Confronting any science studies or learning sciences researcher in the 21st century is the reality of interdisciplinary science. New hybrid fields1 collaboratively build new concepts, combine models from two or more disciplines and forge inter-reliant relationships among specialists with different skill sets to solve new problems. This paper emerges from our recognition that inescapable psychological factors, including identity dynamics, must be described and analyzed in order to better understand the social and cognitive practices specific to interdisciplinary science. In analysis of (...) the foundations and opportunities for an... (shrink)

Psychologists tend to examine their activities in experimentation with the same objective scientific attitude as they routinely assume in the experimental situation. A few psychologists have stepped outside this closed expistemic practice to undertake reflexive analysis of the psychologist in the laboratory. Three cases of such critical reflexive analysis are considered to better understand the strategies and consequences of confronting what Steve Woolgar has called ‘the horrors of reflexivity’. Reflexive work of William James, Horace Mann Bond, and Saul Rosenzweig are (...) examined: working in the early years of modern experimental psychology these scientists identified limitations in the dominant natural science model of experimentation. Attending to the scientist's own cognitions, social status, and unconscious processes respectively, James, Bond, and Rosenzweig criticized this natural science model and presented methodological and epistemic alternatives. The relative neglect of their constructive observations underscores the resistance to addressing psychology's reflexive dimensions. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer a detailed reconstruction and a critical analysis of Abraham Maslow’s neglected psychological reading of Thomas Kuhn’s famous dichotomy between ‘normal’ and ‘revolutionary’ science, which Maslow briefly expounded four years after the first edition of Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in his small book The Psychology of Science: A Reconnaissance, and which relies heavily on his extensive earlier general writing in the motivational and personality psychology. Maslow’s Kuhnian ideas, put forward as part of a larger (...) program for the psychology of science, outlined already in his 1954 magnum opus Motivation and Personality, are analyzed not only in the context of Kuhn’s original ‘psychologizing’ attitude toward understanding the nature and development of science, but also in a broader historical, intellectual and social context. (shrink)