PSYC325 Final Exam: Complete Lectures

The scientific revolution brought about the idea of a mechanistic universe...

- 'The natural world increasingly came to be understood by analogy with artificial processes, culminating by the end of the seventieth century, in the view that the natural world was best understood in terms of analogies with mechanical actions' (Henry, 2008) - e.g. starting to create machines, printing press, chariots of the ancients etc. - But instead seeing the workings of the universe as being like a machine was new - a way to explain how the universe can be lawful and consistent - The universe at one level is a really big machine - The world increasingly came to be understood by analogy with artificial processes, culminating by the end of the 17th cent. In the view that the mature world was best understood in terms of analogies with mechanical actions - There were machines before the scientific revolution e.g. windmills - But seeing the workings of the universe as being like a machine - Eventually leads to the mind-as-computer analogy of cognitive science

Provide dates of important psychological works in the enlightenment...

- 1687: Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica - marks the end of the SR, where we just now have science rather than a revolution - consequently get people trying to understand the human world, not just the natural world - 1690: John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding - get people like Locke etc. who try to apply their understanding from science to philosophy - 1704: Gottfried Leibniz's New Essays on Human Understanding - 1710: Bishop Berkeley's A Treatise Concerning The Principles of Human Knowledge 1741: David Hume's An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding - 1750: Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Discourse Into the Arts and Sciences - 1751-1772: The Encyclopedie - 1764: Thomas Reid's An Enquiry Into The Human Mind On The Principles of Common Sense - 1781: Immanuel Kant's A Critique Of Pure Reason - 1789: The French Revolution

What was involved in the rise of neurophysiology...

- 1751: Animal movements are stimulus and response - Dr Robert Whytt establishes that frogs legs react to external stimuli in decapitated but not pithed (nerves removed) frogs and argues that movements are simply stimuli and response - reinforces that the spine plays some role in transmitting information; mind and body are connected - 1791: Luigi Galvani demonstrates that frog legs move in response to electricity along the nerves (apply electricity to nerves of a frog leg it moves, same as humans) - 1812: Charles Bell distinguishes between sensory and motor nerves - leading from the body to the brain and vice versa - 1850: Helmholtz determining the speed of neuron impulses - (~25-43 metres a second) - Start to get understanding that the brain is made of neurons and cells and some how this turns into life and mind - important step in psych becoming scientific because now we reasonable grounds for the mind and brain being founded in biology

Aristotle was..

- A Macedonian student who attended Plato's academy and was Plato's student - Aristotle nonetheless had a very different vision of the world to his teacher Plato - in many ways the opposite of his predecessors

Provide an outline of what a person living between 1450 and 1517 would have experienced leading up to the scientific revolution

- A contemporary of Columbus who lived to old age whole have witnessed; - The rise of printing - The end of the roman empire/ publishing of previously unknown ancient writings (including on natural philosophy) - A discovery of America - The end of catholic dominance over Western Europe - A world view where new things were possible - and in fact, desirable - things are now different in the world - a world where new things happen - Mikolaj kopernik first circulated his ideas about heliocentrism in 1514 - didn't publish those ideas until after his death when his ideas were published by his friends

What was Hempel's view on Empricial statements...

- A good place to start in terms of understanding the received view - Main thesis was --> 'The defining characteristic of an empirical statement is its capability of being tested by a confrontation with... the results of suitable experiments or focused observations' - the important thing about some theory you have is its ability to explain results - 'A statement is then called testable in principle if it is possible to describe the kind of data which would confirm or disconfirm it' - about testability, what data can confirm or disconfirm it, not as stringent a test of science as falsifiability

John et al (2012) found that...

- A lot of psychologists are doing things with the experiments they do which go against the logic of hypothesis and significance testing itself - anonymous survey sent to 5964 psychologists at major US universities with incentivised truth telling - No one has ever genuinely had a null hypothesis

How does Freud's use of cocaine lead to behaviourism (post Freud)?

- After graduating Freud worked in Vienna hospitals, publishing a monograph called on Coca in 1884 (about the wonders of cocaine) - Freud thought it was a wonder drug and encouraged people to do it - about a year later the side affects and addictive qualities became apparent and he became embarrassed by his paper - In 1884-85 tried to write a book called 'Project for a scientific psychology' attempting to describe psychology in entirely physiological terms e.g. pre-empting behaviourism or neurocognitivism, but abandoned it (too much cocaine?) - this provides insight into Freud's understanding of psychology and the fact that he wanted it to be scientific

Explain the pre-socratics

- Ancient Greek Philosophers were very imperfect as seen from modern standards... but they started a tradition of critical inquiry. - The thought of the initial philosophers in this tradition (Pre-Socratic) only survives in references and quotations by later writers like Laertius - we don't know a whole lot about what they thought and about how in depth their thought was. - They are the start of science, psychology, philosophy, mathematics etc. - Argued knowability - Epistemology

Explain the barbaric customs of Greece regarding when

- Ancient Greek noblemen were sexist/misogynistic (including the philosophers) - Plato: 'All the pursuits of men are the pursuits of women also, but in all of them a woman is inferior to a man' - Aristotle: 'the relation of male to female is by nature a relation of superior to inferior and ruler to ruled'

Provide a recap of lectures 1-9

- Ancient Greeks - The Scientific Revolution (feat. Descartes) - The Enlightenment, and the breakdown of Cartesian mind-body dualism (Locke: ideas aren't innate, Berkeley: material is mind, Hume: is there really a self?) - Went from Descartes to Locke to Berkeley - break down of cartesian mind body dualism

What does William James argue about consciousness?

- Argues consciousness is a disappearing area of psychology - but thoughts do exist - seeing thoughts as being functional but thoughts are not a thing but rather an action, so thus consciousness is an act and thus a function, wants to see what it does for us - opposed by consciousness is a thing and structuralism can figure out the elements - James sought the functionalism view in answering what it does for us? - Behaviourists attempted to answer this question and determined environment is key - argued consciousness was entirely useless and behaviour was entirely determined by environment

Explain Anna Freud and Ego psychology

- As far as she was concerned her father was right - S. Freud's 1923 topographic model of the mind saw not only the id and superego but also the ego as having unconscious processes - things in each of structures that we are unaware of - A Freud's big thing was to focus on the ego and what conscious and unconscious mean within this context of the ego - developed her father's definition - Used her research of children to develop this definition of the ego - Wanted to preserve the drive theory - aggression and sex drive everything - expand to how we interrelate with other people (socially) - The big questions for A. Freud were: - Is development of the ego affected by interactions with caregivers? - What role do the aggressive and libidinal drives play in the development of the ego?

What is Bayesian statistics?

- Associated with 18th century mathematicians/ clergymen Thomas Bayes - With Bayesian statistics, you have a prior estimate of likelihood, and you gather data to alter that likelihood - Your prior estimate is loaded with your previous beliefs

Explain the barbaric customs of Greece regarding slavery

- Athens had more slaves than citizens = Ancient Greek was an Elitist, Brutal and warlike, dominated by a caste of warrior men - Sparta had its Helot class, who they often officially declared war on each year - The Greeks were also sexist and misogynistic - including all philosophers - men were superior and women inferior - Reminds us these are very different people to us, slavery is fine, misogyny is fine, paedophilia is fine - Of course, the Greeks look pretty barbaric to us - Ancient Greek society was elitist, brutal and warlike, dominated by a caste of warrior men - these were the only men allowed to say anything about philosophy - Athens had more slaves than citizens - also had more non-citizens than citizens but weren't slaves - basically the citizen were outnumbered by various groups - Sparta had a helot class, who they declared war on each year so basically if they felt like it they could kill them with impunity - Aristotle - 'for he is a slave by nature who is capable of belonging to another - which is also why he belongs to another' - if you're unlucky enough to have been taken as a slave in war it's your own fault

Explain the 'personal equation' of astronomers

- Because the stars and planets etc move in the sky, astronomers learn things about the stars by their different rates of movement - By the 19th century, astronomers' need for precision in timing was very important - they were looking at milliseconds, and they basically used stopwatches to count how long it took for stars to cross a field of view - In 1795, an assistant at a British observatory was dismissed because his reaction time in measuring these were 0.8 seconds slower on average than the Astronomer Royal's - this was the Persona Equation of the Astronomers; basically how long it to them to react, difference in reaction time from one astronomer to another - this is reaction time experiment - Bessel showed that these reaction time differences were actually consistent across various astronomers it was carelessness... some people just took longer - perception experiment without knowing - Willem Wundt did figure it out that is a psych experiment - these experiments say something about psychological processing

What event in 1439 facilitated the scientific revolution?

- Before 1450; if you wanted a copy of a book, someone had to manually copy it by hand - Johannes Gutenberg invents the printing press in 1439; by 1450 it was in operation - could make a book for the fraction of the expense and effort - could copy many books - By 1500 there are 1000 printing presses in western Europe and 8 million books printed - this is something that has never happened before - information becomes freer - Easier to get information e.g. have you're own copy of the bible for example

Explain the Arts and science through the romantic era

- Before the Romanticism of Rousseau et al., 'the arts' referred to practice and 'the sciences' referred to theory - In the Romantic era, art became Capital-A Art; the creative arts had been about getting ever closer to a perfect form but were now about the expression of the true self - In a newly secular age, Art became sacred, and artists started talking about the unappreciative 'philistines' of the public - Kings going to Monet's funeral for example - In 1834, Mary Somerville wrote the book On The Connexion Of The Physical Sciences (an popular introduction to physics textbook), and in a review of it, William Whewell called her a 'scientist', the first time the term had been used

What did empiricism bring to scientific revolution?

- Before the SR, many philosophers simply assumed that the bible and the words of the ancients (Aristotle and Plato) were more accurate than their own eyes (e.g. Galileo's opponents with his telescope). - In the SR, people became less likely to trust authority and more likely to test things themselves - people in that period who believed that looking through the telescope of Galileo what they saw wasn't real because the ancients had said it can't be - In the SR, people became less likely to trust authority and more likely to test things themselves - questioned the ancient writings - such as Galileo - go out and observe and conduct investigatory experiments - One enormous revolution in the way people thought about science was the idea that contriving a situation to isolate a particular factor might be useful - This is why psychologists do laboratory tests today - because it works and it works for science

What was the historical context of Socrates?

- Born ~470BC, worked as a stone mason as a youngster, was a hoplite in the Peloponnesian wars - Became famous because... Had a habit of going around the Agora and asking people inconvenient questions e.g. what are you actually measuring? Became well known philosophically because he attracted a following of youths, some of whom became the Thirty Tyrants who (briefly) took power in 404BC before being deposed

What was Darwin's influence of psychology?

- Darwin influenced Sigmund Freud - Freud's theory is a very Darwinian theory - Before Darwin there was no good reason for thinking that the human mind was fundamentally part of a material, mechanistic natural world - Even the more atheistic pre-Darwinian philosophers like David Hume essentially saw the human mind as not matter But Darwin provides strong evidence that the human mind is made of matter, and likely formed due to evolution - Nothing in our brain that is not just matter - only cells and electrical matter - Darwin makes it intellectually possible for psychology to be encompassed by natural science - Part of who we are (our mind) is just the product of evolution - the mind is made of matter (physical substances) - no room for a spiritual plane - Darwin's biology encompassed psychology, he published the book the expression of the emotions in man and animals in 1872 - In this book he argued that human emotional expressions are evolved, and recognised cross culturally - Psychology experiment done in 1879 - slightly before Wundt, the supposed father of psychology - Wundt argued with Darwin about the expression of emotions - William James' first published pieces were 1865 reviews of brooks by Thomas Huxley - Darwin enabled psychology essentially

Explain Charles Darwins theory of evolution...

- Darwin was not the first person to come up with a theory of evolution: Erasmus Darwin (Charles grandfather) wrote a poem considering evolution - Robert Chambers' 'Vestiges of the natural history of creation' (natural selection theory) - Darwin's theory of evolution via natural selection, presented theory to British Royal Society in 1859 - there's limited resources (not enough food to feed a whole population), there's a natural variation within a population, those with the genes that best fit the environment are more likely to 'win' the limited resources, those 'winners' are more likely to get to adulthood and pass on their genes, over many generations, those genes that best fit the environment become dominant, with enough generations, species may diverge - argues this happened with the finches in the Galapagos e.g. better beaks for eating nuts, grass etc. - natural selection - sexual selection

Explain Darwinian concepts of natural selection and sexual selection

- Darwinian natural selection - Basically the same as the breeding that led from wolves to chihuahuas and Great Danes, expect not deliberate - just some members of a species surviving and reproducing at the expense of others over an enormous time span (millions of years) and just as chihuahuas and Great Danes have been bred from wolves, both wolves and lobsters were 'bred' by evolution - Darwinian Sexual Selection - Darwin also argued that it wasn't simply natural selection (fitness for the environment) that led to a species surviving and evolving, but also sexual selection i.e. for their genes to be passed down, an animal has to procreate - generally, it's NOT every male copulating with every female, many females tend to be selective about which males meet their standards - this selectiveness can lead to diverging species (breeding out bad genes for surviving e.g. having a really big tail might not be great for escaping prey)

The Roman Empire

- Different points of the Roman empire - Probably wasn't that good for 90% of people - countryside Romans - Fascinated by the Greeks - Saw themselves as having Greek heritage both intellectually, philosophically and biologically

Explain Titchner's structuralism

- Edward Tichner's research priorities (British student of Wundt, ended up teaching at Cornell in America): 1. Discovering the basic sensation elements to which all complex processes could be reduced 2. Determine how these basic sensation elements are connected to from complex processes 3. Relate these functions to neural physiology - Tincher was more of a British associationist (like Locke or Hume) than Wundt - this is structuralism and the idea that consciousness is structured - how things are structured; how atoms come together etc.

Christianity and neoplatonism

- Euro religion before Christianity was local, but Christianity was international - Christianity binding people together - It first appealed to those who moved between worlds in a diverse multi-ethnic empire like the Roman empire like Tatian; 'There should be one code of law for all mankind, and one political organisation' - Emperor Constantine (reign; 306-337AD) - St Augustine (354-430AD), from Algeria, fully integrated Neoplatonism and Christianity - Influenced by Plato's idea of the Soul, develops the idea of original sin (born sinners and must redeem ourselves) - His interpretation of Christianity dominant until the High Middle Ages - from here the Roman Empire Shrinks

Because science had already started doing modern sort of stuff in the SR, the product of this century of philosophy is new ways of thinking, new disciplines --> Some of the products of d'Alembert's century of philosophy are...

- Feminism (Astell, Macaulay, Wollstonecraft) - Utilitarian ethics (Bentham) - Human rights (Locke, Paine) - Economic theory (Adam Smith) - Revolution (the US, France) - because one of things they argued about was how unfair the systems of government were - people like Thomas Paine who argued for revolutions where we overthrow kings

What is the difference between Freud's individual and Post Freudians' social beings

- For Freud, Human beings are born at odds with their environment, bestial impulses in conflict with living in a society - Generally, theorists like Klein believe that human infants are much better adapted to human social life than Freud thought - We are still evolved creatures living in a deterministic materialistic universe it's just that the evolution now includes evolution in terms of dealing with social situations

Explain Melanie Kleins Object Relations Theory

- For Klein, the newborn is instinctively drawn to the breast, and instinctively distinguishes between a 'good' other who is the provider and a 'bad' other that doesn't - For Klein, the project of childhood is not socialisation (because we are innately social) but the amelioration of frightening, forceful, psychotic anxieties about the bad other - the idea of a bad other for children is terrifying, distinction between this and the good other - As a result of fixating on a particular object, (i.e. the good other might be the breast) we develop a tendency to relate it to other objects (i.e. fetishes)

The French Revolution caused people to re-evaluate how they looked at the enlightenment because...

- French Revolution happened in 1789 and caused people to re-evaluate how people looked at the enlightenment - The Enlightenment was against tyranny, and the rule of tyrannical kings didn't stand up to Enlightenment reason (though there were some Enlightened rulers, who tried to find a new way), and applauded the American Revolution which had struck down tyranny - The Enlightenment figures of the late 18th C (Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft) also applauded the 1789 French Revolution because it cast down the kings - However, the French Revolution didn't go as planned, and this was seen to diminish the influence of the Enlightenment - reign of terror - Decisively changed the way people thought - led to romantic revolution

What led Freud to get his medical doctorate?

- Freud as a young man was a student of physiologist Ernst Brucke and worked in Brucke's laboratory doing comparative research on human and animal brain tissue - his first published papers were very dry (looking at animal brain tissue vs human brain tissue) - brought up in a scientific world, physiological understanding of science. - Freud could not find a tenured position in Brucke's lab, and so obtained his medical doctorate in 1881

How did Haeckel influence Freud?

- Freud didn't actually read 'The Origin of the Specie' by Darwin - Ernst Haeckel was the most prominent Darwinian in Germany, and Freud read Haeckel's book, rather than Darwin's - Haeckel is famous for the phrase embryological development reflects the history of evolution - can see this development in the evolution of fish compared to humans, recapitulation of evolution, the embryology says something about the order in which things evolved - this later turned out the not be true - Freud extrapolated from this (and Charcot) to adult mental illnesses recapitulate traumatic childhood experiences - Haeckel had different evolutionary theories to Darwin - He was more Lamarckian, and Freud's biology reflects this -

Explain Freud's tendency towards cultishness

- Freud had a tendency towards cultishness - insisting that his followers had to accept his theory whole e.g. some people didn't want to think about having sex with their mothers etc. but would have to accept the whole theory - According to Makari's Revolution In Mind, Freud had a tendency to stubbornly reject any changes to his theory suggested by his close followers, antagonising them until they left the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society - Freud would then revise his theory to take into account some of their criticisms - basically this meant there were people who were followers of Freud who became not followers of Freud and instead had theories of their own

How is Freud psychology's bogeyman?

- Freud is what people think psychology is... thanks to pop culture Freudian defines the lay definition of psychology e.g. Frasier - Psychology is by and large not Freudian, and most lectures see Freud as old news - in the past and belongs there - In this lecture, I'm going to focus on Freud's metatheory and his metatheoretical commitments (understanding of how the mind was structured) rather than his theories - Freud was very metatheoretically aware and these still have some application to psychology today - sex is related to Freud's metatheoretical understanding but we won't worry about it

Explain Freud's early topographical model of mind & consciousness

- Freud uses the iceberg metaphor in 1915s 'The Unconscious' - Our Consciousness for Freud is the surface of the iceberg - Below the water (But still visible) is the preconscious (the ideas and memories we can draw to consciousness at any point) - The underwater bulk of the iceberg is the unconscious - where consciously censored ideas and desires live (things we don't want to think about, socially unacceptable, things we don't want to tell other people or ourselves)

Wundt appeared in psychology through the rise of the German university, explain the rise of this institution...

- From the medieval era until 19th century, universities were conservative institutions which largely produced clergymen, lawyers and medical doctors - Philosophy - or natural philosophy- was something that gentlemen did as a hobby - Wasn't really a career until Kaiser Fredrich Wilhelm III of Prussia, after being defeated by napoleon in 1806, on this defeat Fredrich Wilhelm III vowed that the state must replace with intellectual strength what it lost in material resources - solution was the modern university - the topics you could learn expanded and created an increasing middle class that sought education as a career path e.g. main aim was to train professionals such as teachers

What did Galileo Galilei do that was scientific?

- Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) who did things that were very scientific... - Did experiments - he did things like manipulate an independent variable, controlling extraneous factors, measuring a dependent variable - Mathematised - he found mathematical patterns in the data - Conceptually analysed- argued inappropriate/illogical classifications, vague/ad hoc explanations, irrefutable hypotheses, the nominal fallacy, overextension of theories, and semantic ambiguity - this is what distinguishes good science from bad science from pseudo science

the scientific revolution and psychology: So why did it take until 1879 before the precepts of the scientific revolution were deliberately applied to the human mind?

- Galileo did some mildly important stuff like revolutionising physics (dropping stuff from the leaning tower of pizza to prove Aristotle wrong; they fall at the same rate regardless of weight) and astronomy (Discovering the moons of Jupiter) - As a result of his work with telescopes, he became interested in the senses, and how the human senses worked - because had to convince people that what they saw through the telescope wasn't just in their head

What was Descartes context?

- Galileo published about primary and secondary sensory qualities from 1610-1623 - this is the SR trying to reckon with how our new understanding of science might change our philosophy - Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy was published in 1641 - Descartes was taught by Jesuits, and lived in Catholic France - in his day Descartes was more well known as a natural philosopher (Scientist in today's terms) and mathematician - basically invented the X and Y axis, and published on physiology and how reflexes work - - The mechanistic universe - published on many things, he published on philosophy and was one of the first philosophers to reckon with what it means for philosophy or the idea of the mind, that we've removed Aristotles Telos (final cause)

What are inductive-statistical explanations?

- Hempel also pointed out that some scientific explanations weren't based on laws but on statistical regularities, and argued that they instead followed logic; 1. the probability that P is a Q is r 2. I is a P 3. (therefore it is probable to degree q that) I is a Q - Inductive arguments are used in psychology - Everything you know about the conclusion is in the first two sentences - deductive - More information in the conclusion of an inductive argument

Explain David Hume and Associationism

- Hume argues that - if there's no self, and just ideas - our experience of mind is fundamentally about the association of ideas (which he specifically distinguishes from perceptions, unlike Locke) specifics between perceptions and ideas, Hume thinks of ideas in more modern terms e.g. maybe I'll go and have coffee later, rather than Locke's ideas of perception of black and white on the board - For Hume, there are three main regularities in the association of ideas: (the ways we associate ideas) - Resemblance: things being similar - Contiguity: things happening around the same time - Cause and effect: one thing result's in another happening - It's been suggested that these are modelled after Newton's laws - Association of ideas is a for-runner of behaviourism - associate particular things in the environment with certain outcomes

The famous argument between Reid and Hume has been described as...

