In addition to the new articles listed in this month’s In the Journals post, I’d like to highlight the March 2015 issue of Science in Context. The themed issue, edited by Stephen T. Casper, is entitled “Of Means and Ends: Mind and Brain Science in the Twentieth Century.” See below for links to the issue’s introduction, five articles, and epilogue.
Of Means and Ends: Mind and Brain Science in the Twentieth Century
Stephen T. Casper
What role does context play in the mind and brain sciences? This introductory article, “Of Means and Ends,” explores that question through its focus on the ways scientists and physicians engaged with and constructed technology in the mind and brain sciences in the twentieth century. This topical issue addresses how scientists, physicians, and psychologists came to see the ends of technology as important in-and-of themselves. In so doing, the authors of these essays offer an interpretation of historian Paul Forman’s revisionist and highly contextualist chronology of the twentieth century, which presents the comparatively recent tendency to aggrandize the ends of technology as evidence of a major, epochal transformation in the epistemic culture of twentieth-century American science. This collection of papers suggests that it was in the vanguard of such fields as psychology, psychiatry, and neurophysiology in North America and Europe that the ends and applications of technology became important in-and-of themselves.
The Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) was a projective psychological test created by Harvard psychologist Henry A.
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