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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)
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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.
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