Toward a Psychology of Knowledge: Hypotheses regarding Rorschach Movement and Creativity

Abstract

Can we say that scholars, scientists, and other intellectuals are free—apart from ideological and motivational constraints—to choose their professional and personal Weltanschauungen? This essay claims we cannot—that intellectuals are also and powerfully constrained by their particular cognitive styles. The analysis of this cognitive constraint comes under the heading of psychology of knowledge. The paper illustrates such an analysis at the level of speculation. Drawing upon the Rorschach movement and creativity literatures, and literatures outside psychology, it hypothesizes differential susceptibility to competing Weltanschauungen within specific disciplines (including psychology and sociology). The main theme is that a random sample of intellectuals subjected from birth to identical ideological and motivational influences will not respond identically to specific intellectual stimuli—that within individual disciplines they will tend to divide into the two cultures that C. P. Snow describes between disciplines.