Cheiron’s Young Scholar Award Committee is pleased to announce that two young scholars have been chosen to receive the 2024 award: Cassidy Kuhar, for her “Qualities of a « bon pilote »: Exploring U.S.-French Collaborations to Select and Classify Aircrew in WWII” and Caitlin Mace, for her “Controversy at the Boundaries: The Instinct Controversy c. 1890–1930.”

Caitlin Mace is a graduate student in the History and Philosophy of Science department at the University of Pittsburgh. She earned a B.A. in psychology with a minor in ethics and values from what is now Cal Poly Humboldt and an M.A. in philosophy from California State University, Long Beach. Her current research focus is on neural circuits and representations in the philosophy of neuroscience. Other research interests include memory engrams, instinct, animal models, reductionism, and levels.

In this work, Mace focuses on “instinct”:

Does ‘instinct’ have a place in a scientifically legitimate study of humans and non-human animals? This was the question at the heart of the instinct controversy in psychology and related fields (c. 1890–1930). I show that the instinct controversy was a result of efforts to establish psychology as a scientifically legitimate field. Such legitimizing work involves the rejection of non-scientific standards, practices, and concepts, as well as boundary settlement between the field of inquiry and other scientific and non-scientific fields. Based on debates in the instinct controversy, I interpret psychologists at the time to have considered scientifically legitimate concepts to be those that are explanatory, based on accepted theory, and useful for producing fruitful research. American psychologists determined the instinct concept to be none of these things, resulting in the decline of use of ‘instinct’ for a generation.