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Abstract

During its relatively short history as a distinct discipline, psychology was accompanied by a historiography that projected the idea of psychology back to ancient times when such an idea did not in fact exist. As the modern discipline proliferated into a collection of weakly connected sub-disciplines, the textbook image of psychology’s ancient essence suggested that, in spite of the current messy reality, the subject had an unchanging core object that had always been there to be recognized. Earlier, that object was the psyche, later it was “human nature,” and more recently, the principles of human cognition. However, historiography plays a more useful role within the discipline when it takes the current multiplicity of psychological objects as its point of departure and explores the social context of their emergence. This entails a historical analysis of the language used to define, describe, categorize, and modify psychological objects.

Keywords

history language of description philosophy philosophy of science scientific progress

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Psychology and its history

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