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21rst Annual Meeting of the European Society for the
History of the Human Sciences
Barcelona, Spain, August 27 31, 2002 (ESHHS 2002) {PRIVATE }
Panel title: 'Historicizing Instincts'
Organizers:
Stephanie Koerner (University of Manchester, England)
Uljana Feest (University of Pittsburgh, USA)
Discussant: James M.M. Good (University of Durham,
England)
The concept of instincts has played a key role in arguments
over competing theoretical positions in the human sciences
throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. This is not
surprizing in light its relation to the long history, for example,
of natural law theories, and the various roles the concept of
instincts has been given among the various conceptual
dichotomies around which disciplinary divisons between the
human sciences have been structured. In psychology, for
example, disagreements which turn on the concept of
instinct are oftentimes underpinned by opposing
perspectives on the nature/nurture distinction, i.e. the
question of the innateness of mental traits and behavior
patterns. For another example, in anthropology, its has
played a variety of roles in disputes over the scientific status
of the field and the very goals of the discipline. And, in
philosophy, it has figured rather centrally in debates over
relations between 'mental event's and brain processes, i.e.
mental causation, as well as over the nature of language
and the mind - to mention only a few examples.
As is widely known, since around the 1960s such
dichotomies as nature-culture, symbol-function, evolution-
history, the mental and the embodied (and materialized),
rational and rhetorical discourses, and Western-non-
Western have come under convergent, if not identical sorts
of scrutiny, in fields as diverse in their subject matter, as
those closest to physical science, such as the philosophy of
science, and the human science which has concerned
societies that were at one time characterized as lacking
science and even history: anthropology. Little by little
researchers became aware that the categories which so
evidently structured their fields of inquiry that they went
unremarked were products of historically contingent
circumstances.
One of the remarkable ways in which researchers have
responded to the situation has been with a growing interest
in the historiography of concepts (see, for example, Bloch
1986, Smith 1992, Danzinger 1997). This panel responds to
the comment on the potential usefulness of the directions
being taken in the historiography of concepts in Professor
Danziger's keynote speech at the 2001 ESHHS meeting. It
seeks to focus a variety of historical (and disciplinary)
perspectives on the concept of 'instincts' in order to throw
some light not only on the diversity of interpretations and
roles the concept has been given, but also on some
reasons why 'historicizing instincts' may be relevant to the
challenges facing attempts to carry forward the constructive
directions suggested by the critique of dualist categories.
Selected Bibliography
Bloch, E. (1986) Natural Law and Human Dignity, tr. D.J.
Schmidt. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Boden, M. (1972) Purposive Explanation in Psychology.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press
Cassirer, E. (1944) An Essay on Man. An Introduction to a
Philsophy of Human Culture. New Haven: Yale University
Press.
Canguilhem, G. (1955): La formation du Concept de reflexe
aux 17e et 18e siecles. Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France.
Danziger, K. (1997) Naming the Mind. How Psychology
Found Its Language. London: Sage Publications.
Kuo, Z. Y. (1921): "Giving Up Instincts in Psychology", The
Journal of Philosophy, Vol. XVIII, No. 24.
Malinowski, B. (1961) Argonauts of the Western Pacific.
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Marler, P. (1991): "The Instinct to Learn," in S. Carey and R.
Gelman (eds.): The Epigenesis of Mind: Essays on Biology
and Cognition. Hillsdale, N.J.: L. Erlbaum Associates.
McDougall (1923): An Introduction to Social Psychology.
London: Methuen.
Nagera, H. and S. Baker (1971) Basic Psychoanalytic
Concepts on the Theory of Instincts. New York: Basic
Books.
Pinker, S. 1995 The Language Instinct. New York: Harper
Perennial.
Plotkin, H. (1994): The Nature of Knowledge: Concerning
Adaptations, Instinct and the Evolution of Intelligence.
Röell, D. (2000): The World of Instinct: Niko Tinbergen and
the Rise of Ethology in the Netherlands (1920 1950). Assen:
Van Gorcum.
Senchuk, D. (1991): Against Instinct: From Biology to
Philosophical Psychology. Philadelphia: Temple University
Press.
Sampson, G. (1997): Educating Eve: the "Language
Instinct" Debate. London: Washington, D.C.: Cassell.
Schiller, Claire (1957) (ed.) Instinctive Behavior. The
Development of a New Concept. New York: International
University Press.
Smith, R. (1992) Inhibition: History and Meaning in the
Sciences of Mind and Brain. London: Free Association
Books.
Tinbergen, N. (1989) The Study of Instinct; with the 1969
introduction and a new preface by the author. Oxford
England: Clarendon Press, New York: Oxford University
Press.
Watson, (1914) Behavior. An Introduction to Comparative
Psychology. New York: Henry Holt
and Company.
