Actualizing potentials: Learning through psychology’s Rrecurrent crises

It was presumably the philosopher George Santayana who commented that those who do not knowthe past are doomed to repeat it. Yet study of the history of psychology has rarely, if ever, been used as a tool by social scientists to help them avoid the pitfalls of the past. Instead, social scientists use the study of the history of the discipline as a tool to plan and organize their work. Sheldon (Shep) White represents a distinctly different model of howto viewthe history and practice of psychology. In the 1970s, Shep began writing articles on the history of psychology that were pointedly designed to be used by the current practitioners of the discipline to help them to reflect upon their own practices (White, 1976, 1978; Cahan & White, 1992). The Nature of Knowledge in Science: From Crises to Potentials Contrary to the fast-paced reporting of science to the lay public-by journalists and scientists-scientific knowledge grows slowly and is subject to various periods of stagnation and even regression. Both evolution and involution in scientific thinking are linked with social events (Danziger, 1990). Usually such periods are filled with the tension created between the avalanche of new ideas (in new contexts) and the rigidities of the previous habits of thought. This tension may emerge along a multitude of parameters-between theory and (social) practice; ways of knowing and religious dogmas (remembering Galileo’s troubles about moving celestial objects at his time and arguments about stem cell research in our own); generality and fragmentation within a discipline; and the “stress of interdisciplinarity”-a discipline resisting the incoming streams of ideas from other disciplines.