- Hume: (LOUDLY) WE HAVE NO GROUNDS FOR OUR BELIEFS (whispering) but we must believe in an external world - Reid: (LOUDLY) WE MUST BELIEVE IN AN EXTERNAL WORLD (whispering) but we have no grounds for our beliefs

What event in 1453 facilitated the scientific revolution?

- In 1453 the (Muslim) Ottomans captured Constantinople and capital of the Roman empire since the 4th century AD - the Roman empire ended; lasted over a millennium - Scholars fleeing the Ottomans to Italy and took Greek manuscripts with them, which then got translated into Latin (The language of learned Western Europe, controlled by the Catholic Church) - now their writings might be frowned upon - This kicks off 'the Renaissance' western Europe got access to many ancient works for the first time (e.g. lots of Aristotle and Plato) - this happening at about the same time as printing was emerging means people read ancient writings for the first time and start to see this as something to emulate and start to consider doing it themselves and because it can be printed people will read them now.

What was Freud's relationship with Jean Martin Charcot?

- In 1885 went to France to spend winter studying with Jean-Martin Charcot - Went into private practice in Vienna as a psychiatrist in 1886, originally as a sort of Vienna Charcot, Charcot's man in Vienna trying to engage in hypnotising patients and telling them to stop being hypnotised (as a means for curing hysteria)

What is Freud's Seduction Error?

- In 1895, Freud thought he had discovered the reason for psychoneuroses; extremely widespread childhood sexual abuse - the reason why people obtain hysteria, anxiety, depression The sexologist Kraftt-Ebbing called this stuff a 'scientific fairy-tale' Freud then revised this theory to be about unconscious phantasises of childhood 'sexuality' - one of the things we need do in childhood is reign in impulses that come up in our heads through sexual evolution. Note that Freud's 'sexuality' encompasses everything ultimately derived from the sexual drives, evolutionarily - rather than necessarily talking about the desire for sex

What is the context of the received view?

- In the 1920s and 30s physics got weird - Einstein's theories of relativity had just upended centuries of Newtonian physics, and had some odd implications about the fabric of reality - Some in the Vienna Circle (Schlick, Reichenbach) were friends with Einstein and many more were very familiar with physics - Frege and Russell successfully reworking mathematics to be a subset of logic (which would lead to computing); maybe science too is a subset of logic? - particular kind of way setting up arguments and conclusions in the same way maths is a way of setting up arguments and conclusions - The late 19th century conventionalism of Pierre Duhem and Henri Poincare - scientific theories are (to some extent) useful conventions rather than truth - A commitment to empiricist epistemology (e.g. Locke/Hume) - the idea we know things through going out and finding these things and this is better - you basically get the received view

Was Isaac Newton a Magician or a scientist?

- Isaac Newton (1642-1727) - the kind of scientist most people have heard of - He never heard of the word scientist - developed in the 19th century after his death - Wrote over a million words on occult topics like the apocalypse and alchemy - Was called 'the last of the magicians' by John Maynard Keynes

What wasn't the scientific revolution?

- It's an evolution rather than a revolution - not quite the big break from medieval era that had once been assumed (Shapin's argument) - Neither Copernicus nor Newton (nor anybody in between) would have understood what you meant by scientific revolution - to them it was natural philosophy not science - in this period there was division at universities between the arts and sciences, but the science and arts were coming together - where the arts are practices and the sciences are theories - E.g. the art of fighting - Neither Copernicus nor Newton thought like modern scientists - a historian once remarked that he intended to study why Isaac Newton 'one of the greatest anti-trinitarian theologians of the seventieth century' dabbled in science' - because Isaac Newton wrote a lot more about theology than about science - nonetheless, a set of crucial scientific occurrences that profoundly shaped the world we live in today

What isn't science?

- It's not just technology - technology is different because science is about the discovery of knowledge technology takes that knowledge and applies to a different area - It's not just men in lab coats play with chemicals or looking through microscopes - It's not just people doing experiments using the scientific method (see; historical sciences, Darwin) - These are really not so much sciences they just observe - like a dinosaur studier - It's not just stuff that follows Hempel's covering laws

What was William James...

- James, like Wundt, studied physiology and biology - similar background to Wundt - In 1865 he both went on a field trip up to the Amazon with eminent biologist Louis Agassiz and published articles about evolution - Taught anatomy at Harvard from 1873, and in 1875 taught the first American experimental psychology course - Was more of a philosopher still than an experimentalist - Both James and Wundt actually started informal demonstrational labs in 1875 (But James was more of a philosopher than practitioner, unlike Wundt, and didn't have the same gusto for research) - not that excited about doing research - Wrote the first English psychology text book - Published 'The Principles of Psychology' in 1890

Explain the success of the German University

- Just as Asian students come to Australian universities to learn now, American students in the 19th century would go to Germany to learn - the thought of better education and better employment prospects once home - There were so many American students in German universities in the late 19th century that they successfully lobbied to have lectures in English - because they were sick of learning German to study - Bit by bit, the German system was transported back to places like the UK, America and Australia and implemented (including psychology)

What was Immanuel Kant's influence?

- Kant argued that there was no possibility for a science of the mind - the mind was in the world of phenomena, science can only look at noumena - (But Kant thought a science of humans was possible, and he is a huge name in the history of anthropology) - Kant also thought that phenomena could be studied as philosophy (and so basically created phenomenology) - Enormous influence on existentialism, post and modernism kind of thought etc - these are things which suggest at a profound level there is something in our mind which constructs the world - Kant also had some very big influences on psychology: - Wilhelm Wundt was heavily influenced by Kant (e.g., Wundt's distinction between 'social psychology' and 'physiological psychology', which was explicitly a distinction between a psychology of phenomena and one of noumena) - Piaget's research program was effectively 'when do infants develop Kant's categories?' (e.g., Kant's subsistence and inherence category is basically Piaget's object permanence)

Explain the 'quantitative universe' occurring in the scientific revolution

- Mathematics 'increasingly came to be seen as an indispensable way of revealing the operations of natural phenomena' (Henry, 2008) - increasingly became an important part of figuring out how the world works - maths had existed and been used to understand things about the world since the second century AD e.g. Claudius Ptolemy who came up with the theory that the earth went around the sun - This is the (originally Pythagorean) idea that the universe is maths, and so therefore science is about uncovering the maths of the universe - people who worshipped maths - Joel Mitchell argued that psychology is a bit like Pythagoras in this is way, in that we worship maths rather than careful use of it - During the SR, 'Theology as the queen of the sciences' becomes replaced by 'mathematics is the queen of the sciences' - the main theory was replaced, if your theory doesn't make sense mathematically then there is something wrong with it - This is why you have to learn about t-tests

Explain the ancient Grecian world in terms of philosophy

- Mediterranean based - Greece as a country- not the same as the ancient Greece, this included parts of what is now turkey and some places in Italy (Sicily) - Up to the coast of turkey - For the Greeks, people who weren't Greeks were Barbarians - One Greek man received a governorship of part of Roman Empire on the Danube, and said that his charges "lead the most miserable existence of all mankind, for they cultivate no olives and drink no wine' - Maybe the Greeks didn't do philosophy first, but their philosophy is the earliest that survives where arguments are made for philosophical positions - critical inquiry - arguments are made is different from this is the way that is

In what ways did Aristotle not act like a modern scientist?

- No maths, no unnatural experiments - doesn't put maths with going out into the world and looking at things - in a psych lab you'll conduct an experiment; Aristotle just examined things in nature and called them experiments The purpose of nature? - talks about the purpose of nature, has what Aristotle calls Telos; the purpose of nature, there I purpose in everything in nature e.g. the purpose of water in a river is to flow down it to the ocean e.g. an animals purpose is related to nature

What is Freud's meaning gap?

- One clear dilemma running through psychology was the problem; how do we have a nuanced understanding of meaning within a deterministic, mechanistic, scientific framework? - this is the meaning gap Wundt explicitly left meaning out of physiological psychology, James left psychology because he couldn't solve the dilemma Freud couldn't ignore it - for Freud it is all about interpreting meaning - He wasn't going to interpret dreams or solve patient dilemmas otherwise. Freud's basic project is to understand the basic structures in the biology and psychology of humans that make meaning possible He discussed symbols and the way they acquire meaning extensively (e.g. Petocz, 1999) and provided a plausible mechanism by which a biological creature in a deterministic universe might be able to symbolise and have meanings Freud is unfalsifiable

How is Jean-Martin Charcot and Hysteria an influence on Freud?

- One psychological condition of the era was hysteria - not talked about so much today - called conversion disorder today in the DSM5; because people talk about it as being the conversion of psychological to physiological symptoms - but back then was one of the most common disorders presented - today is conversion disorder because it involves psychological problems that convert to physical problems (e.g. fainting, blindness, paralysis) - A mental illness - The French Neurologist Charcot argued that hysteria was a sort of auto hypnotism (people hypnotising themselves) and that the symptoms therefore had a psychological origins

What did Reid mean by common sense?

- Originally, 'common sense' (e.g. Aristotle) had been a theoretical 'thing' in the mind which bound the senses together - not so much a sense in itself but the way in which the sense are bound together - common sense which binds the senses together so you can work with them and go about daily life - However, by Reid's time 'common sense' had acquired the modern meaning (idea of basic discernment, judgement) - idea of basic judgement and discernment, logical, doesn't need an explanation it's just basic logic - Reid's idea of common sense is the stuff that every basic competent adult holds in common - that we live in the real world, that there is cause and effect, that the orange I see is really an orange, etc - E.g., Reid argued that Hume might write like a skeptic, but he didn't live like a skeptic (for example might say philosophically but not in reality... 'I'm not coming over to your place tonight, because I can't prove that your place actually exists') - A theory of philosophy, argued Reid, should not conflict with common sense - For Reid, rather than cogito ergo sum, the foundation of knowledge should be common sense, in this sense - nobody really doubts reality - This (and his own scientific research into vision) also influenced his theory of perception

What were the results of the scientific revolution?

- Our understanding of natural philosophy was turned upside down - between 1500 and 1700, natural philosophers' understanding of astronomy (Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo), Physics (Galileo, Newton), Chemistry (Boyle), and Physiology (Vesalius, Harvey) was turned upside down - at the very least pretty incomplete - However it was turned upside down... but not that much! these were still people of their time; strongly religious, believers in magic and alchemy (e.g. Newton) - Universities mostly did not yet have professional science faculties, science was something rich people did for fun - science was in many cases still just curiosity rather than of practical importance. - there were still people of their time - strongly religious

What is Weber's Law? And what does it have to do with is Fechner?

- Physicists were interested in perception - because there is a point at which, when you perceive visual stimuli you have to start paying attention to people's perception - Weber had also figured out something to do with psychology had figure out things to with psychology (perception) - physicists became interested in the cross over between appearance of the world and how we perceive this - The difference between 29 and 30 Kg is basically equivalent to the ratio or the difference rather than the sheer amount of kg - adding a Kg feels about the same as adding a gram - In 1860 'Elemente Der Psychophysik' by Gustave Fechner expanded upon Weber, providing a more systematic set of methodological principles for measuring the conscious

What was involved in the rise of physiology?

- Physiology starts to develop some understanding of nerves and neurons in the brain - Modern neurology and neurophysiology begins in the scientific revolution, with the work of English physician Thomas Willis - Willis brought about the idea that the mind happened because of the brain - Willis profited from new post-mortem/autopsy techniques that stopped the brain from quickly turning to mush, and the illustrations of Christopher Wren (well known architect) - Brain turns to mush quickly after death, figured out a way to preserve it - Willis used to study autopsies of the brain to understand mental illness and how the mind functions in the brain - In his book Pathologie Cerebri draws connections between brain abnormalities and neurological conditions e.g. epilepsy - mind and the brain are intimately linked - In his last book explores idea of philosophical implications of the brain being 'soul made flesh'

Explain the involvement of Alienists in lunatic asylums

- Pinel's (1801) 'moral treatment' of melancholy and mania (i.e. not just chaining them to their bed and forgetting them but actually talking to them and trying to understand the problems in their lives) - instead try to put them into a nice place where they could rehabilitate - Over the course of the 19th century, there was an enormous increase in the amount of people put into lunatic asylums and treated by alienists - less community care and increasingly medical style care of moral treatment for insanity - a model which thought about the brain - 19th century physicians began to incorporate a moral treatment into a medical model where insanity was ultimately rooted in the brain - At the turn of the 19th century, a progressive medical tradition solidified, where alienists attempted to provide medical treatment to 'lunatics' - Today an alienist is a psychiatrist - Madhouses were superseded by progressive new institutions

What did statistics have to do with biology?

- Post-Darwinian biologists had a new appreciation for variation, and the role that might play in biology - In order to understand variation at the biological level - biologists started thinking in terms of variation and so started thinking in terms of statistics which might help us understand this variation - Whereas previously they had just tried to get the most representative specimen of a species - To understand variation, you needed to employ statistics - Galton was Darwinian in the sense that he was Darwin's cousin

What was Thomas Reid's influence?

- Reid was very popular in the 19th century, and broadly influenced the 19th C American pragmatists including William James (one of the founders of psychology) - Reid had a big impact on how philosophers viewed the 'way of ideas' - e.g., Leahey and others use his terminology - Reid's arguments still should be paid attention to: broadly speaking, modern psychology assumes the representations that Reid denies...but should it? - comes down to logic and argument rather than necessarily evidence

Explain ancient psychological medicine

- Religo-spiritual medicine; common through the civilisations of Europe, north Africa, and the middle east (and lasting to this day - see faith healers) - still common today in some parts of the world, we would consider this placebo -The empirical scientific tradition; associated with the Ancient Greek and then Roman physicians like Hippocrates and Galen, and lasting through the Islamic Golden Age and the Renaissance - the Hippocratic oath; (for Drs) to do no harm

Fischer statistics involves...

- Ronald Fischer; in 1925s Statistical Methods for research Workers, he adapted an extended 'Student's' 1908 t-test into ANOVA - had to use an anonymous name instead of his own so he chose student, not actually intended for students - Provided a rationale for using t-tests and ANOVAs in a carefully designed experiment they can determine whether we should reject the null hypothesis (that two sample groups are just from the same population) - Fischer was bitterly opposed to the idea that hypothesis testing allowed decisions to be made on the meaning of data - he did not believe that a p value of less than 0.05 showed that two things were different except in the context of a very carefully controlled experiment where there was no other explanation

Provide a recap of lectures 1-10

- Sar far this subject's involved the mind as discussed by philosophers from Socrates to Kant - But Philosophers are not the only people who have theories about the mind... or brain - and how they work - Ancient Dr's discussing mental illness have theories about the mind - Physiologists/biologists studying how bodies work increasingly focus on the brain and therefore the mind - These both effectively 'enter the game' of psychology in the 19th century

Explain how the scientific revolution resulted in a science which pays attention to conceptual analysis...

- Science has always included the screening of concepts and arguments for clarity and coherence. Archimedes, one of the great classical scientists, discoursed about the level using the axiom-theorem style of reasoning. In which issues of conceptual clarity and logic take centre stage. However, even during the course of the scientific revolution, conceptual analysis remained a part of Galileo's scientific method... it was not abandoned in favour of experimentation and mathematization' (Machado & Silva, 2007) - For all the maths and mechanics of the scientific revolution, its abundantly clear that the natural philosophers of the day were still philosophers who did philosopher stuff - still doing philosopher things like conceptual analysis - Galileo doesn't just do experiments and collect data - he is conscious of metatheoretical assumptions, interrogates arguments etc. - he argues that the reason why other people are wrong is because they have wrong metatheoretical ideas - this is why we teach this subject, because we still need conceptual analysis even in modern science

How did Susan Haack (2003) defend science?

- Science should not really be about getting 100% truth - all science is, is critical inquiry - everyday enquiry - Empirical enquiry of the most ordinary sense - critical common-senseism - We need to 'recognise the imperfection of our epistemic condition' - Hume is right we cannot know for certain if something is true - 'inquiry in the sciences is like empirical inquiry of the most ordinary, everyday kind - only conducted with greater care, detail, precision, and persistence, and often by many people within and across generations

The scientific revolution brought about the idea of a consistent universe...

- Similar to the idea of a lawful universe is the idea that the universe is consistent - so before the SR there was this belief that what was in the heavens (space) were fundamentally/qualitatively made of different substance than earth, this belief was replaced by the belief that there was no disjunction between the heavens and the earth, and that everything... was composed of invisibly small particles subject to the same universal laws of nature - this is new in the SR, part of the ideas that inspired Newton to apply the mathematics that worked in astronomy and apply that to physics - However, now we have to belief that everything is made of the same substances (atoms) - everything made of the same stuff in different combinations - This is why psychologists think the mind can be studied scientifically - implies that our mind must work the same way, be subject to the universal laws of nature - it's made of the same stuff as everything else

Describe what classical Athens means for philosophy...

- Socrates, Plato and Aristotle were from Athens - Athens was the biggest city in Ancient Greece - 40,000 citizens (men with property) - It was a democracy (if you were an Athenian born adult male who had property) you could vote on how things went and what happened in the city - Athens Classical period lasted from 508BC (when tyrant Hippias was overthrown) (became a democracy) to 322BC (When Alexander died) - represents philosophy going mainstream - flowering of classical Athens at this time - Athens golden age of the 5th century - where famous things happened such as The battle of Thermopylae (480BC) and The Peloponnesian war (Athens vs Sparta, 431-404BC) and philosophers Socrates (~470-399BC), Plato (~426-348BC), Aristotle (384-322BC) - Socrates fought in the Peloponnesian war.

Doctor Who; magician or scientist?

- Sonic screwdriver - magic wand - scientific 'technobabble' - disguises a fantasy world - functions on the principles of fantasy - distinction between this and hard scientific fiction; scientifically plausible - BUT the Dr investigates odd situations and acts like a scientist in a un scientific world - The point is that... the boundary between science and not science is fuzzy and the questions we ask are good questions

How does Descartes make the distinction between humans an animals?

- The (God given human) soul, for Descartes, made us humans different to animals because it gave us self-awareness - 'animals do not see as we do when we are aware that we see, but only as we do when our mind is elsewhere' - animals are not conscious quite the way humans are - other animals are creaturess of habit - the self-awareness makes us flexible (unlike animals which are more machine-like) - crucial to that self-awareness/flexibility was language - we think in words in a way that animals don't - We have souls - those souls have language- the language gives us flexibility - This is a neat way to solve the problem of being a catholic and believing in a mechanical universe, but leaves us with the problem of the mind and body - mind-body problem

Explain Ataraxia as opposed to eudaemonia

- The Big Three talked about eudaemonia, which sort of means happiness but also virtue and living well and being lucky - Eudaimonia; the aim of life - sort of means happiness, virtue, living well and being lucky - 'The happy are happy by possession of good things, and there is no need in addition to ask further for what purpose he who wishes to be happy wishes it - Plato -In the turmoil of the Hellenistic age, philosophers were concerned with Ataraxia; attaining tranquillity or freedom from disturbance - different to the good life, its more 'at least we don't have to worry' - shift from philosophy trying to justify how things work to philosophy trying to stop people being really depressed. -Ataraxia; trying to attain tranquillity or freedom from disturbance - well at least we don't have to worry as opposed to eudaimonia; everything in my life is going well because I'm an Athenian nobleman

Provide a recap of Lectures 1-5

- The ancient Greeks are the beginnings of philosophy as we know it - critical inquiry - The Ionians speculating about the stars and the nature of reality - The ancient Greeks did begin critical inquiry and tried to understand the world and the cosmos of the world, the order of the world

What event in 1517 facilitated the scientific revolution?

- The catholic church had ruled the west's intellectual life for over a thousand years - In 1517, German theologian Martin Luther nailed some complaints about the church to a church door, and was excommunicated from the church in 1521 - but instead just started his own church; the Lutheran church - suddenly there were competitor to the catholic church - the protestants e.g. Henry VIII separated from Rome in 1534, to get a divorce or six, he left the church and so did England - there are now challenges to the catholic church - places for thinkers and intellectuals to go where they might not get killed - there is no longer one doctorand of gospel etc.

What occurred between 1500 and 1700 ?

- The discovery of new continents, the ease of propagating ideas, the fall of empire etc - all led to a new way of thinking about the world - Which, broadly, was a blend of Plato's rationalism and Aristotle's empiricism, and there were a set of metatheoretical assumptions science had/has about what the world is like - which saw the universe as fundamentally quantitative (structure mediated by numbers), lawful, consistent, and mechanical, and which aimed to be practical - The people of the scientific revolution knew they were doing something new: - Johannes Kepler - A New Astronomy (1609) - Francis Bacon - The New Organon (1620) - Galileo Galilei - Two New Sciences (1638) (all books)

Define the demarcation problem of science

- The famous example is the phrenology of bumps on the head telling you about the person - Demarcation problem is the problem of what is science and what is 'pseudoscience' e.g. the likes of phrenology and homeopathy are widely considered pseudoscience - homeopathy is exemplified by distilling a rose and doing it again to turn it into something placebo effect meant to treat illness - However, works both ways --> meditation is building evidence to come out of pseudoscience

The Vienna Circle had what relation to the inductivist/logical positivist approach

- The inductivist/positive approach came from a group that met in 1920s and 30s Vienna, who's project was discerning the logic of scientific explanation - Their theorising gets called logical positivism or logical empiricism or the received view - Trying to figure out what a scientific explanation looked like because if you could figure this out you could figure out what is and what isn't science - Thought they had solved science - most philosophers of science don't think they did now - Most philosophers of science no longer think they did solve science

What is the contextual backdrop to Freud?

