2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

HSS Abstracts
psychologists claimed that science, rather than emotional guidance, should be
the focus of undergraduate courses in psychology. As a consequence of a
reorientation of the discipline towards furthering the science of psychology,
human adjustment courses disappeared. In this paper, I will analyze these
human adjustment courses in the way they present psychology to an
undergraduate audience, what elements from psychology they emphasize, and
I will provide a background of the authors of these books. These courses are
important for several reasons. First, psychologists teaching human adjustment
courses were concerned with formulating modern standards of behavior and
in this way often reified cultural norms and expectation. In other words, these
courses naturalized specific cultural norms and expectations as the outcome
of psychological research. Second, these courses were a very influential vehicle
for the popularization of psychology. As a consequence, the demand for clinical
services might increase. However, the cultural influence of these courses has
been much more pervasive, since they succeeded in familiarizing several
generations with basic psychological insights.
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Marcus Popplow University of Bremen / Max Planck Institute for the
History of Science
The Role of Engineer Drawings in the Emergence of Classical Mechanics
In the realm of practical mechanics in the 15th and 16th centuries, different
kinds of engineer drawings rather than theoretical texts were widely used to
consider mechanical phenomena. Well-known figures of pre-classical
mechanics from Tartaglia to Galileo were familiar with this medium of
relection. At the same time, the engineer drawings of this age give evidence of
rules of thumb employed by practitioners which reveal, at least partly, their
understanding of the relationship of force, time and space. This paper presents
an overview of both these aspects of the emergence of classical mechanics.
Theodore␣ M. Porter University of California, Los Angeles
Project for a History of Social Science, 1750-1890
Social science is generally represented as very young, yet the disciplinary histories
often go back to Aristotle. Perhaps because history remains more important for
social science than for most of the natural sciences, its goals and styles continue to
be set by practitioners. Here I ask how the social sciences should be understood by
history, and how it would alter our writing about their history. One crucial point is
that the modern disciplines had a very tenuous existence in social science before
about 1890. This pertains to the organization of knowledge, and the practices by
which it was generated, as well as to the social structure of disciplines. Here I set out
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