Cértainty and uncertainty sciences: Marking the boundaries of psychology in introductory textbooks

Social Studies of Science

Volumn 31, Issue 3, 2001, Pages 389-416

  Smyth, Mary M ^a  

^a LANCASTER UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Autonomous; Facts; Modalities; Statistics

Indexed keywords

EID: 0035536123     PISSN: 03063127     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/030631201031003003     Document Type: Article

References (51)

1. Cértainty and Uncertainty Sciences: Marking the Boundaries of Psychology in Introductory Textbooks Mary M. Smyth ABSTRACT Introductory textbooks in biology, physiology and statistics present material to the student without origins or qualifications. That is, they present autonomous facts, creating the reality of science. Psychology textbooks do not do this when they present psychology. Instead, they give evidence and they qualify and hedge the claims made. Psychology texts write autonomous facts of biology and statistics, just as biology and statistics texts do, but move away from autonomous fact-writing when material is recognized as psychological. The boundaries between disciplines are created in the modalities of the statements in the textbooks. The 'fact' status of material on the activities of neurons in colour vision and feature detectors changes when this material is written as physiology in physiology textbooks and when it is written as psychology in psychology textbooks. Statistics, biology and physiology are presented as 'certainty sciences' both in the home discipline textbooks and in psychology textbooks, but acceptance of material as psychological leads to the presentation of uncertainty. 'Certainty writing' in psychology is not simply a reflection of a users' 'certainty trough', but of textbook writing practices within the certainty sciences themselves. The failure of psychology textbooks to present autonomous facts of psychology is not an indication that no well fabricated knowledge exists in psychology, but rather that psychology habits of textbook writing involve both relevance and evidence. Maintaining relevance to everyday experience but distinguishing the claims of science from the claims of the everyday produces a form of textbook writing which does not present certainty, but which presents evidence instead. Keywords autonomous, facts, modalities, statistics
2. See Greg Myers, 'Textbooks and the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge', English for Specific Purposes Journal, Vol. 11 (1992), 3-17. See also Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 176.
3. See Greg Myers, 'Textbooks and the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge', English for Specific Purposes Journal, Vol. 11 (1992), 3-17. See also Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 176.
4. Bruno Latour, Science in Action (Milton Keynes, Bucks., UK: Open University Press, 1987). On page 15, in sketching the general shape of his book, Latour begins: 'we start with a textbook sentence which is devoid of any trace of fabrication, construction or ownership'.
5. Thomas S. Kuhn, 'The Function of Dogma in Scientific Research', Symposium on the History of Science (Oxford, July 1961), in Alistair C. Crombie (ed.), Scientific Change (London: Heinemann, 1963), 347-69. Kuhn said : 'scientific education remains a relatively dogmatic initiation into a pre-established problem solving tradition that the student is neither invited nor equipped to evaluate' ibid., 351) .
6. Thomas S. Kuhn, 'The Function of Dogma in Scientific Research', Symposium on the History of Science (Oxford, July 1961), in Alistair C. Crombie (ed.), Scientific Change (London: Heinemann, 1963), 347-69. Kuhn said : 'scientific education remains a relatively dogmatic initiation into a pre-established problem solving tradition that the student is neither invited nor equipped to evaluate' ibid., 351) .
7. Thomas S. Kuhn, 'The Function of Dogma in Scientific Research', Symposium on the History of Science (Oxford, July 1961), in Alistair C. Crombie (ed.), Scientific Change (London: Heinemann, 1963), 347-69. Kuhn said : 'scientific education remains a relatively dogmatic initiation into a pre-established problem solving tradition that the student is neither invited nor equipped to evaluate' (ibid., 351) .
8. Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2nd edn, 1986). In the notes (ibid., 90), 'modality' is defined first by reference to the Oxford Dictionary, as 'a proposition in which the predicates are affirmed or denied of the subject with any kind of qualification', and second as having a more modern sense of being a statement about another statemen t.
9. Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2nd edn, 1986). In the notes (ibid., 90), 'modality' is defined first by reference to the Oxford Dictionary, as 'a proposition in which the predicates are affirmed or denied of the subject with any kind of qualification', and second as having a more modern sense of being a statement about another statemen t.