- The madhouses of the 19th century to talking to people for therapy (asylums) - Over the 19th century, it became clear to doctors that there were specific relationships between brain structure and mental function, e.g. Paul Broca & Tan (1861); Discovery of brain region called Broca's area today which inhibits speech function - Also e.g. Phineas Cage (1848) and J.M. Harlow - train track spike went through his head and personality changes (used to be nice and then became weird and less forward thinking, irritable) - As a result... - The rise of Phrenology - can figure out things about the mind by measuring how different the bumps on their brain are compared with others - reasonably quickly discredited; realised bumps on the head did not speak to personality traits- but was time when it was a pseudoscience - This is the context Freud grows up in

Provide a recap of the demarcation problem

- The problem of what is science and what is pseudoscience - Phrenology and homeopathy are considered pseudoscientific - Where and how do you draw the line on what is science and what is not?

The islamic Golden age means...

- The story of philosophy doesn't stop - continues in Islam and the east - - Pre-Christian Greek/Roman philosophy was largely lost in the west - Islamic Hadith; 'The Ink of a scholar is more holy than the blood of a martyr' - In the early period of Islamic conquests Caliphs in places like Bagdad had The house of wisdom in Bagdad, 9th century to 13th century, put in place by Caliph Harun Al-Rashid - basically a library for study for any academic regardless of religion

Explain Descartes and the perfect being...

- Then argued that because he can imagine a perfect being (God) a perfect being must exist (using a form of logic now seen as faulty) - he is a dualist - William of Ockham argued against this kind of thinking that being able to imagine something implies the existence of a pure Form, but it hadn't yet taken by Descartes' day - For Descartes, because this perfect being exists guarantees the reality of reality - God wouldn't lie to us - guarantees ontology; guarantees the way the universe is, is basically a mechanical universe

Kant made a distinction between innate ideas and innate categories, explain how he did this...

- There is a world that science looks at, which is understanding the physical nature of the world - but we have innate categories about what the world is like that structure the world around us for us - We have no experience of the world as measured by science (noumena), but we can know the categories by which we structure our experience (phenomena), which he divides up as such: categories are not in reality but things we impose upon reality to structure it - Quantity: • Unity • Plurality • Totality - structure the world by assuming some things there are one of, some things a few and some things which is everything e.g. totality might be the universe - Quality: • Reality • Negation • Limitation - in terms of the nature of stuff and how it is it either doesn't exist or exists in certain kind of ways - Relation: Inherence and Subsistence (substance and accident) - contrast to this is cause and effect - Causality and Dependence (cause and effect) - contrast to this is reciprocity or relatedness - Community (reciprocity) - Modality: • Possibility • Existence • Necessity - Structure experience by quantity; unity (one person), plurality, Totality (whole universe) - We do structure the world with our minds in a very real way

The high middle ages meant...

- These concepts from the Ibns come back into the way that people think about the world - The sheer pervasiveness of religious thinking - The submersion of the self - people played their roles in society, and writers downplay individual desires, beliefs etc. - The high middle ages is religious world of kings, crusades and monks.. But is also an age of intellectual advancement - philosophy and science starts to happen again - unviersties founded in Bolonga (1088), Paris (1150), Oxford (1167), Cambridge (1209) - the modern world is a culmination of trends started in the middle ages - Universities begin to be founded - the modern world starts - Saint Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) - typical early medieval thinker - Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) - Christian understanding of Aristotle - Kahneman systems 1 and 2 links - William of Ockham (1287-1347) - Ockham's razor; simplest explanation is the best explanation (parsimony)

What relationship did Karl Pearson and Ronald Fischer have?

- They hated each other with a passion - Statistics has a metatheory and there are different points of view about how best to use statistics in a scientific psychology

How were Galileo's primary and secondary qualities (senses) distinct from the thoughts of previous philosophers?

- This was different to what previous philosophers had thought - Aristotle; 'sensibles' were emitted by nature to communicate with living beings - Galileo; the senses mechanically receive sensory information as a result of minute bodies emanating from external objects - Modern psychophysics; the senses mechanically receive sensory information as a result of waves and molecules emanating from external objects

How was Emil Kraepelin an influence on Freud?

- Was a student of Wilhelm Wundt - who sort of brought Wundt's metatheoretical assumptions to psychiatry - not a hard distinction between neurology and psychology at this time - In his 1883 book 'Compendium of psychiatry; for the use of students and psychiatry' Kraepelin argued for a modern psychology that was like any other branch of medicine - mental illness could be reduced to brain dysfunction - argued we try to find the physiological causes of illness and provide a diagnosis for psychological issues - For example - he put together a DSM-style diagnosis of dementia praecox - which we'd now call schizophrenia - today DSM is called Kraepelian because it follows his guide as to how to put together a set of symptoms into a particular diagnosis

What was Thomas Reid's alternative to the 'way of ideas' ?

- Where the 'Way of Ideas' - where a perception is an idea (a copy or a re- presentation) - has all the problems of indirect realism, Reid suggested a return to Aristotelian direct realism; where perception is not a re-presentation it's just a presentation - In indirect realism, there are four elements: the perceiver (you), the act of perception (you perceiving the stuff), the representation, and the object (being represented) - In direct realism, there are only three elements: the perceiver, the act of perception and the object - there is only presentation, not re-presentation - perception is act rather than a thing - perception isn't a thing, it's an act - Solution is to go for direct realism - suggested a return to Aristotle that we directly perceive the world - Perception is an act rather than a thing - it's an ability or act - you perceive something - Cognitive psychology still has (in 2019) representations rather than presentations - Cognitive psychology today still has this debate - perception and representations, is this the right way to go? Or are we just presented with things?

What is the solution to Descartes' target 'I think, therefore I am'

- You can doubt that I'm standing in front of you talking about philosophy - This is philosophical position called 'solipsism'; basically; nothing else really exists in the universe except you - do my parents really exist? - However, the real point is that you cannot doubt that, right now, you're doubting. - there is a you that doubts, it doesn't make sense for you to not exist You must exist in order to think and feel (of which doubt is a subtype of thinking and feeling) - E.g. you think, therefore you are. - this is founding sentence of modern western philosophy

Freud was not perfect; some of his faults are very real...

- he was a terrible therapist, personally, by all accounts; wolf-man is proof of this, paid to be quiet until death bed - he was not a successful therapist - The uncomfortable cult-ishness of psychoanalysis at times (which is not very scientific) (Makari's Revolution In Mind makes clear the changes in Freud's theory's over time) This was not very scientific - often changed his theory over time; would have arguments with other psychologists/theorists and the change his theory to accommodate theirs (after they'd left) - often did not see far beyond the mores of Fin De Siecle Vienna (turn of the century Vienna) - some of the things in his theories look weird to us because we live a century in the future - But some of Freud's supposed faults are really strawmen, or criticisms from a century in the future - how we consider science and psychology has changed in 100 years since Freud

The Romantics' primary two complaints about the Enlightenment were...

- in trying to reduce the world (including thought) to atoms that can be studied scientifically (e.g. Locke's ideas, or Hume's associations of ideas), the Enlightenment philosophers missed the way things came together as a whole - In focusing so heavily on 'reason' the Enlightenment missed crucial parts of human experience - missed the deeper primal, passionate parts of human experience that is expressed in Capital-A Art e.g. when you get the Van Gogh's who feel things so intensely they chop their ear off

What are the important things to understand about inductive arguments?

--> Inductive arguments have a conclusion that is not certainly true even if we accept the premises - offer (or are intended to offer) support (increase likelihood) for the truth of the conclusion - But do not strictly imply the conclusion --> the conclusion contains more information than the premises e.g. she has been coughing, has more information than therefore she has TB - contextual support for the statement that she has TB comes from the fact that she has been coughing and coughing in this area usually means TB --> think: information has been 'inducted' brought into the argument through the course of reasoning - what has been inducted is extra information that doesn't have to be logically warranted, could be a sensible guess. Why are why concerned with induction in science? We only have access to a limited amount of information but what are we aiming when doing science? General theory

Explain how Descartes is similar to modern cognitive science...

-Similar to modern cognitive science in the representational aspect of seeing/experiencing our world - Cognitive science is influenced by Descartes - See similarities on page 34

Late antiquity and the early middle age means...

-The Roman empire shrinks into the Byzantine Empire, and (western) Europe slowly goes 'dark' - philosophy stops/Greek Philosophy is mostly lost - The rise of Islam; between 622-750, Muhammad and those who succeed him conquer Arabia, and the Middle east, North Africa and Spain - from the east, what had been the Roman empire gets conquered by Muhammad

Explain the Humours in hippocratic medicine...

-The biological things that the mental illness came down to - came down to the cause that imbalances in the humours; basically humours are fluids in the body - the Greeks had this idea that there are four elements in the physical world - based on the basic four principles of the earth (earth, wind, fire, water) - therefore there are four fluids (humours) in the body; blood, flem, yellow bile, black bile (coughing up dry blood) - Hippocratic medicine is heavily influenced by: - Pre-existing medical tradition on the humours (e.g. bodily fluid) - Empedocles'' argument about their being four basic elements - Principles of Pythagoras philosophy about cosmic harmony (e.g. there's four elements, so there's four humours) - cult of numbers, number structured the universe in some way

What is the hypothetico-deductive account of confirmation?

1. A prediction is deduced from a hypothesis 2. The prediction is checked (against reality) 3. If the prediction is correct, the hypothesis is confirmed; if it is not then it is disconfirmed Experimental psychology draws from this perspective

What are the meta theoretical assumptions of logical positivism?

1. Unity of science --> there's only one scientific method, whatever the discipline 2. Diachronic reductionism --> over time, all science will be reduced either by a theory being extended into a new domain (e.g. Galileo extending physics to astronomy) or a theory being absorbed by another theory (e.g. Newtonian physics being a special case of Einstein's physics) - argument here is that psychology will be absorbed by biology 3. Metaphysical questions are meaningless --> Carnap's ' a plague on both your houses' stance; theories are only explanadum and explanans - whether electrons are real or besides the point - doesn't really matter whether its instrumentalist or realist, all that matters is you have a set of statements which describe evidence, beyond this is metaphysical and doesn't matter - Science is just the statements used to describe data

How does the split brain patient (H.M.) assist our understanding of cognitive neuroscience...

1950s and 60s very experimental brain surgeries to relieve/cure epilepsy Henry Molaison (H.M.), who's hippocampus was surgically removed, and who developed anterograde amnesia (Hippocampus forms new memories, hence inability to make NEW memory) Epilepsy patients where the corpus callosum was removed - (left and right brain are now separate) because this reduces the extent of the epilepsy and for people who have severe epilepsy this can be better - brings about the start of 'are you left brained or right brained?' - also suggests about different sides of the brain for different processing e.g. specific and global processing Developed an understanding of brain localisation - Cognitivism is gaining speed in the 1950s and 60s through all these sorts of things - the hippocampus playing a role in memory, and all that the left-brain/right brain research Get an idea of parts of the brain involved in different activities

The Scientific revolution represents...

A Shift in how we understand the world

Define folk psychology

A certain way of explaining why people do things e.g. why did you come to class today - answer will include a motive (e.g. wanting a HD in 325), and belief (coming to class results in getting better marks) which lead to an action (e.g. coming to class) - there is a sense to which anyone who ascribes motives and beliefs to actions is doing psychology, this is folk psychology, the common sense, logical psychology MOTIVE + BELIEF = ACTION

Jung was, in conclusion...

A charismatic charlatan who slept with his patients, and who sought to take psychology back to souls and the occult (spirits etc) - he did this continually - had a wife and mistress who knew about each other - sought to take psychology back to the occult and these are the people who are most interested in Jung today - he didn't really think psychology could be a science so his approach was unscientific - however provided a starting point for personality typology

Immanuel Kant's (1781) Critique of Pure Reason sees Kant trying to...

A difficult book to summarise: a complete philosophical system that argues about ethics, philosophy of mind, epistemology, metaphysics, and all sorts of things - the book is about everything Kant had ingenious solutions to the Enlightenment's psychology problems, synthesising Locke, Hume and Reid

define falsifiability

A feature of a scientific theory, in which it is possible to collect data that will prove the theory wrong. A theory must lead to hypotheses that, when tested, could actually fail to support the theory.

What do the Humours have to do with mental illness?

A modern axis on Hippocrates: there's this is idea that an imbalance in the humours caused mental illness - so if you have too much black bile in your system you start to suffer depression - if you have rapid mood swings had issue with their bile levels - imbalance in their chemicals with flem they didn't worry too much about things - melancholy; physical black bile overloading the system - treatment for these mental illnesses was to drain fluids from their bodies

What is the Enlightenment?

A movement where people demanded to think freely for themselves and follow the logic for the argument they had and not have to genuflect from their opinions A social movement which demanded the right to free reason in the public sphere, unfettered by kings or cardinals (for rich white men, anyway) - could follow the logic of the argument they had

Define Logical Positivism

A philosophy that sees meaning in only those beliefs that can be empirically proven, and that therefore rejects most of the concerns of traditional philosophy, from the existence of God to the meaning of happiness, as nonsense.

is psychology a science?

A practical question with massive consequences, socially - research grants, government funding, insurance company rebates etc. because we are convinced that we are science and have convinced other people that we are science - but the answer to this question must be thought about metatheoretically

Who was Carl Jung?

A swiss neurologist/ psychiatrist, who trained with Eugene Bleuer (who coined the term (schizophrenia) - Freud initially encouraged Jung's ideas, making him president of the VPS after Adler - added prestige to the Freudian cult to have someone famous like Jung on his side - while still being in Switzerland, so the VPS expanded - But it soon became clear that Jung was a mystic; had a bunch of ideas that did not fit with Freuds very deterministic, materialistic scientific view on the world - Instead Jung was the type of person who talked about how he sensed spirits - mystical view of the world - while he was interested in Freuds theory, he profoundly rejected Freud's materialism and evolutionary biology, left VPS is 1914 Carl Jung didn't believe psychology could be a science - outside the realms of science - better than an exact science is simply observing the human heart/how we behave, act etc.

Plato's Allegory of the Cave

A theory put forward by Plato, concerning human perception. Plato claimed that knowledge gained through the senses is no more than opinion and that, in order to have real knowledge, we must gain it through philosophical reasoning.

Explain validity, truth and soundness of an argument

A valid argument is one that flows logically; the truth of its premises entails (necessarily leads to) the truth of its conclusions (e.g. the Socrates argument) - thus arguments may (or may not be) be valid - BUT statements may (or may not) be true - ALSO arguments may (or may not) be sound, where a sound argument is both valid, and its premises are true.

What are the two positions Descartes tries to justify separately?

A) We live in a fundamentally mechanical universe (post-Galileo) - universe where atoms hit other atoms and as a result of this atomic movement a rock moves - not because God made it happen or it is part of its purpose, it's just mechanical atoms hitting atoms - Descartes believed we live in a fundamentally mechanical universe B) We have immortal souls (standard catholic doctrine) - But Descartes was also a good Catholic and good Catholics believe they have immortal souls which go to heaven and if you have an immortal soul that's going to heaven that doesn't fit into this mechanical universe

What was the enlightenment and who started it?

About trying to find the truth whatever that may be whoever that offends Philosophically bookended by John Locke's 'An Essay Concerning Human' - Locke starts it off

Describe the relationship between induction and science

All science appears to depend on induction - depends on observing an effect to a generalisation about that effect e.g. lab tests to general theory of something - the development of theories is an inductive business - observations made over a sample of events e.g. 'my 100 or 1000 etc subjects remembered meaningful words better than nonsense words in lab presentations' - So, arguing from the results of your experiment for support for your theory is itself inductive - observations made over a sample of events are, in science taken as support for general theory e.g. therefore we expect that all subjects remember meaningful words better than nonsense words' - but note controversies about induction and probability etc in science - inclined to think that the more data we get the more likely the theory is true, but if a theory predicts infinite events it could be predicting something physically impossible

In a syllogism (a classic deductive argument)...

All thongs are made of rubber (p1), this is a thong (p2), therefore this is made of rubber (conclusion) - logically guaranteed but not sound, because for example there could be leather thongs (other materials)

Evolutionary psychology is a meta theory in psychology, define evolutionary psychology

Also believes psychoanalysis kind of things, but is more cognitive - an evolved survival computer

What is hollywood psychiatry in the 1940s defined as...

American psychiatrists of the 1940s-1970s led to the shrink archetype of Hollywood TV/movies - seen currently in Brooklyn 99 where Jake says he doesn't want to go to a 'Shrink' Biggest influences are Sullivan and A. Freud's ego psychology TV tropes; 'All psychology is Freudian' The reason for this being the archetype is that up until the late 1970s psychologists and psychiatrists were very Freudian - not yet at the modern neuroscientific understanding of the mind

What is the context of the enlightenment?

An age of empires and exploration for European (and for people who weren't European slavery and brutal exploitation) - Europeans are starting to flex their muscle internationally and while doing this (renewed confidence) they start to also flex their muscle philosophically

Define an argument

An argument is a set of statements (propositions/claims) offered in support of (reasons for) another statement's truth. Not a quarrel, though quarrels usually involve arguments - two premises and a conclusion drawn from the premises - E.g. Premise 1. All men are mortal, Premise 2. Socrates is a man, Conclusion 3. Therefore, Socrates is a mortal (this is a syllogism)

A fallacy is...

An invalid argument

explain Aengell's functionalism

Angel began a move away from 'introspective' psychology to something more 'objective', in keeping with James' pragmatism - the introspective psychologist looked inside their own mind and tried to figure out what they actually see, didn't worry about having participants, happy to just look inside their own consciousnesses Even if you're looking at psychology as something that's useful, then you figure out how it's useful, you're probably going to start looking at more objective means for how/why it's useful - i.e. behaviour - how it's useful started looking at James' ideas No longer measuring just thoughts - measuring behaviour Starts to lead to behaviourism

What did Stove (1982, 1998) argue about Feyerabend?

Argued that Feyerabend's 'anything goes' is the logical endpoint of Popper's 'scientific irrationalism' - Popper argued that you can't prove anything right - Poppers followers (Lakatos, Kuhn, Feyerabend) showed that we can't prove anything wrong either - Thus, Stephen Hawking said philosophy is dead

In his book 'The against method' Feyerabend argues...

Argument was --> the data speak against the universal validity of any rule. All methodologies have their limitations, and the only 'rule' that survives is 'anything goes' - directly linked to Colt Porter's song 'anything goes' - believed there was no method to science - and in a particular situation singing a song could actually be appropriate methodology - Anarchic view of science

Platos rationalism vs Aristotles empiricism

Aristotle was an empiricist - go out into the world and observe - Plato was a rationalist in that he thought the way to understand the world was to use logic and reasoning (based on 1st principles and what we can know) - In this argument you get the start of the debates on philosophy that still persist to this day.

Aristotle wrote.... and basically invented... therefore he was a... which is a... in modern terms

Aristotle wrote voluminously on many topics, and basically invented formal logic - developed the form of argument that we still use today Natural philosopher - now called a scientist; someone who finds out things about the world and reports them, tries to make sense of them

Alfred Adler was a neo-Freudian (closely linked to Freud but extended his theory) who...

was a colleague of Freud's, Who resigned from the VPS in 1911 - In his 'Individual psychologie' he emphasised social positioning e.g. inferiority complex and the superiority complex - as factors in human psychology -because Adler thought Freud underestimated the role of social positioning and where we sit in society and the effect this has on how we behave.

Explain Pavlov's context and how he influenced psychology...

Around the same time as Thorndike Pavlov came from a physiological background - found evidence of environmental stimuli causing a behavioural response which could be measured by physiological means implies there is no need to involve the mind Behavioural response because animal's behaviour changes - but measured with physiological means Pavlov wanted to avoid metaphysical ideas of psychology - psychology in terms of philosophy of mind Pavlov and Thorndike set up some of the ways in which behaviourism would be used in order to understand about the human mind - both were interested in humans but used cats/dogs

What is Chomsky's view of verbal behaviour (in terms of behaviourism)

we can't really know what we are responding to as stimuli because when it comes down to it Skinner is avoiding the question of our discrimination abilities e.g. doesn't focus on how we learn to discriminate that thing as a white board instead of something else. Just assumes that it happens, also very hard to do this without considering the perceiving to be mental. Shows that there is still mind there that we cannot get rid of in quite the way that Skinner wants us to. (goes against Skinners radical behaviourist perspective)

Explain how psychology's methods are naturally indirect

we cannot simply measure the mind with a ruler - Psychology is a strange science because we don't have chemicals and lab coats like the other sciences, and the thing that we study is fundamentally a hard thing to study, because we talk about the mind and behaviour being the subject of psychology but we are not even sure of what a mind is.

Ethics is an important subfield of philosophy, Define ethics

what it is best to do - what the right thing is to do - how we know that is the right thing to do? Or if that is the right thing to do?

The enlightenment is the first time in history that some of the prominent figures...

write in English

The British Object Relations School is associated with...

Associated with W.R.D Fairbairn, D.W. Winnicott and John Bowlby, all heavily influenced by Klein. Winnicott noticed a link between adult mental disorder and different ways in which mothers interacted with children Bowlby's project in the 1950s and 60s was updating Freudian metapsychology to be consistent with the post-modern synthesis evolutionary biology (the definitively incorrect Lamarckianism of Freud)

In what ways did Aristotle act like a modern scientist?

Assuming that the foundation of knowledge has to be empirical research - assumes that the foundation of knowledge is empirical research and you have to go out and find things out in the world and this is the starts of theories Making theories based on these findings - e.g. if researched a fish he would relate that fish to other fish

The Romantic Revolution: In the wake of the French Revolution, many turned back to Rosseau's thoughts of down playing the role of reason, which ultimately led to the suggestion...

Basically suggesting there is something missing in a scientific enlightenment view of the world - has reason but no emotion - doesn't feel like reality, peoples lived experience

Describe B.F. Skinner's behaviourist view...

wrote a utopian novel called Waldon two - in which society runs around behaviourist principles - was a radical behaviourist Skinner's explanation of learning and behaviour - operant condition - is most fully developed and influential version of radical behaviourism Positive and negative reinforcement/punishment - Schedules of reinforcement - how these change behaviour - Brought a new methodological and philosophical rigour to behaviourist explanations - Theory as 'a summary of the ways in which observable variables correlate' - very logical positivist point of view

Leibniz also disagrees with Descartes and seeks to solve the problem of interaction by...

