Some evil actions are public. Maybe genocide is the most awful. Other evil actions are private, a matter of one person harming another or of self-inflicted injury. Child abuse, in our current reckoning, is the worst of private evils. We want to put a stop to it. We know we can’t do that, not entirely. Human wickedness won’t go away. But we must protect as many children as we can. We want also to discover and help those who have already (...) been hurt. Anyone who feels differently is already something of a monster.We are so sure of these moral truths that we seldom pause to wonder what child abuse is. We know we don’t understand it. We have little idea of what prompts people to harm children. But we do have the sense that what we mean by child abuse is something perfectly definite. So it comes as a surprise that the very idea of child abuse has been in constant flux the past thirty years. Previously our present conception of abusing a child did not even exist. People do many of the same vile things to children, for sure, that they did a century ago. But we’ve been almost unwittingly changing the very definitions of abuse and revising our values and our moral codes accordingly. Ian Hacking, a philosopher, teaches at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology in the University of Toronto. His latest book is entitled The Taming of Chance. (shrink)

This article argues that the meaning of the word ‘autism’ experienced a radical shift in the early 1960s in Britain which was contemporaneous with a growth in epidemiological and statistical studies in child psychiatry. The first part of the article explores how ‘autism’ was used as a category to describe hallucinations and unconscious fantasy life in infants through the work of significant child psychologists and psychoanalysts such as Jean Piaget, Lauretta Bender, Leo Kanner and Elwyn James Anthony. Theories of autism (...) were then associated both with schizophrenia in adults and with psychoanalytic styles of reasoning. The closure of institutions for ‘mental defectives’ and the growth in speech therapy services in the 1960s and 1970s encouraged new models for understanding autism in infants and children. The second half of the article explores how researchers such as Victor Lotter and Michael Rutter used the category of autism to reconceptualize psychological development in infants and children via epidemiological studies. These historical changes have influenced the form and function of later research into autism and related conditions. (shrink)

A comprehensive history of the human sciences -- psychology, sociology, anthropology, economics, and political science -- from their precursors in early human culture to the present.This erudite yet accessible volume in Norton's highly praised History of Science series tracks the long and circuitous path by which human beings came to see themselves and their societies as scientific subjects like any other. Beginning with the Renaissance's rediscovery of Greek psychology, political philosophy, and ethics, Roger Smith recounts how the human sciences gradually (...) organized themselves around a scientific conception of psychology, and how this trend has continued to the present day in a circle of interactions between science and ordinary life, in which the human sciences have influenced and been influenced by popular culture. (shrink)

Cognitive science is the project of understanding the mind by modelling its workings. Its development is one of the most remarkable and fascinating intellectual achievements of the modern era. Mind as Machine is a masterful history of cognitive science, told by one of its most eminent practitioners.

Especially troublesome in this dispute is the status of the natural sciences, and this is where Hacking finds some of his most telling cases, from the conflict ...