10. 'When facts are well fabricated . . . facts are autonomous': quotation taken from the diagram in Bruno Latour, Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 274. This is part of Latour's argument that 'construction' and 'autonomous reality' are synonyms.
11. I have recently presented material from chapters on memory and social interaction which demonstrates the presence of evidence, qualifications and reference in psychology statements in textbooks: see Mary M. Smyth, 'The Autonomy of Facts in Psychology: Evidence from Introductory Textbooks', Theory and Psychology (2001), in press.
12. Peter Stringer, 'Prefacing Social Psychology: A Textbook Example', in Ian Parker and John Shotter (eds), Deconstructing Social Psychology (London: Routledge, 1990), 17-32; Frances Cherry, The 'Stubborn Particulars ' of Social Psychology: Essays on the Research Process (London: Routledge, 1995), esp. 1-15.
13. Peter Stringer, 'Prefacing Social Psychology: A Textbook Example', in Ian Parker and John Shotter (eds), Deconstructing Social Psychology (London: Routledge, 1990), 17-32; Frances Cherry, The 'Stubborn Particulars ' of Social Psychology: Essays on the Research Process (London: Routledge, 1995), esp. 1-15.
14. See Ian Lubek, 'Social Psychology Textbooks: An Historical and Social Psychological Analysis of Conceptual Filtering, Consensus Formation, Career Gatekeeping and Conservatism in Science', in Hendrikus J. Stam, Leendert P. Mos, W. Thorngate and B. Kaplan (eds), Recent Trends in Theoretical Psychology, Vol. 3 (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1993), 359-78. See also Hendrikus J. Stam, Ian Lubek and H. Lorraine Radkte, 'Repopulating Social Psychology Texts: Disembodied "Subjects" and Embodied Subjectivity', in Betty M. Bayer and John Shotter (eds), Reconstructing the Psychological Subject (London: Sage, 1998), 153-86.
15. See Ian Lubek, 'Social Psychology Textbooks: An Historical and Social Psychological Analysis of Conceptual Filtering, Consensus Formation, Career Gatekeeping and Conservatism in Science', in Hendrikus J. Stam, Leendert P. Mos, W. Thorngate and B. Kaplan (eds), Recent Trends in Theoretical Psychology, Vol. 3 (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1993), 359-78. See also Hendrikus J. Stam, Ian Lubek and H. Lorraine Radkte, 'Repopulating Social Psychology Texts: Disembodied "Subjects" and Embodied Subjectivity', in Betty M. Bayer and John Shotter (eds), Reconstructing the Psychological Subject (London: Sage, 1998), 153-86.
16. Or, to draw on Nikolas Rose, I prefer to ask: 'What, if anything, distinguishes the "constructions" in which psychology has participated from those which have been constitutive of other fields of scientific knowledge?': Nikolas Rose, Inventing Ourselves: Psychology, Personhood and Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 51.
17. See Thomas F. Gieryn, 'Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-science: Strains and Interests in Professional Ideologies of Scientists', American Sociological Review, Vol. 48 (1983), 781-95; Gieryn, 'Boundaries of Science', in Sheila Jasanoff, Gerald E. Markle, James C. Petersen and Trevor Pinch (eds), Handbook of Science and Technology Studies (London & Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage/4S, 1995), 393-443; and Gieryn, Cultural Boundaries of Science: Credibility on the Line (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999). See also Steven Shapin, 'Discipline and Bounding: The History and Sociology of Science as seen through the Externalism-Internalism Debate', History of Science, Vol. 30 (1992), 279-327.
18. See Thomas F. Gieryn, 'Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-science: Strains and Interests in Professional Ideologies of Scientists', American Sociological Review, Vol. 48 (1983), 781-95; Gieryn, 'Boundaries of Science', in Sheila Jasanoff, Gerald E. Markle, James C. Petersen and Trevor Pinch (eds), Handbook of Science and Technology Studies (London & Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage/4S, 1995), 393-443; and Gieryn, Cultural Boundaries of Science: Credibility on the Line (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999). See also Steven Shapin, 'Discipline and Bounding: The History and Sociology of Science as seen through the Externalism-Internalism Debate', History of Science, Vol. 30 (1992), 279-327.