Basically, if soul has no extension, how does it interact with things with extension - how can it have an effect on the real world, in other words? - the mind does not interact with the body, the body and mind operate separately but in harmony and in parallel - believed that this was the result of blessings from God Like Descartes and Locke, Leibniz agrees there is mind and body and they're separate - BUT he advocates for parallelism, arguing that the way to solve the mind-body problem - how does the mind interact with the body? - is to say that the mind does not interact with the body. - Instead, the mind and the body operate separately but in parallel (with God-given harmony) - your mind doesn't actually cause your body to do anything, your body does things for its own reasons because of the natural world - God controls our body and spirit/mind separately - Still kind of believes the "I Think Therefore I am' - Ghost is the spirit and the body in the suit is the body

Indirect realism refers to...

you don't perceive the real item you perceive a copy if it in your mind that your mind has constructed for you

Direct realism refers to...

you perceive the real item - you see an eraser, not perceiving a copy

Why must psychologists study philosophy?

Because philosophy addresses certain points that are relevant to psychology. E.g. Big questions such as free will vs determinism

What does Descartes conclude based on his notion of a perfect being?

Because there is this perfect being and because there is a mechanical universe, there are two planes of existence - a material world and a spiritual world; the material world is the mechanical world, the world that is lawful and consistent and based on mechanism - the spiritual world is where our souls are; the I in 'I think therefore I am' is not part of the mechanical world, that I is made of spiritual stuff -- but your body that your self lives in is in the material mechanical world e.g. atoms put together - souls live in separate plane of existence This position has become known as mind-body dualism or Cartesian dualism - the world is made up of two different fundamental kinds of stuff Dualism is contrasted with monism (there is only one plane of existence) for example Aristotle was a monist, Plato was a dualist

Why must psychology make assumptions about the mind?

Because we cannot directly study the mind we must make assumptions about the mind and what it is - so the metatheory of psychology must include a study of the assumptions we make about the mind - this assumption underlies every theory you have learnt about in psych so far. Psych generally has a cognitive philosophy of mind, like a computer

Rats and Stats in the 70's involved...

Behaviour research explaining how rat's behaviour Behaviourism and statistics

What was the rise of the Mad House ?

Bethlem hospital in London began as a 'public' lunatic asylum in 1377, but mostly where people were judged mentally ill it was the community that judged them to be out of their minds and so it was the responsibility of the family and the parish or town - this is where the phase 'village idiot' comes from, village 'looks after' the person Until the close of the 18th century these were not medical hospitals - might have had an honorary physician that visited - more social institution than medical for the community to put people they didn't know what to do with - brings about the phrase 'it's all gone bedlam' madness insinuated - housed problem cases they didn't know what to do with

Discuss David Hume's involvement in inductive arguments and reasoning

Born 1711 - died 1776, was a major figure in the Scottish Enlightenment - One of the things he did was to ask the big epistemological question, a question about cognition 'can I be sure, in a logical sense and given the fact that I have seen a thousand sunrises, that the sun will rise tomorrow?' but this is only psychologically justified, not logically justified. Having a million sunrises does not guarantee that the million and first will be the same. Depends on induction, any knowledge of the world that we have is inductive, Hume produced an argument which undercuts everything we do, including science. Science depends on inductive reasoning, but inductive reasoning is not valid in the end, doesn't produce true conclusions even though the premises are true.

Provide context for Imre Lakatos

Born in Hungary 1922, died in 1976 Was in a Marxist resistance group fighting Nazis during WW2 After the war, was communist party member, but fled Hungary in 1956 when it was invaded by the Soviets In Cambridge, England he completed his PhD in 1961

Provide context for Paul Feyerabend

Born in Vienna (1924-1994) Drafted to the Nazi army and was shot by the Soviets A playwright in Brechtian tradition Had Karl Popper as his supervisor in the 1950s Worked at UC Berkeley

Explain Attachment Theory

Bowlby's attachment theory related to both geese imprinting kind of stuff and Freudian theory which it comes from Ethological research on goslings (Lorenz & Tinbergen) and rhesus macaques (Harlow) won't thrive and survive unless they have something warm and fuzzy to hold onto e.g. the mother monkey Bowlby combined object relations theory and ethology to argue for attachment theory; there are different styles of attachment (secure, insecure, avoidant) during infancy which lead to personality development - personality is effected by ways we are attached to our mothers

Explain Descartes' evil demon experiment

But maybe we just get fooled by small things? - Descartes' then posits an 'evil demon' which had massive power to fool his senses- this is a possibility - if you're starting from the beginning, from what you can't doubt, its plausible that something like this evil demon is the case, that the world as we experience it is profoundly different from how it actually is - If you're starting from the undoubtable then its plausible that something like this evil demon is possible - our sense cannot be trusted - it's so close to what seems like reality you'd never know the difference therefore we cannot trust reality - do we live in a simulation?

define unfalsifiability

Can't even prove it wrong because you can't prove it right or wrong - we cannot prove psychology theories wrong

How is behaviourism 'the way of no ideas'?

Cartesian Dualism --> no one really agreed with Descartes - subjective experience vs scientific determinist world Radical Behaviourism --> environmental consequences cause us to behave in certain ways - if there is a ghost in the machine i.e. if we have a mind, it has nothing to do with the actual behaviour Methodological behaviourists --> cannot study the consciousness/ghost scientifically - we'll just focus on what we can study Behaviourism takes cartesian mind body problem - solves it by suggesting we get rid of the mind - mind doesn't actually influence our behaviour at all - solution to the way of ideas is to have no ideas There's a fundamental thing about behaviourism in that its entirely stupid - we have a mind that controls behaviour - this should be straightforward and true - this makes us fundamentally different to animals Didn't think that cognition mattered - thoughts matter exactly the same as someone speaking to you

Biology finds a framework in...

Charles Darwin's Evolutionary theory (1859)

The scientific revolution starts with...

Copernicus's heliocentrism (1543); that the earth in fact goes around the sun rather than the other way around to Newton's Principia Mathematica (1687), where he founded modern physics as we understand it -Period in history where we question the ancients and realise they were wrong about most things

Statistics can be split into...

Correlational (spearman's and Pearson's tests) vs inferential (t-tests and f-tests) statistics in psychology - Psychologists enthusiastically took up (Pearson's) correlational statistics pretty early - e.g. Spearman's g (1906) and factor analysis - Galton was also a psychologist interested in the mind and was implementing stats into his work - As a result of this you get the rise of the IQ test

Is the theory the best way to explain how something works?

Could it better be interpreted another way through critical analysis? - to explain data you must make logical arguments about the relationship between data and theory - metatheory of psychology must include a study of the rationale for the way psychology uses theories

Psychology slowly takes up statistics. Provide an overview of this...

Cowles (1989) identifies one of the earliest psychology experiments using null hypothesis significance testing as being from 1940, and a slow rise to acceptance until 1970's - one of the first psychologists in Australia to use a t-test or an f-test was Gordon Hammer in about 1949. Plenty of famous experiments in the intervening period don't use null hypothesis significance testing; e.g. Miller (1956); plus or minus seven idea, Milgram (1963); shocking people - neither of these experiments show statistics First medical RCT (randomised control trial) - was done in 1946 - First meta-analysis done in 1980

Explain Descartes problem in detail

Descartes believed we have souls so how does that fit in with a mechanical universe - the conflicting notion of souls with mechanical universe - humans are fundamentally mechanical but have capacity to do unmechanical things to do with the soul e.g. make decisions For Aristotle though, the world was animated with soul in general - anima - and so humans also having souls was no big deal - But for Descartes it is a big deal, its different, not how things would go in a mechanical universe - E.g. the universe for Descartes was mechanical and ultimately governed by physical laws - the soul is fundamentally unmechanical - For the nature of Descartes' argument he wanted to fit them together

How does Descartes influence the enlightenment?

Descartes was right to start with radical doubt, evil demons etc. - Descartes was right in thinking that we need to resolve the issue of the mechanical universe and the 'spirit'-ish nature of consciousness (our minds don't seem to be part of this world in quite the same way) BUT they didn't think Descartes' solutions to these problems were right: not ideal - for psychology the story of the enlightenment is of various people trying to solve Descartes problems

What are the additional implied principles of evolutionary psychology?

Determinism, materialism - argued that the genes we have are what cause behaviour based on the genes that we have evolved from - Marrying Fodorian cognitive modules and Freudian depth psychology - Lakatosian philosophy of science

What is the fifth principle of realism?

Determinism. --> all situations are caused and in turn cause other situations - in this way realism doesn't condone free will, rather going for a hard or soft determinist point of view.

Describe socrates as a philosopher

Didn't write anything himself - The comic playwriter Aristophanes wrote a play ~420BC called The Clouds that satirised Socrates...E.g.: Aristophanes is the Greek equivalent of the Betoota Advocate (taking the piss out of Socrates) - philosophical nonsense that makes fun of contemporary philosophers - measure of how famous Socrates was in ancient times

According to a survey of American psychologists by John et al., (2012), psychology is in crisis because...

• 66.5% failed to report all of a study's dependent measures in a paper • 58% collected more data after seeing if the results were significant • 27.4% failed to report all of a study's conditions • 23.3% had rounded off p-values, e.g., reported .054 as < .05 • 50% had selectively reported studies that 'worked' • 43.4% had decided whether to exclude data after looking at the impact of doing so on the results • 35% had pretended an unexpected finding had been predicted from the start • 1.7% admitted to falsifying data • All of the things in John et al (2012) undermine the logic behind psychology's use of differential statistics

How are John Locke and Descartes different?

Different to Descartes as Descartes defended innate ideas for religious reasons • In contrast, here's Locke's primary thesis: • "let us suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper void of all characters, without any ideas. How comes it to be furnished?...To this I answer, in one word, from experience." - if we have learnt something we come to know not through our genes but gain knowledge through experience • To Locke, there are no innate ideas - we are not born with any ideas about the world - if we come to know something we do so by experience • For Locke we (for example) don't come into the world intuitively knowing that 2 + 2 = 4 - as infants we figure that out through experience • This is quietly an attack on Augustinian 'original sin' - original sin implies we do have innate ideas - we are born sinners - but Locke is quietly attacking this at point in time when Britain is protestant thanks to Henry the 8th

How does meta theory extend theory?

Does CBT work? Control group experiments? Metatheory extends this and asks; Do the underpinnings of CBT work? Are there problems with the model?

What is history?

E.H Carr's influential book 'What is History?' - the study of history is a study of causes. The historian... continually asks the question 'why'? and so long as he hopes for an answer, he cannot rest. The great historian - or perhaps I should say more broadly, the great thinker - is the man who asks the question 'why'? about new things or in new contexts. - not just to come up with a list of things and know when it started - the purpose is to actually understand why things happened that way

What are the issues with just-so-stories?

E.g. Marlene Zuk's Paleo-fantasy on the paleo diet - we have evolved since the stone age, adaptation for certain foods e.g. drinking milk - unfalsifiable; we don't have the chance to understand why certain behaviours are there Evolutionary psychology conjectures about the EEA depend on them having a detailed understanding of anthropology and palaeontology

What are the different ways of representing arguments like the syllogism?

E.g. formal logic, using symbols; if P implies Q and P is true, then Q is true - understand natively, automatically or pictorially in 'argument maps'

Consider the apricot example again, is it a sound argument?

• Does she understand the difference between a valid and a sound argument? YES • That the truth of a conclusion is independent of whether it has been arrived at logically? YES Take the argument again: • P1 Girls who are three love apricots • P2 Beatrix is 3 • Therefore, she loves apricots (conclusion) i.e. she completes the argument validly - But is it sound (Conclusions are true)? No because Beatrix knows she doesn't actually love apricots

Describe philosophy in pop culture

Fairly airy fairy, pop culture tends to present philosophy as hippy bullshit - this is not the philosophy presented in this subject - Chidi in the good place is a good example of a philosopher; chain of logic around what he does

What is the difference between cosmos and chaos?

First conflict between science and mysticism - first time a society was able to look at and observe and understand the world - we live in a world today that is very ordered - E.g. ability to know if there's a hurricane coming to Sydney

A form of argument central to science is denying the consequent, explain this...

• Follows on from Popper • IF P is true then Q is true - But in this case, Q is not true - therefore P is not true - this is important to science because it is the very thing we use every time we evaluate a theory empirically - e.g. • Denying the consequent; modus tollens - if P then Q but if Q is not true, thus P is not true - this is the logic of all lab work - all hypotheses - proves true or false on a hypothesis • For example; If (P) the ability to learn language is largely innate, then (Q) all children should learn to speak at about the same age - all children do not learn to speak at about the same age thus (p) the innate theory is not true - complications with this

What is real life history of psychology like?

• History is about people, and largely about interpreting evidence to figure out what people thought and how they behaved. • 'Did ancient Greek warriors get PTSD?' is a question historians try to answer • But you can't really administer the CAPS-5 on Odysseus

Who founded psychology and when?

• If our definition of psychology is that it is a) the study of the mind, and b) a profession (as Leahey argues), well... • Wundt founded psychology as a specific 'science' academic profession in 1879 • BUT studying the mind is as old as recorded history • Psychology's big questions (what is mind? What makes us tick? How should we study this stuff?) are as old as recorded history

Provide reasons for discussing logic and argument in a scientific context

• Importance of logical form in the criteria for science - evaluating scientific argument (proof, truth, probability etc) - E.g. Popper argued we don't prove truths, but what we can do is put up hypothesis that work really well and eventually we can falsify them. • Science is not about verifying more and more but in fact putting out grand hypothesis that explain things and then eventually falsifying them and this doesn't matter for scientific theory E.g. Newton's theories established for hundreds of years, something shown to be false doesn't make it bad science, only that they are articulated in such a way that in principle they can be shown false - logical criteria for demonstrating whether a theory is genuinely scientific or not scientific - form and logic are pretty well the same, mean that according to Popper scientific theories should have a certain logical form that makes them testable • More specifically; evaluating arguments in psychology • Constructing arguments in psychology - logical criteria is important in evaluating and constructing psychological arguments - essays are basically arguments; premises, this is how I argued, this is how I supported and this is how I concluded

(Aristotle the cognitive psychologist) Aristotle had a sort of cognitive psychology, he described the different faculties that humans have:

Five senses (modern senses used); these are at some level combined into a common sense (due to our innate ability to perceive them all at the same time subconsciously) - this common sense then goes into imagination and memory - memory can take from imagination and motivation - these are kinds of separate stores - information from this goes to the passive mind (his version of the ego: part of mind where knowledge is) then there is the active mind (made of pure thought; rationality and reasoning) this is the part plants and animals do not have (active mind).

Why is Folk Psychology not scientific?

Folk psychology is an intuitive feeling or explanation for stuff, you have motives + beliefs (reasons) = actions BUT science doesn't like this form of explanation - Science likes there to be determinist explanations for things, likes the reason for us to be doing things to ultimately come back to physics. MOTIVE + BELIEF = ACTION do not square with a deterministic universe. Because reasons appear to be the future causing the present, where this goes against physics, the future cannot cause the present, the present is caused by the past and this is the fundamental basis of science.

Distinguish between essential, efficient and final causes from Aristotle...

For Aristotle, the causes of a cat being a cat are all about the soul The soul is the essential cause of a cat - it is a cat specifically because it has a cat's soul The soul is the efficient cause of a cat - the soul is what turns inert matter into kitten and then cat The soul is the final cause of a cat - it gives purposes (telos) to a cat - the soul gives the cat its catness and what makes the cat want to achieve cat things like chasing mice Aristotle is making distinctions between different kinds of causes, there are causes which are essential, efficient and final, there are the causes that ultimately lead to something happening, provided the mechanical route by which something happened and the purpose Modern scientists tend to avoid final cause - there is not purpose in a cat and we just attribute the cat to evolution

Explain the id, ego and super ego proposed by Freud

For Freud (1923) the id follows the pleasure principles, while the ego follows the reality principles: the ego is the part of the id that has been altered by the direct influence of external world. The ego seeks to bring the influence of the external world to bear on the id and its tendencies... But the ego is in the habit of transforming the id's will into action as if it were its own In contrast, the super-ego is an internalisation of an idealised all-knowing authority figure E.g. Melancholia - depression in today's terms - caused by overactive super-ego Freud doesn't present these as earth-shattering revelations - he is aware they're common sense Freud trying to be scientific - basing his theory on best scientific knowledge of his time - what is implied about the mind based on this knowledge Structure/relations is the important bit

Explain an inductive argument

Form - every thong in this room is made of rubber (premise) therefore all thongs are made of rubber (conclusion) - realise that alternate truth is possible; all other thongs may be made of leather! - more information in the conclusions than in premises - not logically guaranteed but often an expectation in reality - however, almost all the decisions we make in life things we do every day there is logic. Looks much more inductive than deductive because all our logic depends on things being the way they used to be/prior experience - expectations - makes our inductive arguments not logically guaranteed

How did Freud see mental life?

Freud (like William James) saw our mental life as adaptive but unlike James he specifically saw mental life as adaptive directly based on Darwin's natural selection and sexual selection If we are evolved, mental life is at some level about survival and reproduction, and its true nature reflects this - aggression and sexuality will prevail because these are the things that keep us in existence and evolving But to do this we need to adapt to a complex social and cultural environment - Human life isn't just about aggression and sexuality, we have to negotiate things socially, human life isn't just about aggression and sexuality, we have to channel this in some way For Freud, adult mental illness reflects childhood flaws in shaping our evolutionary desires to fit that complex environment - Freud is very much an evolutionary psychologist in that he was very interested in what it is about the way we have evolved that leads to us being the way we are today

Explain Freud's later structural model of mind and consciousness

Freud reworks his model of consciousness in The Structures of Personality (1923) - instead of who we are being a static space, they're interacting structures: The id (where our aggressive and sexual desires are) ego (tries to translate between these desires and the world around us) and the super ego (part of us that is internalised for societies rules and the part that says 'no you might get in trouble')

What was Darwin's influence on Freud?

Freud saw humans has innately biological creatures - Freud fundamentally had a materialist determinist output on what humans were (e.g. just a bunch of cells kept together to be a body) - therefore also saw the mind as something created by evolution - there was no spiritual means in which the soul lived (like Descartes proposed) instead the mind was innately about survival, adaptation to an environment - He continuously intended to do for psychology what Darwin did for biology, which was to provide a metatheoretical framework that would explain why things were the way they were - Until the 'modern synthesis' evolutionary theory of the mid20th century, the scientific status of evolution and psychoanalysis was rather similar - because Darwin couldn't test his theory, couldn't conclusively demonstrate that one species had evolved into another

Explain the unconscious and Freud

Freuds solution for how we adapt our aggression and sexuality to dealing with this complex social and cultural environment is the unconscious Freud was faced with a dilemma; if the mind is fundamentally about sex and survival, why do people's internal mental lives seem to be otherwise? Why are we more than this? - why are we more than striving for sex and survival, the unconscious That much of mental life is unconscious is a recurring theme of German Romantic philosophy; Kant argued that much of the processes of the mind were unknowable, Friedrich Nietzche argued 'I have done that, says my memory, I could not have done that, says my pride and remains inexorable. Finally, my memory yields. Consciousness is a surface. - unconsciousness is something that is there.'

explain the humours enlightenment...

Galen and Hippocrates were the gold standard in understanding mental illness until quite recently (e.g. Burton in 1624 still discusses the humours) - lasts through the enlightenment - Drs didn't have a specialised specialty at this stage, saw that melancholy might be related to other kinds of conditions where black bile played a role Can clearly see the link between biology and psychology

Does the philosophy of science really matter?

Generally considered important Stephen Hawking argued that philosophy doesn't matter - argued philosophy is dead Some sciences do not take note of philosophy - chemists do not need to worry about the philosophy of science for example because their discipline is fairly concrete and established Some physicists and other scientists agree - trying to understand some of the concepts and issues Physics envy - we envy physics as a science - we worry about how scientific we really are in psychology Physicists have string theory - very difficult to test - able to explain everything in a way that may not explain anything at all Physicists are becoming worried about whether philosophy can help them If scientists are arguing about what is and what isn't science - they are actually engaging in the philosophy of science - because they are engaging in the meta-question of what is it that we are actually doing in science? and how do we know they are doing it?

Why was the history stats surprisingly dodgy?

Generally, the mathematicians who figured out the theory of stats - Pascal, Fermat, Laplace - Were mostly trying to help their gambler friends get better at making bets - they didn't see it as something that could be useful if applied to science - gambling by using stats - The first scientists who applied statistics to scientific problem solving were 'advocates of eugenics who were interested in biometrics as a way of identifying 'poor stock' - people who shouldn't pass on their genes - E.g. Francis Galton, perhaps the first scientist to do correlations, donated money in his will to University College London to fund the Galton Chair of Eugenics; 1911-33; Karl Pearson (Pearson's R) - 1933-43; Ronald Fischer (null hypothesis, significance testing, p values)

Alcmaeon of Croton...

