Speaker
Dr. Christopher D. Green (York University, Psychology)
Title
Scientific Objectivity and E. B. Titchener’s Experimental Psychology
Abstract
In Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison’s book, Objectivity, the critical scientific virtue of the title is given a history. There are those who reflexively fear, whenever a scientific methodological imperative is shown to be subject to the vicissitudes of intellectual and socio-political trends and fashions, that the underlying aim is to demonstrate its arbitrariness, its futility, even its fictiveness. Daston and Galison are careful, however, to deny that this intention plays any role in their history of objectivity. Nevertheless, the concept of objectivity does have an interesting and variegated history in science, and one that interacts significantly with the history of psychology, especially of the experimental variety. Unfortunately, although Daston and Galison recognize the relationship between the rise of objectivity as a prime scientific virtue and the rise of experimental psychology (viz., to discover and demarcate the boundaries of the opposed “subjectivity” which is to be abjured by scientists) they do not explore this relationship in any great detail. The primary goal of the present article is to fill in some of the pieces to this important puzzle. In particular, it aims to examine how one highly significant experimental psychologist of the period, Edward Bradford Titchener, contrived to study the structure of the very subjectivity that natural scientists were eager to eschew while simultaneously asserting that psychology itself was an objective, experimental, natural science.
I begin with a summary Daston and Galison’s account of the history of objectivity. Then I turn my attention to psychology, and to the significant ways in which its development interacts with the larger issue of objectivity in the history of science. In particular, I focus on Titchener in order to explore how he saw the position of psychology with respect to various strands in the history of objectivity, and how he endeavored to ally his psychological program with one of these threads in particular. Finally, I show how I believe Daston and Galison’s account of objectivity sheds important new light on one important aspect of Titchener’s approach to introspection, and how it may have been misinterpreted by historians of psychology in the past who were not familiar with the issues surrounding the history of objectivity as an epistemic virtue in science.
Note
This is an alternative format presentation. The paper should be read prior to attending the colloquium. If you wish to attend, but have not yet received a copy of the paper, please contact the Colloquium Coordinator, Laura Ball, at lcball@yorku.ca.