Science & Tech Quote by James M. Baldwin

Psychology gets singled out here the way a newly rich industry gets singled out at a dinner party: not for lacking talent, but for attracting hustlers the moment money and attention show up. Baldwin’s line is a polished reprimand from inside the house. He isn’t dismissing psychology as crank work; he’s warning that, among the sciences, psychology is unusually vulnerable to the costume of science - charts, jargon, confident diagnoses - without the discipline that earns the costume.

The phrasing matters. “More than any other science” is a deliberate provocation, a hierarchy claim meant to sting colleagues into self-policing. And “has had its pseudo-scientific no less than its scientific period” lands like an accounting statement: the field’s history must be tallied in two columns, not one flattering narrative of progress. The subtext is about legitimacy. Psychology, dealing in invisible causes (mind, motive, personality), sits closer to philosophy, morality, and popular advice than physics ever does. That porous border makes it culturally powerful and methodologically precarious.

Contextually, Baldwin was writing in an era when psychology was professionalizing fast: laboratories, measurement, “mental tests,” and competing schools (introspection, behaviorism, early psychoanalytic influence) all jostled for authority. Public appetite for explanations of the self was booming, and with it came opportunists and overclaims. Baldwin’s intent is to tighten the screws: if psychology wants to be a science, it must confront its own periodic susceptibility to fads, metaphysical imports, and results that look empirical but aren’t.