Gets called the father of neuroscience - Alcmaeon ran a medical school (and was perhaps a disciple of Pythagoras - he is the first person on record suggesting that the governing faculty in the brain - the thing that makes us do the decisions that we do lives in the brain - he almost certainly didn't think that the brain was the actual responsible organ for this but thought that a soul of some description lived in the brain - first person to link brain and thought promoted naturalistic medicine helped rid medicine of superstition and magic dissected humans sensations/perceptions/memory/thinking happen in brain health = balance of warm/cold, moist/dry, bitter/sweet

Explain the close relationship between logic, explanation and even prediction

Going back to Socrates argument, can have it posed in a different way, somebody askes, 'why is Socrates mortal'? the answer/explanation is 'all men are mortal, Socrates is a man OR a better example is: somebody asks 'why is Singapore hot and humid?' All tropical seaside cities are hot and humid, Singapore is a tropical seaside city. Been offered a low-level explanation. This can also work as a prediction too, just starting from a different point but has the same logic, asks 'will Singapore be hot and humid?' 'yes, all tropical seaside cities are hot and humid, Singapore is a tropical seaside city'

Define scientific psychology in light of folk psychology

Has to justify how we can get from motives, beliefs, reasons to something that is actually deterministic, because it is foundational to science that we are looking at a deterministic universe. So... a scientific psychology has to justify why reasons can be causes, scientifically, or to find alternative deterministic causes for behaviour (e.g. habit, classical conditioning, genetics, Freudian defence mechanisms, cognitive schema)

What was Descartes influence?

He set the parameters of post-scientific revolution philosophy - philosophy had to start again as a result of the SR because the world had changed and philosophy needed to reflect that Enlightenment philosophers disagreed with his conclusions (many thought the perfect being thing wasn't sustainable), but they shared (many of) his premises These philosophers provided modern psychology's philosophical foundations - influenced Wundt and James when coming with psych as it is

What is the Raven Paradox

Hempel describes the paradox in terms of the hypothesis: (1) All ravens are black. In the form of an implication, this can be expressed as: If something is a raven, then it is black. Via contraposition, this statement is equivalent to: (2) If something is not black, then it is not a raven. In all circumstances where (2) is true, (1) is also true—and likewise, in all circumstances where (2) is false (i.e., if a world is imagined in which something that was not black, yet was a raven, existed), (1) is also false.

What is science?

Historically --> rationalists believed that the world was best explained via maths and logic and in contrast empiricists believed that the world was best explained via observations e.g. Aristotle and Francis Bacon were empiricists Science is a combination of rationalism and empiricism the world is best explained via maths and logic to understand observations E.g. A psychological experiment is an observation of human behaviour that then yields results which are mathematically analysed to tell us something about the generalisation of this behaviour or if there are real differences between groups of people

What are facts in history?

History is not a list of facts, history is all about whether a claim about the past is a fact, and interpreting what that fact means - 'Wilhelm Wundt started the first psychology lab in 1879' is a fact, we have enough evidence for it - What that fact means is up for debate - For Ebbinghaus, that fact delineates 'real history' from 'past' - question the fact. Psychology started before this, Wundt is not the founder of psychology

Explain the relationship between rats (behaviourism) and stats

However, behaviourists - being good logical positivists - thought correlational and inferential statistics were beside the point - they weren't really science because they didn't fit into hypothetico-deductive laws vs statistical inferences (Karl Hempel) - If you actually read behaviourist experiments they tend not to report t-tests or f-tests they just report a behaviour increasing over time in graphical form

Maybe psychology is more like one of the...

Humanities - a lot of what we do is meaning based and how we react to other humans - so maybe we need entirely different techniques to examine the human mind - so where does psychology fit in with the sciences or humanities?

What are the tenants of behaviourism?

Humans, like other animals, are the product of evolution - not that much different to what James believed as a Darwinian However, unlike James - We adapt our behaviour to our environment - not only do we adapt to an environment, but we have a whole set of inherent processes by which this happens - inherent in the nature of being an animal that you have such patterns of reinforcement Humans like other animals are tabula rasa (blank slate) - humans don't come into the world with preconceived ideas - we are written on by experience - because we're all tabula rasa we're not any different to animals we're just more complicated Behaviour can be studied objectively and quantitatively, from a verificationist point of view - Verificationism, also known as the verification principle or the verifiability criterion of meaning, is the philosophical doctrine that only statements that are empirically verifiable (i.e. verifiable through the senses) are cognitively meaningful, or else they are truths of logic (tautologies). Behaviour is explained by logical positivism - this is the kind of philosophy of science specifically that the behaviourists were going for. Verificationist - logical positivism Behaviourism is explained deterministically by environmental factors, not the mind - things that cause behaviour are in our environment not our mind, not that we have a desire to achieve a goal and that determines behaviour - BUT something in the future i.e. the goal, can't cause something in the present to happen. So the behaviourists argued that the way to deal with issue of future focused goals not able to cause current behaviour, that it is only environmental factors to the extent that we think it is our mind causing us to do things. Because of all this... The dominant topic of psychology should be the learning of behaviour

In David Hume's An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, he...

Hume tears Descartes apart - Descartes assumes that the existence of doubt suggests the existence of a self Hume argues that Descartes leaves us no strong grounds for the existence of the self, just for the existence of (connected) thoughts - the idea of the self is an assumption we cannot sustain, because all we know is there are thoughts, there isn't necessarily a self that goes along with those thoughts. - Hume instead argues that we know there are thoughts that are connected but we don't know that this connection of thoughts turns into a self - Hume: I think therefore I am? More like thinking occurs, therefore thoughts exist - because the 'I think' is an assumption that cannot be justified - Descartes: 'cogito ergo sum' is important as a secure base for knowledge; Hume: [there is no] such original principle, which has a prerogative above others, that [is] self- evident and convincing - suggests there is no principle that you can use as a secure basis of knowledge in the way that Descartes wants - The idea of a self is an assumption that we can't contain/ assume - There is no secure basis of knowledge to use in the way that Descartes wants - argues on the lines of Locke

Explain the Schrodinger's cat example for physics

Idea is there is a cat in a box, but in that box with that cat is another box which has a poison in it, a poison gas (half-life, decaying at a certain rate but this rate is random for different substances), and if the radioactive substance which decays and if it decays it sets off the poison gas and kills the cat - observing this process changes it - there somehow different when observed vs not observed - This was Schrodinger's philosophical thought experiment, trying to show how dumb it was; this physics shows that the cat is both alive and not alive at the same time because we can't know whether the radioactive particle has decayed and thus set off the poison gas - the cat is in a state of superimposed; both realities being true at once. physics and philosophy sought to explain this phenomenon

What is a computer (if the mind is like a computer)?

If I'm saying the mind is like a computer, we should understand what a computer is A computer is an information processing machine that has some sort of rules for processing information intones and zeros and then converting those ones and zeros into different ones and zeros and then converts this into some sort of output.

What is the relationship between realism and error?

If we directly perceive the world the big problem is the problem of illusion - which is that we are confused sometimes. Sometimes we don't perceive the world as it is, so you get this kind of illusion, similar to Muller-Lyer illusion. One argument against realism is that we wouldn't be fooled by visual illusions if it really was the case. Realism can be considered outside the way of ideas i.e. explaining the mind and body are separate - suggesting... you're just there in your body, just between you and the world around you. Not seeing the mind and body as separate.

Describe true modern philosophy (as opposed to pop culture presentations of it)

If you read modern analytic philosophy, its dry, rigorous, and all about logical argument to the point of maths - read arguments carefully to the point of putting philosophy into maths - philosophy of understanding mathematics, maths is simply a form of representing a philosophical argument, this is how computers came about

First Year Texts on Wundt suggest...

In 1879 Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920), often described as the father of psychology, founded the first psychology laboratory in Leipzig, Germany... --> This is a specialised psychology lab, but psychology did not begin here, it began much earlier - if you're saying that psychology started at this date, then you're going to say it has certain definitions (psych is scientific, focuses on both mental and behavioural processes)

Explain the Open Science Collaboration (2015) project

In 2015, what was then the biggest psychology project ever conducted was published in the prestigious journal of science It featured 100 separate experiments, and 269 co-authors It aimed to replicate a study/experiment from every journal article in three randomly chosen 2008 journal issues from: psychological science, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Journal of Experimental Psychology; Learning, Memory and Cognition Their aim was to see how much psychologists bad statistical practice effects results - replicate research and see if they find the same results Found that only 39 of 100 replication attempts were successful - assume 3 of 5 times the research is probably wrong Most psychology research is probably wrong - we don't understand the metatheory of statistic

Explain Ebbinghaus' whiggish view of the history of psychology

In saying that psychology's 'real history' was short Ebbinghaus assumed that what psychology had done by 1908 was a cut above what the philosophers had said about the mind before Wundt - but of course, scientific psych in 190: - didn't have participants; usually done on one person and assumed this is generalisable to the population - didn't use differential statistics; scientific criteria missing - no standardised tests (the term IQ had yet to be coined), - no applied psychology (e.g. clinical) - In the long run, post-Ebbinghaus (1908) psych's paid more attention to philosophers than to 1879-1908 psychology

How is the success of behaviourism measured?

In terms of predicting and controlling behaviour, what behaviourists wanted psychology to be about, in animals at least, were very successful e.g. Cats doing tricks

The humanistic relationship with drugs lead to what sort of 1960s counterculture?

In the 1960s the humanistic psychologists and their grumpiness about everyday society fed into the 1960s counter culture The post WW2 baby boom - a lot people of a certain age at once The folk counterculture of the early 1960's - psychedelic counterculture of 1966 and the Summer of Love The 'clash of cultures' implicit in The Beatles' 1967 She's Leaving Home The hippie: more self-actualised than the man in the grey suit going to his 9-5 job every day

What is the replication crisis?

In the 2010s, psychology has had a major blow to its confidence, called the replication crisis --> A prominent social psychologist, Diederik Stapel, fabricated all of his data for years and nobody noticed for decades until one of his students reported concerns and an investigation found him a forgery • Why did nobody notice? For starters psychologists rarely directly replicate experiments - so no one would ever actually know if they found a different result -- If they do, it's hard to get published • Which means that we rarely see evidence that data might not be representative of reality, even if it exists

The 'Way of Ideas' of Descartes/Locke/etc is an example of...

Indirect realism: if the mind is made of spirit stuff, it cannot directly perceive matter, it perceives an indirect 'spirit stuff' copy instead

What are two solutions provided for the problem of induction?

Inductivism - e.g. covering law explanations positivism did not claim 100% truth but instead usefulness - 'we don't know if atoms exist, but it is useful to believe they exists' (this is a bit of an instrumentalist approach) IN contrast Deductivism - Hume was correct that we can't know what scientific statements are true (because of the problem of induction) however we can know which scientific statements are false i.e. can do tests and rule things out 'we don't know if atoms exist, but we know that alternative explanations to atoms are incorrect' - falsity is more reliable as a response to the problem of induction where we only know a limited set of information, in that limited set of information we can't know what is true for the whole galaxy but we can know what is not true for that set of information

Explain the Cartesian theatre

Instead of experiencing that world as it actually is - the you that is experiencing that world lives in a separate plane of existence, the spiritual realm of existence, so rather than experiencing the real world as it is right in front of you, it's not right in front of you, you see a representation of the world constructed by your body and sent to your soul/mind. REPRESENTATIONALIST

Kant made a distinction between innate ideas and innate categories, explain this distinction between phenomena and noumena.

Instead of innate ideas, we have innate categories by which we structure experience - Distinction (similar to primary and secondary qualities) The world as we experience it: phenomena - vs the world of science: noumena

Describe instrumentalism vs realism in psychology

Instrumentalism Generally, psychology is instrumentalist - e.g. the five-factor model explains the data really well, its based on factor analyses of behaviour - more useful than the Myers Briggs test in this regard (better test-retest reliability) Is 'openness to experience' really a thing in the mind/brain.. if so, what is it? Do we think it says everything there is to say about personality in the real world? Realism Have a think about what theories in psychology are actually literally described in the mind as it is... A common idea in psychology; our theories are provisional

Harry Stack Sullivan was a post Freudian, famous for...

Interpersonal Therapy (IPT) ---> Before Freud died but after he'd stopped thinking much about therapeutic kind of stuff, you get Harry Stack Sullivan --> Famous for interpersonal therapy (IPT) i.e. one of the very small amount of psychological treatments for depression with good efficacy listed by Beyondblue - For Sullivan personality is the relatively enduring pattern of recurrent interpersonal situations which characterise a human life - peoples personalities are situational to a greater extent than Freud imagined - Sullivan was probably influenced by the behaviourists - Sullivan downplayed the role of drives (aggressive and sexual) to focus on the field of relations; the way we relate to other people and the recurrent patterns we use to do this. - Coming from the idea that the mind is relational (in our relationships with others) rather than in the head - human activity means what it does because we interact with others and their minds - Like Melanie Klein and the object relations school, Sullivan (an American) saw us as inherently social beings (rather than animals to be moulded into social creatures).

Thales and Anaximander mark the beginning of an...

Ionian school of philosophy

According to Laertius, Anaximander...

Is Meletian and a decade younger than Thales. A quote from Anaximander ' Whence things have their origin, thence also their destruction happens, as is the order of things; for they execute the sentence upon one another - the condemnation for the crime - in conformity with the ordinance of time.' Arguing that is a circle of life moving us all but things don't change in this way, the nature of change in this sense is unchanging. This is the oldest fragment of Greek philosophy and deals with the issue of whether things are constantly changing or stay the same.

In 1749, the Academy of Dijon advertised a prize essay competition, on the topic of 'Has the progress of the sciences and the arts done more to corrupt morals or improve them?' - Rousseau answered this question by arguing that - Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued the former:

Is a bit annoyed that free thinking has lended itself to atheism and that we don't need to worry about God - he starts to put forward counter-enlightenment ideas; arguments that there was value in ignorance and innocence of poverty.

Metatheory is...

Is the logic (philosophy of mind and of science) inherent in the way that Baddeley's short-term memory model does what it does? Does the metatheory make sense for the model? Are the problems with it? If there are, this implies problems with the theories that come out of the model?

Why is Whig history not a compliment?

It is misguided; what if the way things are today is broken? It is also usually misleading; it judges the past by the present (i.e. 'presentism') and focuses on stuff relevant to today - the bits of psychology that did not lead to the present may still lead to a better future

Why care about meta theory?

Its where we get to talk about the big questions: • should we study mind or brain? Does mind = brain? • Is psychology different from other sciences? Is it even a science? • Are humans qualitatively different from animals or robots (and so a special subject matter)? • What is that thing we call 'self'? • Is behaviour determined? • What are mental states made of? • What is it to be a person (vs a thing, or animal)? • How to explain human action (vs events)?

Explain Jung's metapsychology

Jung altered Freuds view of the conscious and unconscious - Believed the mind was structured like a mandala - the middle is core or self, maybe even cartesian your spirit or soul - around the self is the collective unconsciousness, why we gravitate to certain things etc, folk tales and how they reflect the human mind, the collective unconsciousness of the mind - outside the collective unconsciousness there are a variety of different complexes, the way we resolve issues internally and regarding our social environment and interaction with the world - the ego is the outermost layer about interacting with the world (hard shell around all this)

Jung had theories of why people acted the way they did, this lead to...

Jung's personality typology: - The ego is about interacting with the world, and there's different ways of interaction that characterise different personality types; e.g. the introvert prefers to live in their own mind, while the extrovert prefers living in the world - has to do with how their ego interacts with the world around them - Thinking vs feeling & Sensation vs intuition - different ways of interacting with the world in terms of thinking people vs feeling people - the way that the ego interacts with the world; ego mediates between world and internal complexes - The MBTI was developed by Jungian theory - as derived from the terms in the point above

E. Pearson and Jerzy Neyman brought about...

Karl Pearson retired in 1933, but his son Egon Pearson and his collaborator Jerzy Neyman had already taken up arms against Fischer Pearson and Neyman revised the null hypothesis significance testing into basically what it is today... for better or worse. And introduced confidence intervals and the concept of type 1 and 2 errors.

Indigenous models of knowledge are...

Knowledge is tied to place A view from here - we are in this place and our knowledge is inherent with this place

Greek influenced models of knowledge (scientific world) are...

Knowledge is universal - A view from nowhere - don't have to be an ancient Greek to belief their arguments - need argument and logic to understand their perspectives - didn't assume what they had said about the world would apply to everyone

Explain Kuhn's cycle of science...

Kuhn argued there is a cycle that happens - Pre-paradigmatic stage (also pre-science); lots of different competing paradigms, no real 'winning' theory (a bit like psychology? Argued psychology is still at this stage) - Normal science: most scientists agree on the basics, science is about filling in minor gaps in knowledge - Crisis; eventually enough anomalies that the theory doesn't explain very well, are found in the paradigmatic explanations that scientists come to believe that the paradigm is flawed - Paradigm shift; another paradigm takes the place of the original paradigm, and normal sciences resumes (e.g. Newtonian physics to Einsteinian physics)

There is an assumption in the scientific revolution that the universe is...

Lawful. Not a big bunch of chaos being pushed around by the gods depending on who they favour this week - rather specific and precise laws became codified for the first time - we take laws for granted, there is no other way for this to be e.g. if I use this paper clip, if I drop it it's going to fall - People came to believe that the universe followed rules (instead of being the plaything of capricious deities) - Examples of such rules; - Newtons force = Mass x Acceleration - Energy = Mass x the speed of light squared (Einstein) - This is why scientifically oriented psychologists tried to discover laws of behaviour, because there are laws of physics e.g. The attempts of the behaviourists (Skinner et al) to discover

According to Laertius, Thales...

Lived between 624-546BC in Miletus in modern Turkey - Sources agree that he was the first philosopher in the modern sense, and that he had a wide range of interests and tried to make arguments about them, from maths, to astronomy, to politics to business - Aristotle said that Thales argued that all matter had originated from water

Explain Hittite religion-spiritual medicine

Lived in central Asia - writing things down and left things to us - had diagnosis look like depression or anxiety (can recognise modern symptoms in this) diagnosis; had some signs and representation diagnosis of modern depression in - treatment was very different to CBT; treatment was based on appeasing the gods and replenishing the soul/asking that god for forgiveness - in order to understand how you help someone you appease the gods - had to part of the Hittites for this to be effective treatment: ancient Religo-spiritual method - appeasing the gods - not quite CBT!

Lockes distinction between primary and secondary qualities is similar to Descartes and Galileo because...

Locke also makes a distinction similar to the one that Descartes and Galileo makes between Primary qualities (the properties of things-in-the-world) versus secondary qualities (the ideas we have of the things in the world) • Ideas to Locke are the basic constituents of perception - "having ideas and perception being the same thing" - so when talking about ideas are for example 'the blackness of the board eraser' and is the same as perception - we combine perceptual ideas to create a chair for example - We simply combine these perceptual ideas to create more complex ideas

Explain Locke as an empiricist...

Locke was an empiricist - Empiricism: the philosophical position that all knowledge is based on experience derived from the senses - Blank slate theories are empiricist - theories that talk about a blank slate, that talk about nurture are fundamentally empiricist in this way - we come to knowledge through experience

Explain how sociology influences scientific studies

Look at the sociology of scientific knowledge - the social implications influencing scientific studies People who do 'sociology of scientific knowledge' or 'scientific studies' look at the social factors behind scientific theories Are scientific theories influenced by the identities of the theorists? (yes; e.g. Freuds theories are heavily influenced by the fact that he came from 19th/20th century Vienna) Is it often the case that theories fail because of the social conditions of the theorist (yes)

A 'better' psychology may be achieved if...

Maybe psychology would be less in crisis if it spent less time looking like it was doing science and spent more time actually doing science (e.g., doing critical inquiry) Maybe psychology would have a much better understanding of the core questions of psychology (e.g., what is a mind? What makes us tick?) if it paid closer attention to metatheory and conceptual analysis

What is a meta-theory in psychology?

Metatheory of psychology is the discipline that deals critically with theories in psychology. - not just talking about specific theories, we look at theories more broadly and with a critical inquiry lens. There is a difference between theory and metatheory - 'meta' is 'usually used with the name of a discipline to designate a new but related discipline designed to deal critically with the original one' - therefore, metatheory is a discipline designed to deal critically with theory There are other meta disciplines e.g. meta psychology, a term used by Freud in psychology to discuss his model of the mind, the super ego, id etc were part of Freud's metatheory.

What was Wundt's influence on the psychology of consciousness?

More of an experimentalist than a theoretician; he had research involving psychophysics (looking at things like depth perception), 'apperception' (similar to modern attention research), and reaction time, and his practice was followed more than his theory His practice was focused on the 'psychology of consciousness' Wundt influence is less about his theory and more about his practice; he supervised close to 200 PhD students who took the discipline of psychology to other universities and began new faculties from all over the world Many psychologists have a research family tree that ultimately leads back to Wundt Founded psychology as a discipline - as field of study which has university faculties where people do research (specialised psychology labs -specifically about psychology)

Scottish Common Sense Philosophy is most associated with?

Most associated with Thomas Reid (1710-1796) who published 'An Inquiry Into The Human Mind on the Principles Of Common Sense' in 1764 (16 years after Hume's book) Reid, like Hume, was Scottish, and they corresponded - respected each other but weren't necessarily friends Reid was both a pastor in the kirk, and a man of science - pastor in the church

Provide an example of the positivist view of explanation

Newton's law - Q: Why did/does this apple fall (at this rate) - Explanans; Initial conditions; Apple A is an unsupported body - Law; unsupported bodies close to the earth's surface fall at a rate of 32 feet per second - Explanadum; this apple falls at a particular rate - - This is a deductive approach - Can explain what is happening using mathematical formula between different entities - Tries to make science logical have structure - like deductive reasoning explained in week 2

The enemy of critical thinking is...

Not just poor argumentative skills but competing motives; the only psychologist who has ever got a Nobel prize, got it for economics. Kahneman; epitome of cognitivism dominating psychology in recent years. otherwise clever people argue against climate science because conclusions are frightening and run against our wishes, political commitments etc.. our critical skills are prey to our motives and wishes - Some people reject Freud because pessimistic picture of the person is vs their values. Or they believe he has a negative picture of women. That is irrelevant to the truth of the theory. - danger of ubiquitous cognitivism in psychology

The pragmatism of William James

Not only associated with starting psychology in America but is a prominent philosopher as well - James was a prominent philosopher as well as a psychologist, associate with the epistemology of pragmatism - which argued that no belief could be held with certainty. In Charles Sanders Peirce's phrase, the idea that the truth of a belief 'lies exclusively in the conceivable bearing upon the conduct of life' - truth is use, if something is truthful it's because it is useful - the idea that we can't ever know anything with certainty and because of this we need to measure usefulness as the criterion of what is truthful - if something is useful it is more useful than anything else

Why does Aristotle matter to modern psychology?