19. See Thomas F. Gieryn, 'Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-science: Strains and Interests in Professional Ideologies of Scientists', American Sociological Review, Vol. 48 (1983), 781-95; Gieryn, 'Boundaries of Science', in Sheila Jasanoff, Gerald E. Markle, James C. Petersen and Trevor Pinch (eds), Handbook of Science and Technology Studies (London & Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage/4S, 1995), 393-443; and Gieryn, Cultural Boundaries of Science: Credibility on the Line (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999). See also Steven Shapin, 'Discipline and Bounding: The History and Sociology of Science as seen through the Externalism-Internalism Debate', History of Science, Vol. 30 (1992), 279-327.
20. See Thomas F. Gieryn, 'Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-science: Strains and Interests in Professional Ideologies of Scientists', American Sociological Review, Vol. 48 (1983), 781-95; Gieryn, 'Boundaries of Science', in Sheila Jasanoff, Gerald E. Markle, James C. Petersen and Trevor Pinch (eds), Handbook of Science and Technology Studies (London & Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage/4S, 1995), 393-443; and Gieryn, Cultural Boundaries of Science: Credibility on the Line (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999). See also Steven Shapin, 'Discipline and Bounding: The History and Sociology of Science as seen through the Externalism-Internalism Debate', History of Science, Vol. 30 (1992), 279-327.
21. See Kurt Danziger, Naming the Mind: How Psychology Found its Language (London: Sage, 1997), Chapter 10, 181-93.
22. I have argued this in my paper on autonomy and evidence (op. cit. note 6). See also Michael Billig, 'Rhetoric of Social Psychology', in Parker & Shotter (eds), op. cit. note 7, 47-60. Billig suggests that contemporary social psychology constitutes an argument against common sense. Ordinary people can draw on their own experience and collective knowledge to answer social psychological questions, but this is not science and science is needed to show whether common sense is right or wrong. I would extend the argument between psychology and some version of everyday experience or lay categories to cover much (perhaps all) of psychology as it is written in textbooks.
23. 'What kind of grounds have I for trusting text-books of experimental physics? I have no grounds for not trusting them. And I trust them. I know how such books are produced - or rather, I believe I know': Ludwig Wittgenstein (ed. G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright), On Certainty (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969), point 600, page 79.
24. Latour's dissenter who tries to argue with endorphin would have to take on classic claims in physiology, pharmacology, peptide chemistry, optics, the equipment in the laboratory, the equipment in all previous laboratories, the honesty of the present research group and the honesty of all previous connected research groups: Latour, op. cit. note 2, 77-78. Steven Shapin's flirtation with scepticism in relation to cytosine and DNA leads to the conclusion that the rôle of individual pieces of empirical work in the traditional warranting of scientific statements could not produce anything recognizable as scientific knowledge without the morally textured relations and socially situated norms of trust between individual knowers: S. Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 17-27.
25. Latour's dissenter who tries to argue with endorphin would have to take on classic claims in physiology, pharmacology, peptide chemistry, optics, the equipment in the laboratory, the equipment in all previous laboratories, the honesty of the present research group and the honesty of all previous connected research groups: Latour, op. cit. note 2, 77-78. Steven Shapin's flirtation with scepticism in relation to cytosine and DNA leads to the conclusion that the rôle of individual pieces of empirical work in the traditional warranting of scientific statements could not produce anything recognizable as scientific knowledge without the morally textured relations and socially situated norms of trust between individual knowers: S. Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 17-27.
26. Myers, op. cit. note 1. Myers points out the difficulties new learners have in realizing that textbooks and journal articles make different demands on both reader and writer.
27. Donald A. Mackenzie, Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 370-72. See also Alan Collins, Gavin Kendall and Mike Michael, 'Resisting a Diagnostic Technique: The Case of Reflex Anal Dilatation', Sociology of Health and Illness, Vol. 20 (1998), 1-28.
