Strengths and weaknesses of the history of mentalities

Burke, Peter

doi:10.1016/0191-6599(86)90120-8

Cited by 119 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 39 publications

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“…The notion of mentalities has been proposed by Burke (1986) to delineate a stress on collective attitudes that serve the purposes of practical reasoning and that are structured in terms of how people think as well as what they think. That is, mentalities represent substantive cognition.…”

Section: The Psychological Gearbox: Mentalities or Is It Mindsets?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Mentalities and mind-sets: The skeleton of relative stability in psychology’s closet

Sammut

2019

Eur. J. Psychol.

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Over its brief history, the discipline of psychology has seen its fair share of crises (Farr, 1991). In the grand scheme of academic scholarship, it has sandwiched itself between the natural and the social sciences. This positioning, in itself, has fuelled fierce as well as productive debates concerning the discipline's scope, its phenomenology, epistemology, and methodology (see Toomela & Valsiner, 2010). The latest crisis to afflict the discipline is the infamous 'replication crisis', precipitated by the Reproducibility Project which claimed that it was only able to find evidence for successful replication of published psychological findings in 47% of cases (i.e. less than chance, or 50%). No doubt, many expected a higher replication rate, betraying a long held but little researched assumption concerning the immutability of psychological phenomena. To put it simply, many expect psychological findings to replicate invariably across diverse sociocultural contexts in the same way that, for instance, medical diagnoses do (see Sammut, Foster, Salvatore, & Andrisano-Ruggieri, 2016). If one is diagnosed with diabetes in the US, one does not expect different insulin uptake upon migration to China. Similar expectations are levelled at psychology, based chiefly upon the discipline's claims to knowledge concerning psychopathology and personality. Like medical research, psychological scholarship here serves to typify and characterize individuals in ways that facilitate treatment of psychological symptoms, conditions, or disorders. Unlike medical research, however, psychological functioning seems to be amenable to, if not contingent upon, sociocultural influences. For instance, we are not entirely sure whether the human personality is primarily composed of the Big Five trait constellation

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Section: The Psychological Gearbox: Mentalities or Is It Mindsets?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Mentalities and mind-sets: The skeleton of relative stability in psychology’s closet

Sammut

2019

Eur. J. Psychol.

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“…This question has perplexed all those who have thought about it and has split them into two opposing camps: rationalists, such as Hollis (1970), argue for a core of rational cognitive principles common to all human societies; relativists, such as Barnes and Bloor (1982), argue for purely "local" criteria of rationality, the incommensurability of the beliefs of different groups (even those of scientists of different theoretical persuasions); and the radical untranslatability of such beliefs from one language to another. If relativism is right, then the principles of deduction differ from one society to another, and perhaps from one epoch to another -as certain historians have argued (see Burke 1986). Hence, psychological studies of deduction are at best of parochial interest.…”

Section: Thinking Rationality and Modelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Why study deduction?

Galotti¹,

Komatsu²

1993

Behav Brain Sci

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“…astronomy for centuries. I use the term cultural schemata to describe these clusterings of long-standing associations, capable of being recalled and thus able to influence interpretation and meaning-making 10 . Different traditions of popularization, especially those associated with different forms of science, invoked very different cultural schemata, which in turn had consequences for the contexts in which, and the audiences for whom, they were practised.…”

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confidence: 99%

The Proctor-Parkes Incident: Politics, Protestants and Popular Astronomy in Australia in 1880

Bush¹

2017

Hist. Rec. Aust. Sci.

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Henry Parkes' intervention to placate the Sabbatarian movement and prevent British astronomer Richard Proctor from delivering an astronomical lecture on Sunday 5 September 1880 created a major controversy in the Australian colonies. Controversy had been central to much of Proctor's success, and in this case drew on a long-standing connection between astronomy and religion. An examination of the Proctor-Parkes incident shows how popular science works in culture by drawing on and sustaining the analogical connections between scientific ideas and broader cultural concerns.

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Strengths and weaknesses of the history of mentalities

Cited by 119 publications

References 39 publications

Mentalities and mind-sets: The skeleton of relative stability in psychology’s closet

Mentalities and mind-sets: The skeleton of relative stability in psychology’s closet

Why study deduction?

The Proctor-Parkes Incident: Politics, Protestants and Popular Astronomy in Australia in 1880

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