Old wine in new bottles - the philosophical issues first raised and discussed by The Big Three include: How can we best get to actual knowledge? How should we live? What is the nature of the world? How do we interact with the world? What causes people to do the things they do? - we use statistics, philosophical issues raised by the big 3 that are still relevant today - these basic questions are still problematic dilemmas for psychology today - answers often still based on metatheory rather than actual evidence

Psychology and measurement have issues because...

One of the fundamental issues here is measurement - makes sense to measure how tall people are b/c can measure in cm, however the mind is harder to measure - harder to measure someone's need for autonomy as seven units long - doesn't really make sense in the same way - this presents an issue for stats is psychology - Francis Galton argues against what Wundt did - a lot of early psychology didn't use measurement in the same way as today

The difference between cosmos and chaos is...

One of the important things that gets across in the video is the difference between cosmos and chaos - seeing the world as something you could solve - can look at it and analyse it and observe it in order to understand - living in a time when nothing is known, we live in a world now where everything is ordered. E.g. ability to know if there's a hurricane coming to Sydney.

Explain Pavlov's Conditioned and conditional stimuli...

Pavlov actually talked about conditional stimuli; stimuli that were conditional in causing an effect - the idea of conditioning wasn't something he wanted to push necessarily but rather came from a mistranslation

At the birthday of cognitive science (MIT 2nd symposium on information theory) a paper titled 'The magical number Seven, Plus or Minus Two' By George A. Miller was presented, it was...

Perhaps the first cognitive psychology paper to incorporate an information processing approach Famous paper for discovering that we can remember seven pieces of information plus or minus two

Philosophy of mind and of science are...

Philosophy of mind is partially ontology and partially epistemology - The philosophy of science is partially ontology and partly epistemology

Science came from ________________

Philosophy. Science continues to have philosophical assumptions about the world, and continues to make logical arguments - it continues to involve philosophy If a theory has flawed assumptions or logic, there is little point in testing that theory: examinations of logic should come before examining whether there is evidence for the theory

Plato's Forms

Plato believed in both materialism and immaterialism but thought that the immaterial entities were more real, which he called forms. They represented Plato's attempt to capture the mathematical insights of Pythagoras and to correlate being and becoming. This comes into Plato's idea of the Forms, where more real than our real existence is the Form e.g. there is the Form of a dog which is more real than any particular living dog, and the dogs as they grow up aim to be this form of a dog. Plato coming from background where Pythagorean maths is relatively new, theorems. which proved angles etc. for Plato maths is an abstraction. The ultimate dog that existed in a alternate world more real than our own.

Platos dualism vs Aristotles monism

Plato saw a world of the Forms and the world as we experience it; two planes of existence, a world that is more real than our own - Aristotle believed there was just one world

What is our main source of Socrates and what does he tell us?

Plato wrote down many dialogues where Socrates conversed with others - including 'The Apology', Socrates' speech at his trial where he was sentenced to death (probably because he had something to do with the thirty tyrants) - Sentenced to death because he didn't believe in Gods - How he defended himself at his trial was by stating that was not what he had ever said, in fact it only came from Aristophanes, and instead Socrates wanted to examine, trying to figure out what we should be doing with our lives. Socrates big question he brought to the philosophical table was; How we should act? More or less invents ethics, turning morality into a philosophical question - 'The life which is unexamined is not worth living' (Socrates in his speech, The Apology)

Plato's Forms vs Aristotles forms

Plato's Forms (the form of the dog that was more real) vs Aristotles forms (just forms, there is a form of the dog and dogs try to get closer to that dog but it's not more real, just in the genetic make-up)

Explain neo platonism and late antiquity

Plato's philosophy was not forgotten, but evolved into something that focused on the world being not as real as the mystical realm of The Word - The gospel of John - in the New Testament starts with some very Neoplatonist phrases. -this kind of Neoplatonism (Plotinus) turns Plato into something more mystical, 'Neoplatonism' - a higher being is the ruler of the Forms, and we should distain that which is temporal - this has an effect on the way Christians see the world - because one of the things that happened out of the Roman Empire was the rise of Christianity

Deductivist philosophers in the philosophy of science thought they had found a strong basis for what science is - But as the progression of deductivist thought progressed from...

Popper to Kuhn to Lakatos to Feyerabend, it eventually collapsed into anarchy.

What is the inductivist approach/logical positivism?

Positivists argue that the only point to the theories is that they explain relationships in data (preferably mathematically) Theories aren't true but are the most parsimonious way to explain all the known data The problem of inductions means we should be wary of ascribing causality Note- there are two definitions of positivism - one sociologically based and one problem of induction/psychologically based

Science in the scientific revolution starts to become...

Practical. - Related to engineering for example. - People were making machines for scientific purposes and then using them for scientific purposes e.g. Galileo's telescope - Idea that science can be practical - The practical nature of natural knowledge is art - when medieval people talked about arts and science they meant application and theory not painting and chemistry - one big change which underlay the scientific revolution was renaissance humanism; revolutionary idea that what you should be doing with your time, as someone who thought and someone who was coming up with science, is to try and come up with things that might help people - But before this, smart people were encouraged to live a contemplative life; contemplating life - a shift from this to doing things for the good of living humans - General belief that natural knowledge should be put to use - This is why psychologists took their science and applied it, creating clinical psychology or other forms of psychology

What are the limits of science according to humanistic psychology?

Premise rejected; human behaviour is a result of determinist processes (genes and evolution) rather than free will - rejected determinists like Freud or Skinner or Cognitive psychology

An issue with the mind-body problem is the concept of the problem of interaction, explain this concept

Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia; wrote to Descartes and her question is one that never was answered - the problem of interaction is logically, how does something which has no extension, which lives in a different universe, effect anything in this universe. - Descartes notion of the soul excludes extension i.e. cannot be measured, doesn't have length - something that doesn't have length can't interact with things that do (i.e. things in this world)

Gottfried Leibniz's (1704) book 'New Essays on Human understanding' basically sought to...

Prove John Locke wrong --> Like John Locke, Leibniz was a scientist and mathematician - - Strongly pushes against the empiricism of Locke/arguments of Locke - Invented calculus - In 1704 he had completed a step-by-step refutation of Locke's An Essay on Human Understanding (in particular pushing against his empiricism) - For Leibniz, the mind was like a block of marble and experience is the sculptor and the sculptor has to work with the veins and swirls - everything in the mind comes from experience except the mind itself That is, understanding the world must involve more than induction from contingent experience: we must have innate ideas and principles that help us structure the world - everything in the mind comes from experience except the mind itself - some things in our mind that are innate in some way

What is the difficulty of directly measuring the mind?

Psychologists do want to measure things, accurately etc. when it comes down to it, we use behaviour to indirectly find out about the mind but no one has ever observed a mind - it is not measurable - psychology is indirectly examining the mind so we bring in philosophy to supplement

Define an operational definition and state how psychology uses them

Psychology habitually uses 'operational definitions', where it chooses to define something in a certain way for conveniences sake For example - we operationalise intelligence by giving people IQ tests The term originally comes from physicist Percy Bridgman (1927) - length is synonymous with measuring something with a ruler effectively and it is nothing more than this - behaviourists ran with this idea - if we can't measure it, it may as well not exist In Bridgeman's view IQ is the same as intelligence e.g. the set of operations we use to measure intelligence - if you can put something into numbers that is science and nothing else is - gives rise to the tendency to measure things without being sure of what exactly we are measuring

Definitions of psychology in terms of rats and stats...

Psychology is the science of mental life, both of its phenomena and their conditions, the phenomena are such things as we call feelings, desires, cognitions, reasoning, decisions and the like; and superficially considered, there variety and complexity is such as to leave a chaotic impression on the observer - William James, 1890 - Psychology is about mental life - is the science of mental life - the things that happen in our minds In contrast... Watson argues that psychology is a purely objective experimental of natural science. Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behaviour. - just focused on behaviour, not interested in the mind. The first year definition of psychology comes from a combination of these two perspectives

These definitions both emphasise psychology's __________ nature, and its focus on mental processes and behaviour.

Psychology is the scientific study investigating mental processes (thinking, remembering and feeling) and behaviour - Burton, Westen and Kowalski, 2015 Psychology is the science that studies behaviour and the physiological and cognitive processes that underlie it, and it is the profession that applies the accumulated knowledge of this science to practical problems - Weiten (2012)

Locke's empiricism is contrasted with...

Rationalism: all knowledge is based on the application of reason --> When we say 'knowledge' we are looking for a true, justified belief - a sound conclusion in the language of logic - in order to say something is knowledge we have to be able to say it is true and have some justification for it

Provide an overview of constructivist and linguistic accounts of logic

Reasoning/correct reasoning maybe represented formally (maps, rules, formulae) - widespread view that reasoning IS the application of rules - and logic is in the mind/language/practices of humans and applied to the world - argued even by those who think they are realists/scientists - different logics are therefore possible - scientific realism rejects this as incoherent - logic holds because that is the way the world is - logic is a formal science - the way the world is, is what determines logic, it's not constructed by language or by humans at all - does logic have to adhere to its own rules? Yes, it does have to

Lakatos' big question was how to reconcile Popper and Kuhn. How did he approach this?

Reconcile Poppers philosophical background and Kuhns 'this is how science really works' was to argue that scientists have research programmes with a (basically unfalsifiable) hard core and a (falsifiable) auxiliary belt - What we want in a paradigm or research programme is for it to have a progressive research programme - The test of the theory wasn't whether you could prove the theory right or wrong but rather find that this theory/science is predicting things that are unexpected otherwise - A progressive research programme is one that has a strong positive heuristic for new unexpected findings - However, Lakatos failed to explain when a scientist should change research programmes (this can only be seen in hindsight). - Made us less sure of our conclusions in general - undermined work of Popper

What was the crucial dilemma?

Reconciling determinism and free-will - It's in the structuralism vs functionalism debate that you start to see the issues of determinism and free will raised their head in new psychology e.g. is folk psychology correct that our thoughts determine our behaviours? Or are our thoughts and behaviours scientifically determined (by genes or the environment)? - Wundt and structuralists didn't want to go near questions such as free will and determinism so ultimately limited the scope of psychology severely in order to attempt to avoid this problem - Functionalism resembled ancient/medieval 'faculty' psychology, focused on similar functions (e.g. memory) and basically ignored the free will/determinist problem - focused on different functions of the mind - But actually this was a big issue and James wrestled with the free will/determinist issue until he gave up and became a philosopher (to think deeper about these issues)

Reid and Humes famous arguments are 'common sense' but have different viewpoints, what are these viewpoints...

Reid argued that the secure base for knowledge in philosophy be doubt, made no sense - instead, argued that common sense should be the foundation of philosophy - Reid identified Descartes' 'Way of Ideas' as the problem that stopped enlightenment philosophy from being common sense - the reason why philosophy didn't make complete sense - Descartes wanted to find a 100% solid epistemological foundation for the new science - Descartes had to posit dualism (two sides to reality internal and external reality) - Descartes thought he found that foundation in cogito ergo sum - and as a result Descartes had to argue the nature of human consciousness vs reality as portrayed in Descartes requires that we don't experience the world, but copies/representations of the world

Chomsky suggests... about language learning. This goes against Skinner's perspective of verbal behaviour.

Reinforcement cannot solely account for our learning of language as kids e.g. a child might say 'mummy goed home', despite never hearing an adult say 'goed' - child is taking information about the world and applying it to other stuff and this has to involve some sort of mental process. - Unless you can explain how 'colourless green ideas sleep furiously' is different to 'friendly young dogs seem harmless' - there has to be more than just reinforcement in language - We cannot explain language without having a mind - Descartes also thought we cannot have language without a mind - expression of the mind and justification of others existence

Explain the rise of behaviourism

Remember the functionalist/structuralist debates of introspective psychology - between function of consciousness (William James, James Angell) and structure of consciousness (Wundt) Functionalists in this debate evolved in behaviourists - key differences between introspective psychologists and behaviourists, was that introspective psychologists were initially very interested in introspective results e.g. interested in consciousness BUT... At the turn of the century, functionalists became increasingly less worried about introspective results and more focused on objective results (e.g. Angell 1903) Research gives them license to believe this is the best way to go about psychology - to start focusing on behaviour - research of Edward Thorndike

What is Thorndike's Law of Effect?

Research on cats learning to escape a 'puzzle box' - reinforcement - positive reinforcement is important to animal learning - satisfaction of escaping the box The law of effect is a psychological principle advanced by Edward Thorndike in 1898 on the matter of behavioural conditioning (not then formulated as such) which states that "responses that produce a satisfying effect in a particular situation become more likely to occur again in that situation, and responses that produce a discomforting effect become less likely to occur again in that situation."

What is the behaviourists relationship with the received view?

S.S. Stephens in 1935 introduced Bridgeman's operational definitions into psychology - instead of defining airy fairy ideas about thought or cognition, we could specifically define it as a certain kind of behavioural output of that which was more real than the thing itself Verificationism, hypothetico-deductive method Tolman in the 1930s travelled to Vienna to study with the logical positivists - Behaviourists justified the use of operational definitions by arguing that they were literally all that needed to be studied - we didn't need to know anything about the mind behind those constructs that are operationally defined because that had no effect on behaviour By 1950, theorists like Hull and Tolman were criticised for not being logical positivist enough (despite their claims)

The enlightenment is considered the 'age of reason' because...

Science rather than scientific revolution (revolution over) - now focus is applied to trying to understand the human world not just the natural world

In spite of all the arguments against it, science...

Science still works - thousands of tonnes of metal can fly through the air are thanks to engineering based on scientific principles and laws - often, those in the Strong Program in SSK make little remarks that let you know that they still really think science is real Is there a middle way between Inductivism and Deductivism?

define realism

Scientific theories are literal descriptions of how the world is e.g. light is literally a wave and particle at the same time - Whether science is real or not, it is a useful construct to help us explain observations

Kuhn proposed that...

Scientists in reality usually entirely ignore falsifications - instead, science is a series of paradigms (where Kuhn refers to paradigm as overarching, more similar to metatheory) - controversially; no one paradigm is better than another except at solving the problems scientists at a particular time have chosen as important - Kuhn's paradigms vs psych paradigms - underlying set of assumptions that guide behaviour in practice

Explain the evil demon thought experiment in accordance with The Matrix (1999) and provide examples of people who think this is true today

Similarly, the science fiction film, the Matrix (1999), imagined a world where humans in reality lay inert in pods, while input was fed by computers to their brains, making them think they were living in the real world - whether you're hooked up to machines in The Matrix or fooled by an Evil Demon, the idea is that it is so close to reality that you'd never know the difference Some people really do believe we are living in a simulation - 'if you assume any rate of improvement at all, games will eventually be indistinguishable from reality' concluding that 'we're most likely in a simulation' - Elon Musk The point is we can doubt quite a lot about the nature of reality

At the birthday of cognitive science (MIT 2nd symposium on information theory) a paper titled 'Logic Theory Machine: A complex information processing system' By Allen Newell and Herbert Simon was presented, it proposed...

Simon claimed to have solved the mind body problem; explaining how a system composed of matter can have the properties of mind Explained a way in which the mind could be explained as if it was like a computer

Why Skinner not a stimulus response psychologist?

Skinner argued that a stimulus doesn't elicit a response, but enables an organism's discrimination - trying to get rid of drives. - Where S-R psychologists see organisms seeking to reduce unpleasant stimuli associated with e.g. hunger (drives) - Skinner just sees reinforcement/punishment Behaviours as not just movements in space by ways of interacting with reinforcers Did not think this was scientific enough - drive theories and goals are not as scientific - primary drives are unscientific Skinner is a radical behaviourist

Verbal Behaviours in behaviourism refer to...

Skinners tacts; verbal behaviour under the stimulus control of something in the environment We have been trained via reinforcement to response in particular ways to particular situations in the environment around us Skinner argues that when someone says 'I am looking for my glasses' what they really mean in terms of stimulus response is 'when I have behaved this way in the past, I have found my glasses and have then stopped behaving in this way' - there's something in the environment we want to stop happening so we look for our glasses and this influences future experiences of losing glasses and thus looking for them Something in your training reinforces your behaviour - we learn these behaviours based on past experiences

Ludwig Wittgenstein and conceptual confusion in philosophy refer to...

So, in the end when one is doing philosophy, one gets to the point where one would just like to emit an inarticulate sound. Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language. Wittgenstein's project is to try and stop us from being confused by language into making conceptual confusions (e.g. logical mistakes caused by misapplying concepts) - philosophy is all about clarifying concepts and almost nothing else - Bennett and Hacker come from this perspective

What are the advantages of socio-biology over evolutionary psychology?

Some awareness that human culture is much more complicated to explain than ant culture Clearly specifies the nature of the neural/psychological mechanism involved Can avoid biological determinism - Stephen Pinker, 1997 - gives a sense of what evolutionary psychologists argue

What dates provide context for the enlightenment?

Some dates for context: - 1712: Coffee from Java in Indonesia reaches Amsterdam - coffee houses enabled wired discussions of philosophy - 1721: Robert Walpole becomes Britain's first PM - agreed upon position of power - an age of increasing democracy - 1741: Pamela (the first English novel) published - novel written in English - 1755: Samuel Johnson's dictionary - spelling and definitions - first modern dictionary - 1757: The British East India Company conquers Bengal - India starts to fall to the English - English becomes wealthy based on exploitation of India - 1758: Linnaeus begins modern zoological nomenclature - names for animals e.g. homo-sapiens or tyrannosaurus -rex - 1770: Cook lands in Botany Bay - 1776: The first practical steam engine - 1776: Adam Smith publishes On The Wealth Of Nations, the beginnings of modern economics - 1776: the American Revolution - 1787: American constitution drafted - 1788: Arthur Phillip lands in Sydney - 1789: the French Revolution - This is the context of the enlightenment, an age of expansion for Europe and this is where the philosophers of the enlightenment came from

Psychology is said to have had a 'long past and a short history', however....

Some of the metatheoretical questions that underlie psychology are incredibly old - go back to things like 'The Epic of Gilgamesh' Seeing how people argue about these questions (both before and after Wundt) gives us an alternative perspective which might help us understand psychology as it is now (travel broadens the mind) Ebbinghaus was exactly wrong: psychology has a long history and a short past

Descartes solution was to...

Start from the very beginning - let's get rid of ancient opinions such as Plato and Aristotle etc. and determined what we know for sure; what we cannot doubt - Well... we can be fooled by our senses (the Dress, Yanny vs Laurel, etc) so we can't rely on that, can't rely on the fact the world is really there based on our senses - there not necessarily an objective version of the world that everyone sees - Comes up with a thought experiment for things we cannot doubt called 'the evil demon'

What is the basic assumption in behaviourism?

Stimulus response (S-R) - The idea that behaviours are essentially reflexes - responses - caused by environmental stimuli e.g. a baby grasping your finger if you put near it - caused by reinforcement Not caused by belief-desire folk psychology - caused by environmental stimuli The language of independent, dependent, and intervening variables originally came from the behaviourist Tolman - Indep. variable was the stimulus - Dep. variable was the response

Logical positivism is...

Syntactic account of science; argues science is the language used to describe science. Science is a particular set of conventions by which we discuss relationships between observable entities - Just description and not implying causality - Regarded anything beyond this syntactic account as metaphysics, and thus not worth paying attention to (or not important) - Just description, not implying causality What you can observe about the show that you went to is the actors speaking words together, but how can you observe the actors being good actors? - metatheoretical assumptions

What was Descartes problem?

That we live in a fundamentally mechanical universe and that there is something about us which is fundamentally unmechanical, the soul.

How was Jame Angell's Functionalism related to J.B. Watson... and what was Watson famous for...

The 1903 experiment of Angell's were a blindfolded observer pointed to where sound was coming from - this was research that was starting to move away from introspective psychology and towards more objective means of measurement. The blindfolded observer was almost certainly J.B Watson - who was one of Angell's PhD students at the time Watson was most famous for the little albert experiment - but his most influential thing was 'psychology as the behaviourist views' (1913) basically a manifesto for psychology should do it this way - argued for behaviourism rather than cognitivism and that psychology should discard consciousness - didn't want psychology to be introspective and focused on consciousness - suspected our minds had nothing to do with our behaviour Psychology 'started' in 1879 with Wundt but took less than 40 yrs for psychology to say well are we really focused on the mind or the behaviour

What is The Modern Synthesis?

The Modern Synthesis in evolutionary theory, associated with Ernst Mayr (and popularised by the likes of Richard Dawkins): - An emphasis on Darwinian natural selection and sexual selection - A mendelian understanding of genetics - DNA has the basic component for genetic change/underlying unit of natural selection - Population analysis - mathematical models showing how a trait could start as a mutation, and then spread through population - evolutionary biology had become quantitative - The rise of ethology, the discipline which looks at behaviour in animals as an evolutionary adaptation (e.g. geese imprinting)

Freud's death and the glory years of psychoanalysis encompassed...

The Nazi's were not fans of Freud (to start he was Jewish) in Germany burnt Freud's books, and in 1938 they annexed Austria (Where Freud lived in Vienna) - Freud was delving into things the Nazi's didn't want people to think about Freud was old at this point, his daughter (Anna) was interrogated by the Gestapo in Vienna, he/they fled to London in exile Freud died in September 1939 - his last years books were very depressed and more about society If anything psychoanalysis had its most influence between 1940s and 1970s But post Freud Freudianism was not quite traditionally Freud

The scientific revolution meant that we took the best of...

