ABSTRACT
This chapter describes a brief history of the early laboratories using self-observation is given, focusing on how various linguistic practices and social relationships among experimenter and observer shaped their results. It outlines an argument for studying mind as it becomes embodied in a public material medium and the influence of others and social institutions on the operation and observation of mind. The chapter explores the ideas developed here to critique and redevelop contemporary psychologies most widely used and perhaps least understood method of self-observation, rating scales. It provides some of the early psychological laboratories, concentrating on how their language use and the practice of self-observation interrelate. As language is an essential feature of institutional life, it is little surprise that the early debates between psychological laboratories about self-observation often revolved around issues of language, description, and expression. There are many varieties of “self-observation,” even among the early laboratories of psychology.