28. Donald A. Mackenzie, Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 370-72. See also Alan Collins, Gavin Kendall and Mike Michael, 'Resisting a Diagnostic Technique: The Case of Reflex Anal Dilatation', Sociology of Health and Illness, Vol. 20 (1998), 1-28.
29. See Julie Thompson Klein, Crossing Boundaries: Knowledge, Disciplinarities, Interdisciplinarities (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996).
30. Kurt Danziger has argued that the categories of psychology cannot be natural kinds because natural objects are indifferent to the descriptions applied to them. He argues that if we change our identification of a chemical compound because our technical methods have changed, the compound remains the same as it was all along. This is not a particularly Latourian position, as it places a large gap between the reality of what is there all along and the activities of making: Danziger, op. cit. note 11, 190-91. Ian Hacking has introduced the terms 'human kind' and 'interactive kind' for categories, such as the categories of psychology, which are essentially self-referring and intrinsically part of social practice: see Hacking, op. cit. note 1, 58-59. If the arguments are about the ways in which claims are transformed as they are passed along, rather than transferred without being transformed, then the looping effects which Hacking has identified (ibid., 108) are negotiations which are, in Latour's terms, the regime in which soft facts circulate: Latour, op. cit. note 2, 208.
31. See Rose, op. cit. note 9, esp. Chapter 2, 41-66. Rose identifies a number of different tactics through which translation has occurred. The first is persuasion and negotiation between what he calls 'social and conceptual authorities'; the next two are visualization and articulation in certain terms; and the fourth requires individuals to be enrolled into a psychologized network which makes connections and alliances between the researchers and the practitioners, the producers and consumers of psychological knowledge: ibid., 56. For Rose, psychological ideas are bound into technologies and are not limited to the practices of the academic and the laboratory: ibid., 83.
32. See Graham Richards, Putting Psychology in its Place (London: Routledge, 1996), 100-09.
33. See Danziger, op. cit. note 11, 51-65.
34. Edward Boring's 1942 book, Sensation and Perception in the History of Experimental Psychology (New York: Appleton Century Crofts), has been described by Graham Richards (op. cit. note 20, 108) as 'The most exhaustive historical account available' of a topic which has remained at the heart of psychology's experimental research.
35. See a recent review by Nicholas Wade and Vicki Bruce, written to celebrate one hundred years of the study of vision in the UK for the centenary of the British Psychological Society: N.J. Wade and V. Bruce, 'Surveying the Seen: One Hundred Years of British Vision', British Journal of Psychology, Vol. 92 (2001), 79-112.
36. Gerd Gigerenzer, 'Probabilistic Thinking and the Fight Against Subjectivity', in Lorenz Kruger, Gerd Gigerenzer and M.S. Morgan (eds), The Probabilistic Revolution, Vol. II: Ideas in the Sciences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 10-33.
37. Richard Griggs, 'Introductory Psychology Textbooks: Assessing Levels of Difficulty', Teaching of Psychology, Vol. 26 (1999), 248-53.
38. Gigerenzer, op. cit. note 24.
39. There is an interesting footnote in William McDougall's Outline of Psychology (London: Methuen, 1923), 302, which explains how researchers determined the coefficients of correlation between performance on several different memory tasks. This was done 'By applying the formulae which the mathematicians have worked out'. For both McDougall and our contemporary textbooks, statistics and mathematics are not psychology, so do not have to be demonstrated.
40. See Donald A. Mackenzie, Statistics in Britain, 1865-1930: The Social Construction of Scientific Knowledge (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981).
41. Ian Hacking has pointed out a range of possible rôles for deconstruction, of which debunking is only one: Hacking, op. cit. note 1, 35-62.
