology, my impression was that this relative lack of representation of psychol- ogy in German academies of sciences was not true for the previous, the nineteenth, century.With my limited knowledge of the historical state of affairs, I speculated that during these earlier periods, the subject matter of psychology seemed to figure much more prominently on the agen- das, for instance, of the mother academy of the BBAW, the Prussian Academy of Sciences. However, when contemplating this possibility of a marked discrep- ancy between the significance of psychology in modern times and its seeming decline in German academies, I was enough of a realist to won- der whether there would be solid evidence for my supposition if the matter were studied more carefully. At the same time, and after conver- sations with historically better-informed colleagues such as the late Friedhart Klix and Wolfgang Schönpflug, I was reasonably sure that intu- ition had some basis in fact. As to the importance of interdisciplinary perspectives, I knew, having just completed co-editing, with Neil Smelser, the International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioral Sci- ences, which contains several chapters on the history of these fields, that there was more to the evolution of a given discipline than developments within the discipline itself. Social, institutional, and professional con- texts did matter—that was the argument in most of the relevant chapters in that encyclopedia.PAGE PROOFS In any case, when I presented this rationale to the Year 2000 Planning Group and pointed to Mitchell Ash as a possible leader, there was sup- port. With no other psychologists present, who could object, based on substantive grounds? Of added significance was that the Millennium Planning Group liked the focus on Berlin, and Berlin indeed had been one of the centers where experimental psychology had been estab- lished in Germany. Therefore, the Planning Committee supported the idea of establishing a working group, the task of which would be to study the historical, contextual, and interdisciplinary factors that shaped the formal and informal evolution of psychology in the last cen- tury. Berlin and Germany were expected to be at the core of the group’s work, and the historical research was to concentrate on the period from 1850 to 1950, but there would be no objection if the activities were to include a larger context and more recent times as well. Launching the Working Group was facilitated
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