The SR did an interesting thing by taking the best of Plato (rationalism) and the best of Aristotle (empiricism) and putting them together so that we now had people who went out into the world or who did carefully contrived experiments and then explained them mathematically using the principles of maths and logic - something Aristotle did a little bit of but he never used maths, this is the new component

Define the mind-body problem

The Standford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy: ' In Sum, we can say that there is a mind-body problem because both consciousness and thought, broadly construed, seem very different from anything physical and there is not convincing consensus on how to build a satisfactorily unified picture of creatures possessed of both a mind and a body' - the big question with this problem is the problem of interaction, how does the spirit/soul interact with the body?

Why rats and stats?

The answer: while psychiatry was fixated on psychoanalysis, psychology was conditioned to respond to behaviourism From J.B. Watson's 'Psychology as a The Behaviourist Views it' (1913) to 1960 (when there are finally more cognitivists key words in the literature) Skinner publishing screeds against cognitivism in 1990

Ignoratio Elenchi (straw-man argument) is a fallacy, define Ignoratio Elenchi (straw-man argument)...

The argument attacked is not the one proposed but instead a much weaker and easier to attack - diverts the discussion from something more proper to another tangent that's completely irrelevant and easier to argue - hidden assumptions: keeping dog inside will prevent barking; it is neighbourly to prevent disturbance etc. - real arguments are complex and untidy

Explain Descartes 'I think, therefore I am'

The famous quote in philosophy - original Latin; 'Cogito, ergo sum' - Everything since Descartes in the philosophy of mind is basically a response to Descartes - the philosophy of mind matters for psychology because psychology is the applied philosophy of mind - makes philosophy of mind scientific - As a result, several modern psychology metatheories, including behaviourism and cognitivism are in some ways influenced by Descartes in important ways which should change how we understand them - Including several modern psychology metatheories - The other famous phrase is things getting called "Cartesian", this is the adjective referring to Descartes thought e.g. Cartesian Dualism (his surname got Latinised to 'Cartesiuis')

From Empedolces of Acragas we have...

The first surviving text of a psychological theory - the ancient Greeks at this point were most interested in perception theories because they were interested in metatheories and understanding what the world is like - how the world is like has to do with what's in the world and what comes out of our heads. - the way we perceive the world plays a role in this, perceiving the world as we see it. - Aristotle suggests something is our soul that creates a representation of sorts. 'For it is with earth that we see earth, and water with water; by air we see air, by fire destroy fire. By love we do see love, and hate by grievous hate' - basically we see a realistic world, if you see a puddle of mud, it's a puddle of mud

Validity is a property of...

The form of an argument - If P1 & P2 entail C then the argument is valid - a sound argument is both valid and true

Determinism

The idea that people's behaviour is produced primarily by factors outside of their willful control. The philosophy that holds that every event, action, and decision results from something independent of the human will.

What is scientism (in relation to humanistic psych)?

The idea that science is the only worthwhile path to truth/knowledge But of course science is not the only way e.g. historians have knowledge without engaging in science Psychology is particularly hard-fought battleground in arguments about scientism because psychology claims to be a science but takes as its topic matter matters that same think are outside the bounds of science - psychology does claim to be a science. Maslow - experiments aren't the only way to find knowledge

The Received View

The inductivist or logical positivist view gets called the received view because this remains the background against which contemporary alternatives have been formulated and developed, and by reference to which those views are often distinguished from each other. In at least this sense, it has dominated much of the philosophy of science in the latter half of the twentieth century as well - the standard view about what a scientific theory is

What did behaviourist research on animals result in?

The kinds of animals that behaviourist research was done on were actually specific kinds of animals - Pigeons, rats, and dogs (typical test subjects) are all omnivorous invasive species with a lot of behavioural flexibility Other species are not like this; e.g. squirrels have more limited behavioural routines As a result of all this, psychology needed a metatheory capable of accounting for mental states, as language cannot be accounted for without assuming mind, and a metatheory with less emphasis on the tabula rasa - Welcome to cognitive psychology (cognitivism)

The major theoretical/metatheoretical group in psychology; the majority view involves...

The metatheoretically unreflective - takes cognitive points of view but doesn't think that hard about it, cognitive by default - not really thinking carefully about the cognitive positions - most research falls under this

Radical behaviourism infers that...

The mind has nothing to do with behaviour - thought is simply inner verbal behaviour and no different to saying out loud- Lashley, Skinner, Hull - we don't have thinking in our heads, thoughts were inner verbal behaviours, no different to saying things out loud

Explain Hume and the problem of Induction

The most basic question in the philosophy of science: Are we rationally justified in reasoning from instances or from counter instances of which we have had experience to the truth or falsify of the corresponding laws or to instances of which we have had no experience? (Popper's wording) i.e. how can we justify the belief that the world that we have experienced is representative of everything else? - how do we know that the laws of physics also apply on other planets etc? e.g. it might be tomorrow that physics stops working but chances are it won't we cannot justify this the reason we have this problem is because science does make this assumption e.g. representativeness The problem is that we use representativeness in science - we cannot justify this - we cannot justify that the world will be the same tomorrow as it is today we have to take it on faith that it will be But justifying this seems implicit in the existence of 'laws' of science - otherwise they're not really 'laws'

Epistemology is an important subfield of philosophy, define epistemology

The nature of knowledge, what knowledge is and how we can get to knowledge e.g. science is a particular way of trying to get a specific kind of knowledge about a specific kind of category of stuff that exists - whether we know if a theory is true or not?

Ontology is an important subfield of philosophy, define ontology

The nature of reality, what is the world? What is it made of? Science has a particular ontology for example, it argues that the world is made up of atoms. Subatomic particles etc.

(Aristotle the psychologist) Define Aristotle's way of trying to understand the mind... for Aristotle everything has a soul and it's just part of the world - the soul is just part of nature - Aristotle divides between three forms of soul/mind that different forms of life have...

The nutritive soul - Humans, other animals and plants all share this soul - Soul that has aim of getting nutrition e.g. plants bend toward the sun The Sensitive soul - Different from plants but not other animals - Humans and other animals have a sensitive soul e.g. we feel things, feel pain - not shared with plants The rational soul - Humans only - our ability to have reason/use logic/come up with an argument and find evidence for this and argue it to someone else

September 11th 1956 is considered...

The official birthday of cognitive science (Based on the MIT 2nd symposium on information theory)

What does idealism refer to?

The opposite of realism: it is a philosophical position arguing that reality as we know it is fundamentally constructed from ideas

French Philosophers of the enlightenment brought about the...

The philosophes of the lumieres (French philosophers) produced the best-selling Encyclopedie - an unprecedented 17 volume alphabetical compendium of all knowledge (inspiring the Encyclopaedia Britannica and eventually wikipedia) edited by Diderot & d'Alembert - made some strong statements about how things were changing... 'A most remarkable change has taken place in our ideas, a change which by its rapidity, seems to promise us a greater one yet...our century has called itself supremely the century of philosophy' (D'Alembert,1759)

A valid deductive argument is one where...

The premises if true, then it would be impossible for the conclusion to be false E.G. if A then B, A therefore B - cannot question this, no argument with anyone who says if A then B, but oh no not B, has stepped out of rational discourse

Provide an example of a deductive argument

The situation: a mother is making a cake for her daughter's 3rd birthday, the daughter asks, "what's in the cake?", the mother replies "apricots", "oh, I don't like apricots" The argument: Girls who are three love apricots (P1) I'm three (P2) So I LOVE apricots (Conclusion) - Logic is written into, is the very form of, reason; two premises and a conclusion drawn from these premises this is a simple argument called a syllogism (2 or more premises, which if true, imply (from which may be deducted/derived) a true conclusion - Therefore, also, 'so', 'thus' 'because' and other terms indicate an argument is being made - maths and logic are sciences of form, not concerned with content - another term for this is syntax form/logic/syntax/mathematics - computer programmer learns logic to set up computer codes etc.

The finding that behaviour is partly genetic, meant what for behaviourism?

The tabula rasa (blank slate) evidence of behaviourism is not justified because genetics influence behaviour (nurture side of debate less valid now) - Nim Chimpsky - Behaviourists in the 1970s tried to raise a chimpanzee to sign American Sign Language - to prove Chomsky wrong... did not learn grammar - found that chimpanzees were pretty good at learning individual signs but were crap at learning grammar e.g. could not teach a chimp the difference between 'my aunt killed my uncle' and 'my uncle killed my aunt'

In the period where ataraxia and eudaemonia becomes opposed, different schools or pathways to Ataraxia appeared. These are...

The therapeutic philosophies: - Epicurus (341-270BC) - Epicurean - Happiness best found by avoiding cynic - tried to get people to let go of things most frustrated with - live simply - Diogenes (400-322BC) - A cynic- rejected society altogether, avoiding civilisation was the way to tranquillity - e.g. doing things like masturbating in public - Pyrrho (360-270BC) - A sceptic - don't expect anything and you won't be disappointed - Developed CBT - Stoicism - founded by Zeno (333-262BC) - a more developed version of scepticism; a philosophy for slaves and roman emperors - reconsider views on things in order make people less unhappy - All these people had a theory about how best to behave in order to achieve this tranquillity and lack of disturbance

Provide a brief overview of the whig history of psychology

The typical Whig history presents an inevitable road towards stuff getting more and more awesome - introspective psych associated with Wundt and James who didn't do experiments but tried to figure out their minds, then Freud came along who made us think about things (psychoanalytic perspective), then we had the behaviourists (Skinner) reinforcement schedules, then the mind came to focus in psychology; this is the point at which you get the modern definition of psychology, now there is various areas such as neuroscience in psychology, positive psychology etc. - but what if psychology isn't actually at peak awesome? - therefore we should look more closely at the past for things that might help the present and future

Problems for Karl Popper included Climate Change, this was a problem because...

The vast majority of climate scientists believe that anthropogenic climate change is real - however, pseudoscientists like Andrew Bolt use Popper-esque arguments to argue that it's been falsified, no matter what most climate scientists think - but this is not how science works, one experiment does not prove a whole theory wrong

What is the science-practitioner model of teaching psychology?

The way we are taught in psychology is not to teach us to become a psychologist first but a scientists first and then to use this knowledge to inform how we engage in psychology - then you go on to specialise in whatever you like - because part of psychology sees as being scientific is knowing your stats and how to conduct experiments

John Locke (1632-1704) tried to solve Descartes' problem by writing 'An Essay Concerning Human Understanding' (1690), explain how this book solves Descartes problem...

The work is 700 pages long in modern paperback, and discusses most of the same topics that a modern psychology textbook would cover: principles of learning, child development, perception, memory, decision making, etc - basically covers usual things that a modern psych textbook would cover It (book) endorses some very Cartesian viewpoints: • Locke shares with Descartes a distinction between a thinking soul without extension and the body in the world - thinking soul doesn't have length, doesn't take up any space in the universe • Locke echoes Descartes' cogito ergo sum: "If I doubt of all other things, that very doubt makes me perceive my own existence, and will not suffer me to doubt of that." - 'I think, therefore I am' • Still endorses some cartesian viewpoints - the mind doesn't have extension - the thinking soul doesn't take up any space in the universe - how can I get to understanding the human world • One of the things making Locke different from Descartes was that as with Plato (whose Forms are innate ideas), Descartes defended innate ideas

Provide an example of a theory question vs a metatheory question

Theory is what askes the questions 'what theory best explains these results?' vs metatheory asking the question 'what are the assumptions about how science works that we have when we claim that a theory explains the results?'

Giambattista Vico & Johann Herder: We Live in a world we ourselves create epitomises the 'Counter-Enlightenment', suggesting...

There are limits to applying philosophical and scientific reason to a messy world which is to some extent the creation of human imaginations e.g. $5 as a social construct, only has meaning because humans decide it does - Vico made distinctions between studies: - naturwissenschaft studies objectively, from without (e.g., physics) - geisteswissenschaft studies subjectively, from within (e.g., history) - distinction between natural sciences and human sciences Psychology is necessarily geisteswissenschaft

Explain Plato's conception of the soul/mind

There's an I who is the charioteer trying to steer where one horse and where the other horse wants to go - within us we have both the right hand horse who wants to do the right thing and we the left hand or crooked horse (have to whip them to make them do anything) - between the cleanly made horse and the lumbering animal (good and bad choices) - Not different to Freud's idea of the id, ego and super ego; Freud mentions this himself stating that his idea is not meant to be a new one but is aware that people have attempted this before such as Plato this is the first time you get the 'devil and angel on the shoulders' Devil and angel on the shoulders - theory of psychology of how people are, how the mind works, how people channel behaviour between different extremes - Freudian - Tripartite soul: three parts to the soul/mind - the chariot driven mind and good and bad choices

What was the relationship between Melanie Klein and Anna Freud

They had a big rivalry - Perhaps the two most influential psychoanalysts post-Freud - When A. Freud moved to London found there was already a psychoanalytic society there headed by Melanie Klein, diverged in a bunch of ways from original Freud - Both exiles from central Europe in London (Klein earlier than A. Freud), focused on children in their professional practice; in contrast to Freud who focused on adults - There arguments with each other in the mid-1940s led to the splitting of the British psychoanalytic Society into three groups (one of each: Freudian, Kleinian and one that supported neither)

Suppressed premises/ hidden assumptions in an argument are...

Things not included in the argument that Suppressed not support the premises so well - Logically they may be all over the place, invalid arguments e.g. the bible is the word of God, it says so in the book of John - suppressed premise; the book of John is part of the bible - a circular example - this also shows a fallacy: something that looks like a proper argument but is not

The 'quantitative universe' where maths is applied to logic means what for the scientific revolution?

This culminates in the scientific revolution - the point at which we think the scientific revolution is over and scientific things are just the way things are is not a revolution any more - Is Newton's book the Principia Mathematica - Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica; the mathematical principles of natural science - once this is in the title of a book science is no longer a revolution

The pragmatist notion influenced James' psychology of...

This pragmatism influenced James' psychology of consciousness; what consciousness is is less important than what is does - what is the usefulness? - start of the debate between structuralism vs functionalism (what's useful vs what's there) - For James consciousness is active - it is an evolutionary survival mechanism that makes us different from animals (e.g. self-consciousness that animals don't have) - Argues we don't have a unitary consciousness - we just have a stream of things that happen some of which we pay more attention to - William James was Darwinian in a way - saw our minds as a way of attempting to adapt to an environment

Define Whig History or Presentism

This refers to history that thinks that the way things are today is the best possible way they can be, and what needs to be explained in history is how we got to that best possible way.

What in a theory needs meta-ing/critical analysis?

To explain data, scientists must make logical arguments about the relationship between data and theory - any time you come up with a theory, you must come up with a logical argument to explain the theory (based on experiments) - So the metatheory of psychology must include a study of the rationale for the way psychology uses theories; this rationale is of course something studied in the philosophy, reasoning is important for a study, reasoning from a set of premises to a conclusion

What was Freud's post France project?

To find a middle ground between Charcot's emphasis on psychogenic causes and his own background in physiology and biology Firstly, Freud distinguished between 'actual neuroses' (actual problems with the nerves in the brain) and psychoneuroses (illness which is psychological in origin)- some mental illness (e.g. dementia praecox, Kraepelin) is physiological in origin, but some is psychogenic (things in that persons life that have made them unhappy or be in psychological pain (e.g. Hysteria) - Secondly, Freud still saw psychoneuroses as being biological in origin (but his argument was that they are biological in origin basically because we are evolved creatures)

Logic/explanation is an important subfield of philosophy, define logic/explanation

Topic of figuring out if arguments make sense logically, are they valid, are they true? What is the difference between valid and true? how to know whether a theory or statement even makes sense E.G. Do any of the propositions that underlie theory X contradict each other?

Describe the structuralist vs functionalist debate between the followers of Wundt and James

Ultimately the 'introspective' new physiology-merged-with-philosophy psychology ended up with a 'structuralist - functionalist' debate, Where Titchener being the most influential structuralist (representing Wundt in America) and James Angell being the most influential functionalist broadly speaking, the structuralists were Wundtian, and were more interested in the structure of consciousness, and the functionalist Jamesians were more interested pragmatically in how it worked Basically doing the same sort of experiments (because Wundt had that influence) but they were doing so with different philosophies of science - the Wundtians' were using a more realist philosophy of science; wanted to understand the atoms of consciousness - whereas the Jamesians' were more instrumentalist and wanted to know how we could use it/how it functions

People let go of the received view and moved towards a deductivist view, this meant...

Ultimately the received view wasn't sustainable- too many problems: 1. The raven paradox - the received view argued that evidence for a deductive scientific theory of the form all Ps are Qs (e.g. all ravens are black) confirms a theory - But logically, all Ps are Qs is equivalent to all non-Ps are not Q (e.g. no ravens are yellow) - Therefore, the existence of a yellow banana can be seen to be confirmatory with regard to the theory that all ravens are black - according to the logic of the received view this is a problem e.g. if you're a psych student you're crazy and an engineering student is not crazy confirms the psych student as crazy 2. The problem of induction - logical positivism at first tried to argue that the problem of induction was meaningless metaphysics... The collapse of 'metaphysics is meaningless' 3. Quines objections in Two Dogmas of Empiricism- language is intrinsically referential, and reducing scientific theories to language removes that reference 4. The collapse of 'metaphysics is meaningless' - The received view - the point is behaviourism, completely in love with the received view

A valid inductive argument is one where...

Usually B follows A, A therefore B; usually rain follows dark clouds, there is a dark cloud, therefore rain is coming OR usually a patient who coughs blood has TB, this patient is coughing blood therefore they have TB - these are inductive arguments

What is realism and what is it usually contrasted with?

Usually contrasted with idealism - the world is made of ideas - the world as we understand it is profoundly shaped by the ideas we have of it - and that we only know the ideas we have rather than the world itself - and therefore, does the world exist? Realism - the world exists and is real and we can perceive it, we can physically see it

The philosophes of the Enlightenment ignored Rousseau at first, but in 1762 he wrote the best-selling novel of the century 'Julie, Or The New Heloise' which (to 18th C audiences) portrayed emotions so vividly that everyone assumed (incorrectly) it was based on real life... leading to Rosseau to be called...

Voltaire, one of the big French Enlightenment figures, called Rousseau a 'lunatic' and called Julie such 'a stupid, bourgeois, impudent and boring' book that he would prefer to kill himself than read the whole thing - called Rosseau a lunatic Despite Voltaire's disdain, Rousseau's Romanticism was enormously influential in Europe - became the event that ended the enlightenment

Plato's work 'The republic' ~380BC is...

Voted greatest ever work of philosophy 'Despite the fact that most modern writers would rubbish Plato's premises/writings' - but today philosophers would start from a different premise in terms of what Plato was talking about, his way of thinking was influential

Explain Pseudoscience

We have anti-vaccination campaigners --> everybody besides these people, agrees that anti-vaxxers are NOT science (apart from the anti-vaxxers themselves) However, anti-vaxxers at least appear to be using maths and logic to explain observations - talk about things that engage in science experiments and maths --> This is the nature of pseudoscience - being unscientific but pretending towards science - anti-vaxxers are biased in their report confirmation bias (only reporting findings that report their research) - there is no black swan black enough to convince them swans aren't white - So, we cannot just use maths and observations as the basis of science

The argument for the enlightenment in psychology went something like...

We want a secure base for science - this is why you get people like Descartes arguing what the natural world is and how it is and how that relates to the soul - want to start building knowledge therefore, that secure base for science has to be based on an understanding of how knowledge works - if we think about we come to have knowledge this is a question for psychology i.e. study of how people learn and what people know as a result of this secure base for science How we come to know things is a question of psychology Because this was a question of the age, Enlightenment figures like John Locke and David Hume wrote at length about the nature of the mind - because in order to understand how we come to know things we must understand how the mind works

Bishop George Berkeley's Esse Is Percipi (to exist is to be percieved) tries to sole Descartes' problems by involving...

What if what seems like a material universe is all (literally) in the imagination of God - in this case there is no mind body problem, because there is not matter, only mind - argument was everything is spirit and therefore no interaction problem • Solves the problem of the interaction with spirit and matter: it's all spirit, so interaction's not a problem! - because everything is spirit there is no matter, but God just happens to make things in such a way that there is order in the way the world works - the world around us is imagined by God - Berkely's monism; world around us is only made of spirit • Maybe a bit drastic, but logically, this makes more sense than Descartes/Locke ONLY MIND NO MATTER

What is the positivist view of explanation?

When scientists make predictions from a hypothesis, they are attempting to explain Logical positivists have a deductive-nomological model of explanation, where we can see the structure of a scientific explanation (basically put it into logical terms e.g. if A then B kind of logic) Explanadum- the phenomenon to be explained Explanans - the laws and initial conditions that explain the phenomenon This is science there is nothing on top - the law and initial conditions should explain everything (be the only explanation needed)

What is the mind-as-a-computer metaphor?

When your eyes take information your brain then processes that Cognitive science argues is this is the same processing that occurs in the mind - same as computing -

Diogenes Laertius brings us to conclude that the Greeks...

Wrote a book called 'The lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers' (after 200AD) addressed to a noble lay who apparently liked to read Plato - The book begins.. "some say that the study of philosophy originated with the barbarians. In that among the Persians there existed the Magi...' goes on to list other wise men from other cultures such as druids '...but those that say this ignorantly impute to the barbarians the merits of the Greeks, from whom not only all philosophy, but even the whole human race in reality originated' - this book is our best source of information now but Diogenes did not know his stuff well - critical inquiry is the important factor drawn from the Greeks for us learning about psych in 2019 Ends up suggesting that the ancient Greeks used critical inquiry as we do in psych in 2019 - Greeks have the first inclining of Critical inquiry in the Ancient World

Wundt's psychology involved...