42. For example, John E. Freund's Mathematical Statistics (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962), which makes no concessions to psychologists, behavioural scientists or statistical consumers, and is targeted at mathematics students who have already taken an undergraduate course in calculus, has a short bibliography after each chapter, but no references within chapters. There is no presentation of theoretical disputes, simply attribution of first proof. So, for example: 'Theorem 11.1 is usually called the Neyman-Pearson lemma, named after J. Neyman and E. S. Pearson, the two statisticians who first gave it its proof: ibid., 242. But in 1967, Maurice G. Kendall and Alan Stuart continued to present debate in the second edition of their research text: The Advanced Theory of Statistics, Vol. 2: Inference and Relationship (London: Charles Griffin), saying: 'There has been so much controversy about the various methods of estimation we have described that, at this point, we shall leave our customary objective standpoint and descend into the arena ourselves': ibid., 152.
43. For example, John E. Freund's Mathematical Statistics (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962), which makes no concessions to psychologists, behavioural scientists or statistical consumers, and is targeted at mathematics students who have already taken an undergraduate course in calculus, has a short bibliography after each chapter, but no references within chapters. There is no presentation of theoretical disputes, simply attribution of first proof. So, for example: 'Theorem 11.1 is usually called the Neyman-Pearson lemma, named after J. Neyman and E. S. Pearson, the two statisticians who first gave it its proof: ibid., 242. But in 1967, Maurice G. Kendall and Alan Stuart continued to present debate in the second edition of their research text: The Advanced Theory of Statistics, Vol. 2: Inference and Relationship (London: Charles Griffin), saying: 'There has been so much controversy about the various methods of estimation we have described that, at this point, we shall leave our customary objective standpoint and descend into the arena ourselves': ibid., 152.
44. For example, John E. Freund's Mathematical Statistics (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962), which makes no concessions to psychologists, behavioural scientists or statistical consumers, and is targeted at mathematics students who have already taken an undergraduate course in calculus, has a short bibliography after each chapter, but no references within chapters. There is no presentation of theoretical disputes, simply attribution of first proof. So, for example: 'Theorem 11.1 is usually called the Neyman-Pearson lemma, named after J. Neyman and E. S. Pearson, the two statisticians who first gave it its proof: ibid., 242. But in 1967, Maurice G. Kendall and Alan Stuart continued to present debate in the second edition of their research text: The Advanced Theory of Statistics, Vol. 2: Inference and Relationship (London: Charles Griffin), saying: 'There has been so much controversy about the various methods of estimation we have described that, at this point, we shall leave our customary objective standpoint and descend into the arena ourselves': ibid., 152.
45. Gerd Gigerenzer and David J. Murray, Cognition as Intuitive Statistics (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1987), at 22-23.
46. Gigerenzer, op. cit. note 24, 20.
47. Greg Myers, Writing Biology: Texts in the Social Construction of Scientific Knowledge (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), xii (emphasis in original).
48. See Laurence D. Smith, Lisa A. Best, D. Alan Stubbs, John Johnston and Andrea Bastiani Archibald, 'Scientific Graphs and the Hierarchy of the Sciences: A Latourian Survey of Inscription Practices', Social Studies of Science, Vol. 30, No. 1 (February 2000), 73-94. Out of interest in the hardness of topics in the textbooks considered here, I counted the number of graphs in each of four chapters. The results were puzzling: Hilgard (2000): Sensation, 6; Perception, 0; Memory, 6; Social interaction, 4: Gleitman (1999): Sensation, 8 (omitting two diagrams of wave forms for hearing); Perception, 0; Memory, 10; Social interaction, 3. Sensation and memory could well be regarded as 'harder', but graphs do not correlate with evidence and qualification - and perception is a complete anomaly.
49. See also Bruno Latour, 'Drawing Things Together', in Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar (eds), Representation in Scientific Practice (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 19-68.
50. See Kenneth J. Gergen, 'The Ordinary, the Original, and the Believable in Psychology's Construction of the Person', in Betty M. Bayer and John Shorter (eds), Reconstructing the Psychological Subject (London: Sage, 1998), 111-25.
51. See Shapin, op. cit. note 14, Chapter 4, 'Who Was Robert Boyle? The Creation and Presentation of an Experimental Identity', 126-92, for his account of the rhetoric of empiricist individualism which insisted that no source of factual information was to be relied on more than the direct experience of an individual, but which also allowed the accounts of the observations of others to be accepted as warrants, extending networks of testimony rather than of tradition.