Week 1 Flashcard Set: Introduction and Historiography

Hermann Ebbinghaus’s Quote

"Psychology has a long past but only a short history." Humans have wondered about the mind for millennia (long past), but formal experimental psychology is very recent (short history).

Year of Hermann Ebbinghaus’s Quote

1908

Historiography

The study of historical methods and scholarship—examining not just what happened, but how history is constructed, written, and interpreted.

Presentism

Evaluating past ideas using modern standards and values, creating a moral cartoon of historical "winners" vs. "losers"

Other term for Presentism

Whig History

Historicism

Understanding past ideas through their local historical and geographic context rather than judging them by today's standards

Internalist History

An approach that views science as a vacuum driven purely by intellectual milestones and "great men" discovering truths

Externalist History

An approach that looks at external factors—like economics, politics, funding, and social power—that shape scientific development

Reflexivity (in Social Sciences)

he fact that psychological knowledge is produced by humans who are themselves subject to the psychological laws and categories they create

Interactive Kinds

Unlike natural elements (like rocks), humans interact with psychological labels and categories (like IQ or diagnoses), altering their behavior and changing the science itself

Genealogy

Foucault’s concept on "history of the present" that diagnoses a current societal issue and traces backward to see how historical power structures built it.

Father of Genealogy, Power, and Discipline

Michael Foucault

Power as "Productive"

Foucault’s concept that Power is not just held by governments; it is everywhere in relationships and is productive—it actively creates knowledge and human subjectivity.

Discipline

Foucault’s concept of How institutions (schools, clinics, prisons) use expert knowledge to render human bodies and minds docile, manageable, and measurable

Psychologization

The way psychology expands out of the lab into everyday life, shaping our inner self-understanding, emotions, and social relations ("little-p psychology")

Meta-Narrative

An overarching master story that gives legitimacy to events (e.g., the narrative of pure, linear scientific progress). Postmodernism feels "incredulity" toward these.

Subjugated Knowledges & Double Consciousness

the idea that marginalized groups possess privileged insight because they navigate both the dominant master narrative and their own lived reality.

Situated Knowledges

Donna Haraway’s concept of rejection of the "God trick" (false view-from-nowhere neutrality); all knowledge is produced by embodied people in specific social locations.

Provincializing

A postcolonial strategy showing that supposedly universal Western psychological models are actually local, particular, and contingent.

Indigenization

The active process of adapting psychological knowledge or practices to fit local conditions and cultures.

Close Reading (Sinykin & Winant)

An analytical method to decode texts consisting of 4 steps: 1. Setting the scene, 2. Noticing odd details, 3. Local claiming, 4. Global theorizing

First step of Sinykin & Winant’s decoding

Setting the scene: riefly outlining the prior background information, historical context, or authorial priors necessary to understand the text before analyzing it

Second step of Sinykin & Winant’s decoding

Noticing Odd details: Stumbling upon a telling detail in the text—such as something odd, surprising, missing, or excessive—that sparks curiosity, confusion, or a desire to investigate.

Third step of Sinykin & Winant’s decoding

Local Claiming: Advancing an interpretive claim (not just a summary) about what a noticed detail means within its immediate context, such as a single sentence or paragraph.

Fourth step of Sinykin & Winant’s decoding

Global Theorizing: Expanding outward from the local interpretation to explain what the detail reveals about the text as a whole, its genre, its author's broader work, or its historical period