ABSTRACT Despite widespread interest in individual life histories, few biographies of scientists make use of insights derived from psychology, another discipline that studies people, their thoughts, and their actions. This essay argues that recent theoretical work in psychology and tools developed for clinical psychological practice can help biographical historians of science create and present fuller portraits of their subjects' characters and temperaments and more nuanced analyses of how these traits helped shape their subjects' scientific work. To illustrate this thesis, the (...) essay examines the early career of James McKeen Cattell—an influential late nineteenth‐ and early twentieth‐century experimental psychologist—through a lens offered by psychology and argues that Cattell's actual laboratory practices derived from an “accommodation” to a long‐standing “cognitive deficit.” These practices in turn enabled Cattell to achieve more precise experimental results than could any of his contemporaries; and their students readily adopted them, along with their behavioral implications. The essay concludes that, in some ways, American psychology's early twentieth‐century move toward a behavioral understanding of psychological phenomena can be traced to Cattell's personal cognitive deficit. It closes by reviewing several “remaining general questions” that this thesis suggests. (shrink)

En el artículo planteamos una categoría para el estudio de controversias científicas, controversias sobre estilos, y proponemos una herramienta de análisis para dar cuenta de ellas. Para ello, hacemos uso de la noción de estilo de razonamiento de Ian Hacking y la metáfora de una historia por estratos. Mostraremos que las controversias sobre estilos tienen la particularidad de persistir en el tiempo, evolucionar e involucrar discusiones y debates en múltiples niveles. Para ilustrar nuestra propuesta, presentamos la controversia cuántica como un (...) ejemplo de una controversia sobre estilos y hacemos uso de la herramienta que aquí sugerimos. (shrink)

Huw Price (1996, 2002, 2003) argues that causal-dynamical theories that aim to explain thermodynamic asymmetry in time are misguided. He points out that in seeking a dynamical factor responsible for the general tendency of entropy to increase, these approaches fail to appreciate the true nature of the problem in the foundations of statistical mechanics (SM). I argue that it is Price who is guilty of misapprehension of the issue at stake. When properly understood, causal-dynamical approaches in the foundations of SM (...) offer a solution for a different problem; a problem that unfortunately receives no attention in Price’s celebrated work. (shrink)