The Department of Psychology (at Wash U) is being renamed the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences.
As a psych major and especially after the discussion we had in class yesterday, my first reaction was a cynical one. The addition of "brain" and more explicitly "science" to the department's name seems a very transparent attempt to make psychology into a "harder" science. One of my professors this semester often emphasizes that behavior and cognition are always caused by an interaction between biology and the environment--so it seems like a fad to me to focus only on one. Could this be related to that physicist's ladder of disciplines that places biology above social sciences? Or is this a more permanent change in direction for the study of psychology?
I think this is additional evidence that science is more socially constructed than people would think--what counts as science, where to draw the boundaries between different fields, what the factions are within.
No comments:
Post a Comment