This spring, you’ll likely be encountering students in reference asking for help with an assignment in PSY 4012 (Evolution of Modern Psychology) where they are expected to write a textbook chapter on one of these five broad sets of questions:
- What is consciousness and how have psychologists dealt with it? Does psychology need biology to understand consciousness, or does biology merely provide a distraction and lead us into nonproductive directions about how to understand consciousness? Can psychology deal with both mind and body in a coherent way, or must one be basic and the other subservient? What alternatives have philosophy and psychology provided to deal with the issue?
- How important has evolutionary theory been in the history of psychology? Have psychologists really understood evolutionary theory and its implications, or have many of them worked from a distorted idea of what evolution theory is about?
- Has psychology been a more productive science when viewed in terms of reductionism or in terms of holism? What has been gained and what has been lost with each of these two competing perspectives? Should psychology finally choose one or the other of these perspectives, or is there an advantage to having a tension between the two among scientific psychologists? What is at stake when someone proposes that psychology should be eclectic and include both perspectives?
- Should there be a separate science of psychology, or did the idea of separate science of psychology emerge only because of historical and philosophical conditions in Germany at the time the first psychology lab was opened in 1879? Was this beginning merely an accident of history, or can one explain why such an event would have taken place then? What sense does it make for psychology to be both a science and a collection of applied practices, such as clinical psychology, school psychology, etc. Should we continue with the same set of boundaries between the separate sciences that we have today, or should we re-think the existence of a separate science of psychology that combines both the scientific and the applied?
- Does psychology require the assumption of determinism if it is to be a science? Can it include the notion of free will as well as determinism? Can it deal with both determinism and free will at the same time in a coherent way?
I just taught workshops for two of the sections of this class and want to share the strategy I was recommending to them and the handout I gave them:
- Start with Gale Virtual Reference Library. Look up the big concepts (reductionism, free will, evolutionary psychology, etc.) in multiple encyclopedias (especially ones in psychology and philosophy) to get intro to the topic, search words, names of leading researchers and theorists.
- Go next to find literature review articles in PsycINFO. Also browse the Thesaurus in PsycINFO to identify preferred terms and to discover additional related ones.
- Then search broadly across PsycINFO for articles, etc.
Here is the handout all the students in my workshops received.
Let me know if you have any questions or if you want to refer any students to see me.
