Search Results

This chapter focuses on a particular moment in the history of human sciences in which reflexivity played a significant role: the early days of revolution when cognitive science supplanted behaviorism as the hegemonic science of human nature. In the struggle that marked the cognitive revolution. Reflexivity provided the combatants with weapons to attack their foes and also methods and concepts to form their respective sciences of human nature. To enhance their public standing, cognitive scientists sought to make their own thought processes match folk ideas of scientific thinking. They applied the same categories of selfhood found in popular culture and social psychology to themselves. They collapsed distinction between normative rules for scientific thinking and the actual processes of human thinking. As cognitive scientists crossed back and forth between scientific descriptions of the human and normative discussions of the best way for scientists to think, they borrowed from the folk and social psychological image of right-thinking to inform their own personal and public images. These very same scientific self-images would form the basis for the image of human nature that cognitive science produced.

This chapter examines the transmission of cognitive psychology outside the halls of the academy to the wider public through National Science Foundation sponsored science high school curricula. Curriculum designers believed that treating learning as discovery oriented process rather a matter of memorization would inoculate Americans against the wrong-headed, reactionary politics, and dishonesty of McCarthyism. The chapter focuses on the design of a social science course, “Man: A Course of Study” (MACOS), led by cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner. Along with the other science curriculum projects, MACOS sought to transform minds of its students and therefore the nation. Social and natural science when taught in the proper way would enable pupils to become responsible citizens. MACOS treated the classroom as a place to do social science and elementary school children as though they were little scientists. Instead of emphasizing on memorization of facts and truths derived from authority, MACOS taught its students mental self-reliance. In so doing MACOS aimed to foster the liberal traits of tolerance, encourage reason, and promote an attitude of self-confidence and the questioning of received authority. It was these open-minded attributes and not the ability to memorize that cognitive science had marked as distinctively human.

This chapter examines development of and changes in the research culture at Harvard's Center for Cognitive Studies. The directors applied their psychological expertise in how humans think and learn to design a research environment that would maximize the chances for acquiring reliable knowledge about world—specifically, about the nature of human thinking. They saw learning as, fundamentally, the acquisition of new structures of thought and of new tools with which to think. Therefore what was important was not simply facts that people learned or scientists discovered. Rather more significant were the procedures, forms of mental representation, and heuristic methods that enabled individuals to have original forms of ideas, novel hypotheses, and techniques for investigating the world. Accordingly the Center was organized along interdisciplinary lines in order to facilitate the construction of new theories and new scientific tools while establishing the disciplined study of human cognition on a stable foundation. Several years later, once its work was well under way, the Center's culture became multidisciplinary. Rather than emphasizing the creation of cognitive science by sharing, invention, location, discussion and stabilization of new research techniques, the Center's new multidisciplinary atmosphere involved researchers working in parallel.

This chapter examines the ways that McCulloch’s new research culture at MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics shaped the evolution of his scientific identity into that of an engineer. This was an open, fluid, multidisciplinary culture that allowed McCulloch to shift his focus more squarely onto understanding the brain from the perspective of theoretical modelling, and to promote the cybernetic vision to diverse audiences. McCulloch’s practices, performed with a new set of student-collaborators, involved modeling the neurophysiology of perception, understanding reliability in biological systems, and pursuing knowledge of the reticular formation of the brain. The chapter provides a nuanced account of the relations between McCulloch’s work and the emerging fields of artificial intelligence and the cognitive sciences. It also highlights McCulloch’s identities as sage-collaborator and polymath, two roles that in part were the result of his students’ observations and in part products of his own self-fashioning.

This final chapter reflects on the many identities McCulloch performed throughout his life: student, poet, neurophysiologist, neuropsychiatrist, cybernetician, mentor, and engineer, to name but a few. It argues that none of these can be understood as straightforward products of McCulloch’s own agency, nor were they driven by McCulloch’s institutional context. Rather, they were performatively produced. McCulloch was simultaneously irreverent and traditional, theoretical and practical. His open, generous spirit is as much a part of his scientific legacy than his theoretical contributions. McCulloch’s story also tells us much about the landscape of twentieth-century American science: fluidity between science, medicine, and philosophy, the role of patronage, and the liberation of the brain from medicine and its redefinition as a scientific object. All of these elements come together in bringing about McCulloch’s ultimate identity: the rebel genius.