James Mark Baldwin

James Mark Baldwin (January 12, 1861 – November 8, 1934) was an American philosopher and psychologist who made important contributions to early psychology, psychiatry, and to the theory of evolution.

Life

James Mark Baldwin was born in on January 12, 1861, in Columbia, South Carolina. His early intention was to study ministry, but later, after being influenced by his professor and then the president of Princeton University, James McCosh (1811-1894), he decided to study psychology. He was particularly drawn by the empirical method to psychology that McCosh was emphasizing, which was rare in the time of philosophical psychology. Baldwin’s whole career was be characterized by empirical approach to his studies.

After graduating from Princeton in 1884 Baldwin received the Green Fellowship in Mental Science to continue his studies in Germany. He studied from 1884 to 1885 with Wilhelm Wundt at Leipzig and with Friedrich Paulsen at Berlin.

In 1885, he became instructor in French and German at the Princeton Theological Seminary. He translated Théodule-Armand Ribot's German Psychology of Today and wrote his first paper The Postulates of a Physiological Psychology. In 1887, while working as a professor of philosophy at Lake Forest, College Baldwin married Helen Hayes Green, the daughter of the president of Princeton Seminary. At Lake Forest he published the first part of his Handbook of Psychology, in which he directed the attention to the new experimental psychology of Ernst Heinrich Weber, Gustav Fechner, and Wundt.

In 1889, he went to the University of Toronto as the Chair of Logic and Metaphysics. His creation of a laboratory of experimental psychology at Toronto (the first such in Canada) coincided with the birth of his daughters Helen (1889) and Elisabeth (1891) which inspired the quantitative and experimental research on infant development. His work from this period, Mental Development in the Child and the Race: Methods and Processes (1894) later made a strong impact on Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg.

During this creative phase Baldwin traveled to France (1892) to visit the important psychologists Charcot at the Salpêtrière Hospital, Hippolyte Bernheim, and Pierre Janet.

In 1893, he was called back to his alma mater, Princeton, where he was offered the Stuart Chair in Psychology and the opportunity to establish a new psychology laboratory. He would stay at Princeton till 1903 working out the highlights of his career reflected in Social and Ethical Interpretations in Mental Development (1897).

In 1892, he became the vice-president of the international Congress of Psychology held in London, and in 1897/1898 he served as president of the American Psychological Association. He received a gold medal from the Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences of Denmark (1897), and was a honorary president of the International Congress of Criminal Anthropology held in Geneva in 1896. By the end of the century the work on the Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology (published in 1902) had been announced and a period of intense philosophical correspondence ensued with the contributors to the project: William James, John Dewey, Charles Sanders Peirce, Josiah Royce, George Edward Moore, James McKeen Cattell, Edward B. Titchener, Hugo Münsterberg, and others.

In 1899, Baldwin went to Oxford University to supervise the completion of the Dictionary. There, he was awarded an honorary Doctorate in Science. In 1903, partly as a result of a dispute with Princeton president Woodrow Wilson, partly due to an offer involving more pay and less teaching, he moved to a professorship of philosophy and psychology at Johns Hopkins University where he re-opened the experimental laboratory that had been founded by G. Stanley Hall in 1884, but later closed with Hall's departure.

In Baltimore, Baldwin started to work on Thoughts and Things: A Study of the Development and Meaning of Thought Or Genetic Logic (1906) a densely integrative rendering of his ideas. It was in Baltimore that Baldwin was arrested in a raid on a brothel (1908), a scandal that put an end to his American career. Forced to leave Johns Hopkins he looked for residence in Paris, France. He was to reside in France till his death in 1934.

However, before moving to France, Baldwin worked in Mexico, advising on university matters and lecturing at the School of Higher Studies at the National University in Mexico City. In 1912, he took up permanent residence in Paris.

Baldwin's residence in France resulted in his pointing out the urgency of American non-neutral support for his new hosts on the French battlefields of World War I. When in 1916 he survived a German torpedo attack on the Sussex in the English channel, on the return trip from a visit to William Osler at Oxford, his open telegram to the President of the United States on the affair became front-page news in the New York Times. With the entry of America into the war in 1917, he helped to organize the Paris branch of the American Navy League, acting as its Chairman till 1922.

Baldwin died in Paris on November 9, 1934.

Work

James Mark Baldwin was prominent among early experimental psychologists (voted by his peers the fifth most important psychologist in America in a 1902 survey conducted by James McKeen Cattell), but it was in his work in developmental psychology and evolutionary psychology that his contributions were the greatest.

Step-wise theory

His step-wise theory of cognitive development was a major influence on the later, and much more widely-known, stage theory of Jean Piaget. Baldwin constructed his theory based on his interpretation of the observable data in his experimental studies of infant-reaching and its role in mental development. Baldwin noticed that mental development of a child is parallel with its physical development. Moreover, he noticed that child learns behaviors in stages, or “steps.” Every practice of the infant's movement intented to advance the integration of behavior, making them more complex. Baldwin rooted his step-wise theory of individual development into his theory of evolution, which he called “organic selection.”

