Facilitating Access to Pavlov's Twenty Years of Objective Study of the Higher Nervous Activity of Animals

University Of California-Los Angeles, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

General Audience Summary This award provides seminal support for a research infrastructure project to translate into English I. P. Pavlov's most important contribution to psychology, first published in 1923 as Twenty Years of Objective Study of the Higher Nervous Activity of Animals. The project will culminate in uploading the complete text to eScholarship and indexing it in WorldCat, making the entire work available in English for the first time. The investigator is an experienced linguist and translator with medical background and a track record of success in large-scale translation projects. The final product will include two introductions, one by an American psychologist and the other by an American historian of science. Producing a translation of Pavlov's most influential piece of work and rendering it accessible to and searchable by anyone with access to the internet will be of potential interest not only to scholars and specialists (psychologists, historians, translation scholars, learning/teaching specialists, or therapists), but may also inspire young scholars and students, as well as lay persons interested in the implications scientific ideas have for common life. The proposed resource will show readers the controlled step-by-step experiments in which some of the 20th century's most seminal scientific knowledge was produced, and will potentially stimulate public scientific literacy and public engagement with science. Many of Pavlov's papers describing experiments with dogs' salivation end, unexpectedly, in paragraphs that informally bring in parallels with human psychology and try to address the social condition and human suffering. These turns reflect Pavlov's concern with the vexing question for all scientists today: What is the relevance of basic science to the public at large? Technical Summary The potential of the proposed activity to advance knowledge can be judged on the basis of the importance of having access to an accurate rendering of the work by the 1904 Nobel Laureate Ivan Pavlov. Despite his exceptionally high ranking in both physiology and psychology today (e.g., in a survey of professional opinion he ranks with Freud and Piaget among the most frequently named "greatest psychologists of the 20th century in the overall field of psychology"), the existing translations of Pavlov's seminal work into English are incomplete in coverage and flawed in quality. Moreover, they are not indexed, searchable, or available online. Anglophone scholars, students and the general public deserve better. The proposed project would address the problems of coverage, translation quality, and accessibility. The resulting exposure may well lead to a re-evaluation of Pavlov's ideas in several sub-fields of psychology, and further in applied fields related to them. As long as we believe that change in societal and individual attitudes is ultimately related to learning, wide access to an accurate presentation of Pavlovian conditioning principles would also benefit our approach to psychopathology, social psychology, and sociology in general.