Fact making in psychology - The voice of the introductory textbook

Autonomous scientific fact statements, independent of the circumstances in which they were made, are to be found in scientific textbooks, according to Kuhn and Latour. Introductory biology textbooks have few references, littl e acknowledgement of researchers, and few qualifications of the facts they present. This paper examines introductory psychology textbooks and finds li ttle autonomous fact writing. Instead, when dealing with memory and with so cial interaction, psychology textbooks use experiments to demonstrate gener alizations, they qualify claims and refer extensively to the literature. A key feature is that psychology textbooks present experiments and other evid ence as the content that the beginner must learn. Psychology presents parad igms of doing, not of knowing. Psychology's struggle to make scientific kno wledge is presented in the textbooks, but the knowledge is not autonomous. Psychological knowledge always carries evidence with it, indicating that th e possibility of disagreement is ever-present. This raises issues about how psychological knowledge becomes accepted and about the place of academic f act making in the establishment of psychological regimes of truth.