2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

HSS Abstracts
out the distribution of fluctuations and looked to its graphical form for insight
into the character of the process. In studies of color perception these same
Viennese physicists insisted on the irreducible variability between observers.
In rejecting the significance of averages and problematizing the notion
experimental error, Schrödinger and his colleagues took an approach that might
be termed “morphological.” The premise of their method seems to have
mirrored Goethe’s axiom that there is no such thing as a “normal” member of
a species, or an “error of nature.”
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Jamie␣ N. Cohen-Cole Princeton University
The Cognitive Revolution
and the Culture of Interdisciplinarity in Cold War America
In the two decades following World War Two experimental psychology
experienced the Cognitive Revolution. Early adherents of the cognitive
perspective saw their work as a fundamentally interdisciplinary project. In
fact, it was this interdisciplinarity which helped cognitively oriented
psychologists overcome objections raised by behaviorists such as B. F. Skinner
to the scientific study of mind. But, the advantage the cognitive perspective
drew from its interdisciplinary stance did not rely only upon the specific ideas
that psychologists could import from neighboring disciplines. Instead, a
significant part of the benefit cognitive psychology derived from being
interdisciplinary rested on the two features of the Cold War’s cultural climate.
First, many attributed America’s technical success in WWII to the
interdisciplinary nature of the war-related research programs—most notably
that of the Manhattan Project. They further believed that this war-time
experience demonstrated that the best way to conduct research would be on a
similar interdisciplinary basis. Second, from the late 1940s through the 1960s,
thought carried political and moral significance. For many in this period rational
thinking and freedom of thought were seen as intimately related and as the
foundations of democracy. At the same time, irrational, ideological, and
totalitarian thinking (which were commonly equated one to the other) were
seen as anti-democratic. If types of thinking could be characterized with
political labels, the converse was also true—political positions were given
mental characteristics. Within this understanding, a primary feature of
rationality was broad, synthetic thought. In the case of scientific research this
meant the ability to escape methodologies bound by a single discipline. Within
this charged context government officials, public intellectuals, science
administrators, foundation officials, and cultural commentators would come
to favor interdisciplinary research. And, as a consequence, research programs
with a cognitive emphasis were able to garner external funding, despite the
fact that a behaviorism opposed to cognitive perspectives held sway within
the academy.
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