Organic selection/Baldwin effect

Baldwin's most important theoretical legacy is the concept of the Baldwin effect or "Baldwinian evolution." Baldwin proposed, against Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, that there is a mechanism whereby epigenetic factors come to shape the genome as much as, or more than, natural selection pressures. In particular, human behavioral decisions made and sustained across generations as a set of cultural practices ought to be considered among the factors shaping the human genome.

For example, the incest taboo, if powerfully enforced, removes the natural selection pressure against the possession of incest-favoring genes. After a few generations without this natural selection pressure, unless such genetic material was profoundly fixed in the genome, it would tend to diversify and lose its function. Humans would no longer be innately averse to incest, but would rely on their capacity to internalize such rules from cultural practices.

The opposite case can also be true: cultural practice might selectively breed humans to meet the fitness conditions of new environments, cultural and physical, which earlier hominids could not have survived. Baldwinian evolution might strengthen or weaken a genetic trait.

In the later editions of his Mental Development he changed the term “organic” selection to “functional” selection.

Legacy

Baldwin’s contribution to psychology is significant. His biosocial theory of mind, as discussed in ental Development in the Child and the Race, influenced subsequent generations of thinkers, among most noted being Lev Vygotsky and Jean Piaget. His empirical method was an overture to the rise of functionalist approach which dominated American psychology for the next hundred years. His theory of organic selection was an early pioneering effort to introduce into psychology a mechanism of evolution, which resurfaced again in late twentieth century with the proliferation of evolutionary psychology.

His contributions to the young discipline's early journals were highly significant as well. Baldwin was a co-founder (with James McKeen Cattell) of Psychological Review (which was founded explicitly to compete with G. Stanley Hall's American Journal of Psychology), Psychological Monographs and Psychological Index, and he was the founding editor of Psychological Bulletin.

Publications

• Baldwin, James M. 1891. Suggestion in Infancy. Science, 17, 113-117.
• Baldwin, James M. 1893. Elements of Psychology. Henry Holt and Company
• Baldwin, James M. 1895. Memory for Square Size. Psychological Review, 2, 236-239.
• Baldwin, James M. 1896. A New Factor in Evolution. The American Naturalist, 30(354), 441-451.
• Baldwin, James M. 1897. Organic Selection. Science, 5(121), 634-636.
• Baldwin, James M. 1898. Story of the Mind. D. Appleton
• Baldwin, James M. 1913. History of psychology: A sketch and an interpretation. Watts & Co
• Baldwin, James M. 1913. The religious interest. Sherratt and Hughes
• Baldwin, James M. (Ed.) 1960. Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology (3rd edition). Peter Smith Pub Inc. ISBN 0844610488
• Baldwin, James M. 1974. The Individual and Society: Psychology and Sociology. Ayer Co Pub. ISBN 0405054920
• Baldwin, James M. 2000 (original work published 1906). Thought and Things: A Study of the Development and Meaning of Thought Or Genetic Logic (3 vols.). Adamant Media Corporation. ISBN 1402197624, ISBN 1402197616, ISBN 1402197594
• Baldwin, James M. 2001. Selected Works of James Mark Baldwin (Robert Wozniak, Ed.). Thoemmes Continuum. ISBN 1855069164
• Baldwin, James M. 2001 (original work published 1897). Social and Ethical Interpretations in Mental Development. Adamant Media Corporation. ISBN 1402181590
• Baldwin, James M. 2002 (original work published 1902). Development and Evolution. Adamant Media Corporation. ISBN 1402160682
• Baldwin, James M. 2006 (original work published 1890). Handbook of Psychology. Kessinger Publishing ISBN 1425491146
• Baldwin, James M. 2006 (original work published 1895). Mental Development in the Child and the Race: Methods and Processes. Kessinger Publishing. ISBN 1425491022

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Broughton, John M. & Freeman-Moir, D.J. 1982. The Cognitive Developmental Psychology of James Mark Baldwin: Current Theory and Research in Genetic Epistemology. Ablex Publishing. ISBN 0893910430
• Goodwin, James C. 2004. A History of Modern Psychology. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 0471415650
• Maier Bryan N. 2006. The Separation of Psychology and Theology at Princeton, 1868-1903: The Intellectual Achievement of James McCosh and James Mark Baldwin. Edwin Mellen Press. ISBN 0773459308
• Sewny, Vahan D. 1967. The Social Theory of James Mark Baldwin. Augustus M. Kelley.
• Weber, Bruce H. & Depew, David J. (Eds.). 2003. Evolution and Learning: The Baldwin Effect Reconsidered. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN 0262232294
• Wozniak, R. H. 1998. Thought and things: James Mark Baldwin and the biosocial origins of mind. In R. W. Rieber & K. Salzinger (Eds.), Psychology: Theoretical-historical perspectives. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. ISBN 1557985243

External links

• Biography – Biography on Encyclopedia Britannica website
• James Mark Baldwin, (1861-1934) – Short biography and bibliography
• Autobiography of James M. Baldwin – Full text autobiography on the “Classics in the History of Psychology” website
• Selected Works of J.M. Baldwin – Bibliography with full text articles of some of Baldwin’s works
• “What Genes Can’t Do” - Current debate in genetics by Lenny Moss (2003)

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