Thinking in psychological science

ideas and their makers

Edited by
Jaan Valsiner

Transaction Publishers

2007

Abstract

This book explores the development of ideas in psychology's past. It is the initial volume in a series intended to shape such ideas into a valuable resource for the discipline's future. Scientists, in general, are known to ignore their own history, considering it to be a graveyard of failures. In Thinking in Psychological Science, selected ideas of key figures in the cognitive, comparative, and developmental sides of psychology (Karl Duncker, Karl Bühler, Tamara Dembo, Zing-Young Kuo, C. Lloyd Morgan, Alexander Chamberlain, and Arnold Gesell) are traced, and the social contexts of their ideas are given a collective analysis, focusing on the potential of these ideas for the present state of psychology.