Event Title
Feminist antecedents?: Mary Whiton Calkins' project for a scientific psychology
Start Date
26-6-2010 10:45 AM
End Date
26-6-2010 11:45 AM
Description
This presentation is part of the Researching Sex Differences: Feminist Critiques and their Antecedents track.
In this paper I will develop a feminist analysis of Mary Whiton Calkins’s project for a scientific psychology in her work on self-psychology. There are good reasons for philosophers to read Calkins as a colleague and proto-feminist, for her first academic position was in the Philosophy Department at Wellesley College, when psychology was still regarded as a subfield of philosophy. She was required to prepare for this position by studying psychology for a year; but throughout her professional life her concern with philosophy was a continuing and increasingly prominent thread. Remarkable in a discipline that has had so few women presidents, Calkins was elected president of the American Philosophical Association in 1918, thirteen years after being elected president of the American Psychological Association, in 1905.
Several aspects of Calkins’s work are illuminating for the epistemological, ethical, and political research of present-day feminist and other hitherto marginalized philosophers, especially in the philosophy of the social sciences. Her opposition to the behaviourist conviction that “the self” was so ephemeral a concept and so perniciously metaphysical a construct that it had no place in a properly scientific psychology, is continuous, if variously, with feminist and other post-colonial philosophers’ dissatisfaction with the presumptive abstract masculinity of the invisible subject of the philosophical mainstream. Epistemologically, the position she opposes presages Karl Popper’s efforts to eliminate the knowing subject in his “Epistemology Without a Knowing Subject,” in order to affirm and preserve its putatively asocial and apolitical - hence maximally objective - nature. Calkins would have opposed such a project as vigorously as she opposed efforts to expel the self-aware experiencing subject from experimental psychology.
In a response to sex-difference research which anticipates the challenge Carol Gilligan presented to Lawrence Kohlberg in the 1970s and 1980s, Calkins charged that experimental “results” represent male-female differences in observations and understandings that are more the products of environmental than of “natural” differences: that the gender specificity in cognitive abilities sex difference researchers claim to have demonstrated is discerned on the basis of a failure to take the constitutive effects of social-cultural-environmental factors into account in experimental design: factors that silently prompt certain responses in women, and others in men, and tell in favour of stereotype-confirming readings of the results. Had the selves/subjectivities and the constitutive parts played by their “situations”, in Donna Haraway’s sense, been more visible in their multiple modalities, the conclusions might also have been different, rather as the moral judgements of Gilligan’s subjects were opened to reassessment with respect to the levels of moral maturity they evinced once she began to engage critically with the research apparatus that informed the context of discovery, and to reexamine the presuppositions that had contributed to the design of the Kohlberg scale as a putatively impartial measure of moral maturity.
My intention is not to conflate Calkins’s reclaiming recognition for “the self” with current feminist commitments to taking subjectivity into account. Yet her “self-psychology” is animated by a realization specific to her time that, as she puts it, “The self is bowed out of psychology on the ground that scientific introspection has failed to discover it”. It is this eradication of the self that she seeks to reverse. Hence, I will read her arguments for “the self” together with Simone de Beauvoir’s thinking about self and subjectivity, and in light of Michèle Le Dœuff’s insistence that “there is no intellectual activity that is not grounded in an imaginary”, where she emphasizes the power of an instituted imaginary to legitimate or silence certain readings of empirical “data” in diagnostic-genealogical investigations - for example - of how an entrenched conception of the male-female distinction has functioned in shaping understandings of selves, subjectivities, and relative intellectual and moral competence. Research into sex-gender differences, like most other research, is to a great extent (borrowing Foucault’s terms) “a function of what a given society defines as thinkable”. Calkins’s work was of her time and place, and shaped by what her society defined as thinkable; but in significant ways she broke away from those confines to open the way to innovative and provocative inquiry. She was both of and ahead of her time.
Feminist antecedents?: Mary Whiton Calkins' project for a scientific psychology
This presentation is part of the Researching Sex Differences: Feminist Critiques and their Antecedents track.
In this paper I will develop a feminist analysis of Mary Whiton Calkins’s project for a scientific psychology in her work on self-psychology. There are good reasons for philosophers to read Calkins as a colleague and proto-feminist, for her first academic position was in the Philosophy Department at Wellesley College, when psychology was still regarded as a subfield of philosophy. She was required to prepare for this position by studying psychology for a year; but throughout her professional life her concern with philosophy was a continuing and increasingly prominent thread. Remarkable in a discipline that has had so few women presidents, Calkins was elected president of the American Philosophical Association in 1918, thirteen years after being elected president of the American Psychological Association, in 1905.
Several aspects of Calkins’s work are illuminating for the epistemological, ethical, and political research of present-day feminist and other hitherto marginalized philosophers, especially in the philosophy of the social sciences. Her opposition to the behaviourist conviction that “the self” was so ephemeral a concept and so perniciously metaphysical a construct that it had no place in a properly scientific psychology, is continuous, if variously, with feminist and other post-colonial philosophers’ dissatisfaction with the presumptive abstract masculinity of the invisible subject of the philosophical mainstream. Epistemologically, the position she opposes presages Karl Popper’s efforts to eliminate the knowing subject in his “Epistemology Without a Knowing Subject,” in order to affirm and preserve its putatively asocial and apolitical - hence maximally objective - nature. Calkins would have opposed such a project as vigorously as she opposed efforts to expel the self-aware experiencing subject from experimental psychology.
In a response to sex-difference research which anticipates the challenge Carol Gilligan presented to Lawrence Kohlberg in the 1970s and 1980s, Calkins charged that experimental “results” represent male-female differences in observations and understandings that are more the products of environmental than of “natural” differences: that the gender specificity in cognitive abilities sex difference researchers claim to have demonstrated is discerned on the basis of a failure to take the constitutive effects of social-cultural-environmental factors into account in experimental design: factors that silently prompt certain responses in women, and others in men, and tell in favour of stereotype-confirming readings of the results. Had the selves/subjectivities and the constitutive parts played by their “situations”, in Donna Haraway’s sense, been more visible in their multiple modalities, the conclusions might also have been different, rather as the moral judgements of Gilligan’s subjects were opened to reassessment with respect to the levels of moral maturity they evinced once she began to engage critically with the research apparatus that informed the context of discovery, and to reexamine the presuppositions that had contributed to the design of the Kohlberg scale as a putatively impartial measure of moral maturity.
My intention is not to conflate Calkins’s reclaiming recognition for “the self” with current feminist commitments to taking subjectivity into account. Yet her “self-psychology” is animated by a realization specific to her time that, as she puts it, “The self is bowed out of psychology on the ground that scientific introspection has failed to discover it”. It is this eradication of the self that she seeks to reverse. Hence, I will read her arguments for “the self” together with Simone de Beauvoir’s thinking about self and subjectivity, and in light of Michèle Le Dœuff’s insistence that “there is no intellectual activity that is not grounded in an imaginary”, where she emphasizes the power of an instituted imaginary to legitimate or silence certain readings of empirical “data” in diagnostic-genealogical investigations - for example - of how an entrenched conception of the male-female distinction has functioned in shaping understandings of selves, subjectivities, and relative intellectual and moral competence. Research into sex-gender differences, like most other research, is to a great extent (borrowing Foucault’s terms) “a function of what a given society defines as thinkable”. Calkins’s work was of her time and place, and shaped by what her society defined as thinkable; but in significant ways she broke away from those confines to open the way to innovative and provocative inquiry. She was both of and ahead of her time.