Kurt Danziger: Discipline

Kurt Danziger is German academic. Explore interesting quotes on discipline.
Kurt Danziger: 40   quotes 0   likes

“Investigative practice therefore constitutes an area of considerable anxiety within the discipline of psychology. Concern with questions of methodological orthodoxy often takes the place of concern about theoretical orthodoxy when research or its results are discussed and evaluated. These preoccupations with the purity of method frequently deteriorate to a kind of method fetishism or "methodolatry." From this point of view there may be something distinctly subversive about the suggestion that the sphere of methodology is not a realm of pure reason but an area of human social activity governed by mundane circumstances like any other social activity. Nevertheless, the consequences of this suggestion should be explored, for not to do so exposes one to all the risks entailed by a naive and self-deluded style of scientific practice.”

Kurt Danziger

Source: Constructing the subject: Historical origins of psychological research. 1994, p. 5-6

Question

“In the case of psychology, of course, it is not only the concepts and methods of the discipline that undergo constant historical change, but the very subject matter itself. Human subjectivity, the reality behind the objects of psychological investigation, is itself strongly implicated in the historical process, both as agent and as product.”

Kurt Danziger

Source: "Does the history of psychology have a future?." 1994, p. 475

Reality , Change

“Newtonian studies are not part of physics but belong to an altogether different discipline, the history of science.”

Kurt Danziger

Source: "Does the history of psychology have a future?." 1994, p. 472

History , Study , Science , Parting

“Where the insider's engagement with the discipline's concepts and practices is combined with the moral distance maintained by the outsider one has reason to look for the emergence of a historiography that is both critical and effective.”

Kurt Danziger

Source: "Does the history of psychology have a future?." 1994, p. 479

“For such fields deep historical studies can have considerable contemporary relevance and hence fall within the boundaries of the field itself. Weber and Durkheim are still studied by sociologists, just as Adam Smith and Ricardo are still studied by economists, whereas Galilean and Newtonian studies are not part of physics but of an altogether different discipline, the history of science.”

Kurt Danziger

Source: "Does the history of psychology have a future?." 1994, p. 472

History , Study , Science , Parting

“Historical studies of the sciences tend to adopt one of two rather divergent points of view. One of these typically looks at historical developments in a discipline from the inside. It is apt to take for granted many of the presuppositions that are currently popular among members of the discipline and hence tends to view the past in terms of gradual progress toward a better present. The second point of view does not adopt its framework of issues and presuppositions from the field that is the object of study but tends nowadays to rely heavily on questions and concepts derived from studies in the history, philosophy, and sociology of science. A history written from the insider's point of view always conveys a strong sense of being "our" history. That is not the case with the second type of history, whose tone is apt to be less celebratory and more critical.
In the case of the older sciences, histories of the second type have for many years been the province of specialists in the history, philosophy, or sociology of science. This is not, or perhaps not yet, the case for psychology, whose history has to a large extent been left to psychologists to pursue. Accordingly, insiders' histories have continued to have a prominence they have long lost in the older sciences. Nevertheless, much recent work in the history of psychology has broken with this tradition.”

Kurt Danziger

Source: Constructing the subject: Historical origins of psychological research. 1994, p. vii; Preface.

History , Question , Sense , Study

“Wundt sought to achieve was a rejuvenation of philosophical inquiry by new means, not the constitution of a completely new discipline.”

Kurt Danziger

Source: Constructing the subject: Historical origins of psychological research. 1994, p. 39