Re: Origins of schema

Resent-From: "csaba pleh" <PLEH(a)IZABELL.elte.hu> Rejected message: sent to koglist(a)cogpsyphy.hu by RICKER(a)SC.MARICOPA.EDU follows. Reason for rejection: sender not subscribed. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Since the recent thread on "schemas," I have become mildly obsessed with trying to understand the origins of the modern use of the word "schema." I have not yet read William Brewer's papers on this (apparently they are both "in press" still), but he has argued that the our modern usage began with Bartlett, who obtained the idea from the neurologist, Henry Head. In his book _Remembering_ (1932), Bartlett is effusive in his praise for Head: My debt to Sir Henry Head will be obvious to everyone who reads this book. It was, indeed, largely through the inspiration of personal contact with him that I began to see how the apparently tangled mass of my experimental data revealed consistency and order in the working of the human mind (p. xix; I am using a 1995 reissue of the book by the Cambridge University Press) On page 200, Bartlett stated that he was using Head's notion of schema to develop his theory of remembering. In one of his posts, William Brewer stated that, "Bartlett was probably being overly generous in giving Head credit for the concept," but since I haven't read his paper yet, I don't yet know the argument supporting this statement. I looked a little more carefully at Bartlett's citations to Head's work. He refers to Head's two-volume work, _Studies in Neurology_, published in 1920, as the source for the word "schema." But it turns out that the first use of the term by Head was in a paper he published with Gordon Holmes several years earlier (Head & Holmes, 1911-1912, _Brain_, vol. 34, pp. 102-254). In fact, the wording in his 1920 book (quoted on pages 199-200 of Bartlett), and in his later work on aphasia, is very similar to the wording of this early paper (and, in fact, explains the use of the pronoun "we" in these later works--works in which there was only one author): For this combined standard, against which all subsequent changes of posture are measured before they enter consciousness, we propose the word "schema." (p. 187) Head and Holmes do not, however, cite any work that would explain why they chose this word. In looking at the reference lists of Head's works, it seems that his influences mostly came from within his field of neurology. So, I must suppose that the word "schema" came from some other unmentioned influence (perhaps he had read Kant?). Bartlett, on the other hand, mentioned mostly psychologists and anthropologists in his book. The founder and director of the lab in which he began his work was C.S. Myers; and it seems that he was influenced strongly by the works of various "social" psychologists--those psychologists who would have been most likely to have read the works of Baldwin and his close friend Janet. As I mentioned in an earlier post, Bartlett mentioned that Pierre Janet had been an important influence on him, and that Janet had published a work in 1928 that had taken an approach very similar to that of Bartlett. Janet's close friend was J. M. Baldwin, who had begun to use the term "schema" in 1906 to refer to mental structures in a way very similar to Bartlett's eventual use of the term. Perhaps it was facts such as these to which Brewer was referring in his post. But my point here is that the neo-Kantian movement of the late-nineteenth century to which some members of this list referred perhaps gave rise to a way of thinking about consciousness and memory that had a large influence on some important psychologists (and neurologists) around the turn of the century. These psychologists influenced not only the work of Jean Piaget but also (most probably, in my still forming opinion) the work of Frederic Bartlett. Although the lines of descent may then have continued separately after this point (in the work of the Piagetians and the "Bartlettians"), they come together in the same neo-Kantian pool of influences during the first decade of the 20th century. Jeff Ricker Scottsdale Community College Scottsdale AZ ricker(a)sc.maricopa.edu