Wundt was squarely in German psychological tradition; he largely agreed with Kantian psychology and approvingly quoted Leibniz saying; 'nothing in the intellect that was not first in the senses, expect the intellect itself' - there are structures in the mind that are innate at some level Like Kant distinguishing between the stuff of scientific research (noumena) and the stuff of humanities (phenomena), Wundt similarly distinguished between physiological psychology (which was focused on psychophysics and consciousness) and cultural psychology (which was focused on language and culture) Unlike Kant, Wundt had Weber and Fechner's intellectual tools, and believed we could investigate psychophysics (the interface between noumena and phenomena) Most of the research done in Wundt's lab is reaction time trials, completion of figures (gestalt trials)

Explain Wundt's big influence on the astronomers of the British Observatory

Wundt's big insight in 1862; the 'personal equation' of the astronomers said something about psychological processing - that we could use experiments like this to figure out what the mind is doing - Wundt came up with an experimental instrument; the thought metre - a grandfather clock that had a ball at the bottom and in the middle a large spike, on either side two bells - at the bottom there was a ruler measuring - Big question was: What ruler measurement was the ball of the pendulum at when the bell rang? Found that there was 0.8 second delay/inaccuracy in seeing and hearing a sound - seeing where the pendulum was on the ruler and where it should be - shows that you can use an experiment to find things out about the way our minds work

Clearing conceptual confusions around the Bennet and Hacker approach involves suggesting...

Your brain is just a big clump of neurons that send electrochemical signals to other neurons via synapses A big clump of cells sending electrochemical signals to other cells does not hear or see or represent Therefore, your brain itself does not 'see' or 'hear' or 'represent' or 'treat' Having a brain is a pre-condition to you doing the job of hearing or seeing or representing

Plato suggests the allegory of the cave is...

a metaphor for Socrates death - for asking too many questions - questioning the reality of society, questioning the structure of society and if this occurred could unravel the structure of society - denying the existence of the gods - philosophy makes people uncomfortable

What is the empirical scientific tradition...

a tradition associated with Hippocrates (5th century contemporary Socrates, from the Greek island of Kos) and his followers, and with Galen (~130-200AD) - For them disease/illness is physical and caused by natural causes - no magic or need for praying to the gods - caused by things there are too much of or too little of - careful diagnosis and identification of different diseases - because if you can identify a distinctive disease you can specify a treatment - Strongly influenced by philosophy (because that was then the best understanding of the physical world) - influenced by the idea that there is order in the world (for example) - because then we could go out and categorise diseases and there causes - influenced by tradition of Aristotle, Socrates etc. - This is the first time we get the impression that psychological illness (mental illness) is biological, caused by imbalances in brain chemicals

the houses of Wisdom in the Islamic Golden Age not only stored information, but...

added to it. The physician Ibn Sina (980-1037, from modern day Uzbekistan) wrote a series of commentaries on Aristotle, which expanded upon his ideas, and tried to align them with Galen's physiology and Islamic beliefs - wrote works on optics, which get into modern sensation/perception topics Ibn Rushd: A physician/judge from Andalusia in modern Spain - Like Ibn Sina, his commentary on Aristotle expands upon it - Ibn Rushd sees five rather than three souls (nutritive, sensitive, imaginative, appetitive, and rational) - Ibn Rushd's writings were seen as unordthodox but were very influential in the west to the extent that Averroism (identifying the mind with the immortal soul) became a Catholic heresy - this is how philosophy gets back into the west.

When the ancients suddenly realised we were orbiting the sun and were a planet, it was argued that...

argued that the universe was knowable; because it was ordered, there are regularities in nature which permitted secrets to be uncovered.

Humanistic psychology is a meta theory in psychology, define humanistic psychology

autonomous decision-making self with goals, motives and beliefs make us tick human

Why do we go back to Wundt?

because he was the first person to see psychology as a science that needed a specialised laboratory in 1879 - HOWEVER for most of the history between 1879 and 1970 people would have disagreed with these definitions, these psychologists do differently to what we would do

Hume is the point at which the enlightenment...

breaks down - tries to apply a scientific principle to philosophy - suggested that these are modelled after Newton's Laws

The strong programme in SSK argues for 'radical relativism', this...

comes from the view that knowledge is fundamentally constructed by the interaction of people socially - Social constructivist - Claims to be neutral but often (at least) implicitly anti-realist - lack of caring whether it's true or not leads to positions that effectively state science isn't real - The meanings of scientific terms are products of social negotiation and need not be fixed or determinate

What are the principles of the German university (via Van Humboldt)...

deriving everything from an origin principle, relating everything to an ideal, unifying this ideal and this principle in a single idea - this is kind of what Wundt did for psychology, engaged these principles - Provided (along with Romantic thought) a platform for universities to be a place to progress knowledge, and for new areas of knowledge to be subsumed within this platform - For the first time, science becomes professional, didn't have to be a gentlemen of means to attend university and conduct research - Gov. giving people money to do research

Alienists

early term for psychiatrists; one who treats mental alienation

Enlightenment philosophers from John Locke to Immanuel Kant wrote widely, on...

everything from science to politics to metaphysics to religion to ethics to aesthetics - psych was just one of the things written about and interested in

Bishop Berkeley (or Plato) was an

idealist

Unlike Descartes, Locke thought the soul was made of...

ideas. "actual thinking is as inseparable from the soul as actual extension is from the body...soul and its ideas, as body and its extension, will begin to exist both at the same time" - you can't have a body and not exist in the world - it makes no sense to have a body that is zero centimetres - implicit that your body has extension in the world - there is no soul without thinking, in the same way there is no body without centimetres - this is Locke's solution to Descartes problems - trying to create a world out of 'I think therefore I am', creates a thinking world out of ideas

Unlike deductive-nomological explanations, these inductive-statistical explanations are...

inductive - inductive arguments hold that the premises make the conclusion more likely, but the conclusion contains more information than the premise - In order for these explanations to be scientific, degree q (level of understanding we have about the nature of the trend) should be high enough to be expectable and reference class should reach the requirement of maximum specificity - i.e. in the IQ test example, we want to be super-specific - it is just humans who have high test-retest reliability, or are specific kinds of humans more or less reliable?) - from this comes the idea of operationally defined concepts

What is the socratic method?

instead of telling people things, he'd ask questions and figure out where they were going wrong (where there was contradictions and pitfalls in their logic) - the Socratic method is the foundation of philosophy in some ways - not that different from what a clinical psych does; get the patient to talk a lot and then figure ways to change that mindset through reconsidering their pit falls - big basis for CBT and Freudian theory QUESTIONING + ADDRESSING LOGICAL INCONSISTENCIES

Critical thinking or logical thinking?

interchangeable - forms of logic will be touched on - so when do you apply logical analysis/critical inquiry? Even when asking things like is the hypothesis coherent? Make sense? Properly argued? - all of these are exercises in logical thinking.

An issue with the mind-body problem is the concept of reification/thingification, explain this concept

is a logical fallacy that occurs when you reify; when you turn an abstraction into a thing in the way you discuss it - for example, there isn't a thing that is communism, you can't point to a chair and say 'that communism' - this causes problems e.g. someone complaining about 'millennials' is making an abstraction (an idea, but not a thing in itself) about the behaviour of millions of people and assuming that abstraction is a thing - as a result of Descartes we start stalking about consciousness as a thing that is separable part of us - consciousness is an action that a person does e.g. playing cricket is an action not a thing, consciousness is a verb

An issue with the mind-body problem is the concept of philosophical zombies, explain this concept

it is 'I think, therefore, I Am' - Not able to prove whether you think, therefore you are - If we follow Descartes it is very difficult to disprove the following statement;' I am the only conscious being on the planet' - if you follow Descartes logic it is hard to disprove the fact that you are the only person on earth and everyone else is a robot or 'philosophical zombie' i.e. they don't have a mind - language proves this incorrect to some degree because it shows communication from one soul to another - God isn't an evil demon and language is something that only things with souls/minds can do - Language demonstrates the presence of other minds

Cognitivism is a meta theory in psychology, define cognitivism

mind as a computer, what makes us tick is that we process inputs that result in outputs like a computer does

Behaviourism is a meta theory in psychology, define behaviourism

mind doesn't matter at all, inapplicable to understand behaviour because we are conditioned solely by the environment

describe the nature of what we have of Plato's writings...

over half a million words of Plato's writing have survived - does dialogue form of writing, later writings start to put words in Socrates mouth - All his writing is in dialogue form, initially simply portraying Socrates' discussions, but later putting his own thoughts in Socrates' mouth

Circularity is a fallacy, define circularity of an argument

petition principia or 'begging the question' which means assuming the very thing that you are claiming to prove

Identify issues with the mind-body problem

philosophical zombies the problem of interaction The homunculus problem Reification/thingification

In terms of ancient philosophers, they get divided into the pre-socratics and post-socratics, meaning...

pre and post Socrates who changed many things in philosophy

Pragmatism was an influential philosophy which basically argued that...

psychology/philosophy should give up the quest for first principles - James argued there is no first principle that can do what Descartes and others wanted it to so we should just go on what is useful

Descartes and Reid were

realists

What does realism refer to?

refers to the philosophical position that when we look around, we perceive a real world that is actually there and made of material - exists whether you believe it exists or not

Define instrumentalism

scientific theories are not literal descriptions of the world but instead are constructs which are useful in solving problems in a particular scientific enterprise e.g. light isn't really a wave and particle at the same time - it's just useful in my calculations to assume it is

Explain Locke and his idea of the 'blank slate'

suggests that all that we have comes from experience so if you haven't experienced something you have no knowledge of it - This is one of the big origins in western philosophy - The idea of the mind as a 'blank slate' (Latin: tabula rasa) yet to be written on is a common philosophical description used by previous philosophers (from Aristotle to Ibn Sina and especially Ibn Tufail wrote about the blank slate of the mind) and which Locke is very associated with (even if he described blank paper instead) - This is the start of the nurture side of the nature vs nurture debate

Adler also believed...

that we live in a deterministic, materialistic universe. There is no soul just people adapting to an environment. The environment we were adapting to wasn't just about sexuality and aggression but also about dealing with social situations - According to Adler we are fundamentally socially animals - we are evolved to group life and adapting to this e.g. chickens live in groups and have a pecking order, so why wouldn't humans? - part of what makes us who we are is this ability to deal with other animals being above or below us in the pecking order - Adler definitely made his name through the inferiority complex - Freud later adopted aggression into his theory after his battles with Adler

Neurophilosophy

the application of neuroscientific techniques to traditional philosophical questions

Aristotle and his research also marks...

the end of classical period of Athens - the democracy of Athens ended with Alexander the Great taking control - This period ended with Alexander the Great - took a teaching job teaching Alexander and some other Nobel Macedonian teenagers - Athenian warrior culture and democracy is over; they're a conquered people in a larger empire - The turmoil of the Hellenistic Period begins - Alexander's generals carve up his empire and their heirs war with each other - At this point Greek Philosophy changes

Explain W.E.I.R.D.NESS

the idea that most psychology study participants are W.E.I.R.D. (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic) - and that probably includes you!

An issue with the mind-body problem is the concept of the homunculus problem, explain this concept

the idea that we receive a spirit representation that our body has fed to us - the problem with having a little man inside your head is that this doesn't actually explain anything, what's inside his head? - homunculus problem is; if there's a little man inside your head and you're using this to explain how you perceive things, you then have to explain how the little man in your head perceives things. And if you're argument for this is that there is a little man in his head and in his head etc. it's not an explanation, moving the explanation back a step. - have to explain if we are perceiving representations we have to explain what it is about the mind and brain that helps us see these representations

Behaviourists aimed to have a verifications science, this meant...

the kind of science that is logical positivist, found out things and you verified them by doing experiments - but behaviourists like Hull and Tolman still used unverifiable mental states surreptitiously Skinner attempted to get around this in 'Verbal Behaviour' (book) attempted to account for langue in purely behavioural terms - language is the Everest of behaviourism - language is specific to humans and tried to be accounted for by behaviourism, account for language without talking about the mind - language without the mind is too difficult to talk to

What was the motto of the enlightenment?

"Have courage to use your own reason - that is the motto of enlightenment"

The scientific revolution was controversial among histroians because...

"there was no such thing as the scientific revolution and this is a book about it" - Steven Shapin, The scientific revolution, 1996, based on argument that what happened in the scientific revolution isn't that different to what happened in late medieval Europe and that it's the culmination of a bunch of trends which have previously already been existing and therefore drawing the line denoting modern science as starting in the scientific revolution is wrong

To the Question of ' if a tree falls in a forest and there is no one around to hear it does it make a sound?' - Galileo replied...

' there is no sound in the world without living ear, but only vibrations. Without a living eye there would be no light, no colour, no darkness in the world but only the imponderable oscillations that correspond to light and its matter, or their absence' - There is a distinction between primary (objective/spatial) is real and in front of you and secondary (subjective/qualitative) and what your living eye does, senses, qualities in the world

What is critical inquiry?

'Careful, systematic investigation, employing best available error-detection, mechanisms testing hypotheses via both logical and observational tests' - Mackay & Petocz, 2013 • Historians and scientists do this • Does psychology appear to be employing critical inquiry to the best of its ability? No, we are terrible at it E.g. the replication crisis

Before the scientific revolution; 1492 is considered the boundary between...

the medieval and modern period. - Before 1492 people didn't believe the earth was flat - No flat earth theory; but the learned had believed that the know lands of the earth were on a globe of earth (rock and other things) floating in a globe of water (the ocean) - Cristoforo Columbo from Genoa thought that the world was more oval than round, that the globe of water wasn't as big as everyone said it was and thus you could go from one side to the other quicker than people thought - and so Asia wasn't quite as far west as people thought. Convinced the Spanish Crown to fund Columbo's 1492 voyage West, despite most people thinking Asia was really far away and that they'd die of starvation before they got there, Columbo insisted to his grave that he'd found Asia, but in fact he had landed near modern Cuba - Columbo insisted on going and discovered America - American Indians were called such because Columbo thought he was in Asia - originally Columbo thought they were in India

Psychanalysis is a meta theory in psychology, define psychoanalysis

the mind as you understand it is just the tip of an unconscious iceberg - what makes us do the things we do is ultimately drives of survival and sex

Hume argued that humans use reason for...

'Reason is the slave of the passions' - the enlightenment was all about using reason to improve things - Hume argued that reason is the slave of the passions, we use reason to get our emotionally based aims - we use reason to get what our emotions desire - humans are not rational creatures in this way - this challenges enlightenment thought because enlightenment through was all about how good reasoning was and how far we could get if just reasoned about things instead of thinking about them emotionally - Hume suggests we can't just reason, have to accept emotion - For Hume, somewhere else the Early Modern philosophers went wrong is that they went searching for rationality in our minds - came from the place where humans thought rationally but in fact this is probably not even them - ...we humans aren't so rational - Hume recognised this as a problem for the enlightenment - For Hume the earlier philosophers went wrong in that they searched for rationality in our minds - Assumed that we think rationally... Kind of forgot that maybe that's not everyone - Hume recognised this and sought an understanding of the mind based on rationality

The scientific revolution is...

'The name given by historians of science to the period in European history when, arguably, the conceptual, methodological and institutional foundations of modern science were first established' - John Henry, the scientific Revolution and the Origins of Modern Science (2008) - Name given to European time period in which the conceptual, methodological and institutional foundations of modern science were first established. - modern science; remember we are taught on the scientist practitioners model, scientists first and practitioners second - this is the period in which this modern understanding of science comes to be

Why must psych students study history?

'The past is a foreign country - they do things differently there' - Hartley - we tend to underestimate how different things were in the past, people are considered the same in the past but the often weren't 'History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme' - Twain 'Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it' - Santayana

B.F. Skinner was not a fan of cognitivist psychology and said...

'The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do' Cognitive science (as far as Skinner was concerned) is the creation science of psychology, as it struggles to maintain the position of a mind or self All this cognitive science stuff that allowed us to have minds was effectively pseudoscience to Skinner Went to his grave believing this - 1990 paper finished the day before he died

Theophrastus said of Alcmaeon...

'sight depends on brilliancy and transparency of reflection, and the clearer this is, the more perfect the vision, Alcmaeon says that we hear with the ears because there is an empty space in them; this space resounds. Sound is produced by the cavity and the air within produces resonance' - saying things that are getting towards modern perception research

Science as empiricist meant...

'the reliance on Ancient Authority... was replaced by a belief that knowledge of the natural world can only be acquired by studying the world at first hand, either by detailed observation or even by specifically contrived investigatory experiments' (Henry, 2008)

If the pas if a foreign country (as Hartley says it is), then...

'travel broadens the mind' - if you go to a different country with a different culture, it makes you realise things about your own culture you'd never thought about before - Knowing history makes you conscious of the assumptions you have about how things are now

Problems for Karl Popper included psychology, why was this?

the standard psychology experiment is incapable of falsifying a theory - there is no psychological experiment that has conclusively falsified anything, because psych uses differential stats to prove something unlikely rather than wrong or right - the mind is too complex to rule out any vaguely plausible theory - p > .05 merely shows that something is unlikely, rather than false - thus there's no falsifying in psychology just 'unlike-a-fying'

Methodological behaviourism infers that...

to be scientific psychology has to focus on objective behaviour, rather than the mind - Tolman exemplifies this Still thought we might have had minds and those minds might affect our behaviour But figured to be scientific must look at what can be studied and that is the environmental impacts on our behaviour - Behaviour and reinforcement can be studied objectively and quantitively

Asserting the consequent is a fallacy, define asserting the consequent...

(a distortion of the earlier 'denying the consequent', modus tollens) - Asserting it is strictly invalid; If P, the patient has swallowed razor blades, then Q, He will cough blood, Q, he is coughing blood, therefore, P, the patient has swallowed razor blades - because can get the same conclusion from a different premises e.g. TB, Tuberculosis and patient coughs blood

Ad Hominem argument is a fallacy, define ad hominem argument...

(attack the arguer & not the argument) --> we depend on authority, information passed to us is by authority, E.g. Ad hominem argument is an attempt to dampen a person's argument by challenging their authority in the field - related fallacy is 'argument from authority'

What did Diderot in the encylopedie (1751-1772) suggest about the enlightenment?

- 'All things must be examined, debated, investigated without exception and without regard for anyone's feelings...we must ride roughshod over all these ancient puerilities (religion), overturn the barriers that reason never erected, and give back to the arts and the sciences the liberty that is so precious to them." - From Immanuel Kant's essay 'Was ist Aufklärung?' (what is enlightenment) (1784): - "The public use of one's reason must always be free, and it alone can bring about enlightenment among mankind"

What is a mereological fallacy (as explained by Bennett and Hacker, 2003 & 2008)

The eye doesn't see, the human sees, the eye is part of the mechanism by which the human sees - the same is true of the brain. Mereology is the logic of part/whole relations. The neuroscientists mistake of ascribing to the constituent parts of an animal attributes that logically apply only to the whole animal we shall call the mereological fallacy in neuroscience. It is only a whole human that sees.

Explain the philosophy of what a computer is...

The influential philosopher of maths Paul Frege recast mathematics as a subspecies of logic - As such, maths could be used to represent logical arguments - And as such, you could use that maths to process logical arguments (figure out validity) This is what Newell & Simon (1956) did - they used machines to process arguments from Russel and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica - Logical arguments can be said to be comprised of information Logical arguments consist of information - e.g. syllogism; Socrates is man, all men are mortal, therefore Socrates is mortal - there is information in each of those three phrases and you can represent these logically mathematically - this is what computers effectively do As long as you can boil down information to 0s and 1s, a computer can process it - transfer those 0s and 1s into something else: e.g. script telling a monitor or projector to show a particular set of coloured dots. Or a script which detects boundaries of light/dark in a picture file, and shows those boundaries on screen rather than the original coloured dots

Cognitive science took the information processing approach that was developing in leaps and bounds in computing, and applied it to the problem of understanding the mind...

The mind-as-computer metaphor - the assumption that our minds process information, central to the metatheory cognitivism - That is, fundamentally what a mind does is takes inputs, transform them into neural information, representations, which then results in an output - Cognitive science is an umbrella term that includes a variety of disciplines which take this approach, from linguistics to cognitive psychology to cognitive neuroscience - This is the foundation of psychology today - because more or less psychology today is either cognitivist explicitly or implicitly

What lessons has humanistic psychology taught us?

The need for psychology to admit something of human complexity and goals vs the need to have a secure basis as scientific - has to have an explanation of what that actually is How do we judge theories, if not scientifically, or from a secure basis? - how can we do such in a way that is rigorous? Psychology is not just a science - descriptive/predictive vs prescriptive - psychology is working with people, psychologists are people living in a society who want to change that society From the 'ivory tower' to the streets - how do we actually play a role in people's lives/society?

What did Bennet and Hacker say about the Libet et al., 1983 study?

- 'This experiment is based on confused presuppositions. It is neither necessary nor sufficient for an act to be voluntary that it be preceded by a feeling of desiring, wishing, wanting or intending to perform it or by an urge to do it.' - Argue that the brain doesn't decide - deciding is something we do as a whole and the brain is involved in the decision but as a whole all the brain does it just neuron activations to other neurons - lead to making decisions and thoughts - we are not our brains

Provide context for cognitive neuroscience in the 20th century...

- Broadly speaking, since Wundt and physiological psychology, our default assumption is that the mind is something that the brain does, somehow - we clearly don't have minds without having brains - this hasn't been something always assumed e.g. Aristotle thought the mind was in the heart - But how exactly that all worked was pretty unclear for much of the 20th century; e.g. behaviourists totally ignoring the brain, more or less. - From about the 1960's cognitive neuroscience started to gain speed - progress in ability to relate brain and mind - research on people who have neuropsychological deficits e.g. people like Tan (who could only say Tan) and Phineas Gage (railway accident)

How is modularity a criticism of evolutionary psychology?

- Generally, psychology is much more suspicious of modularity than it used it be- the rise of embodied cognition - Evolutionary psychology articles rarely focus on modules now (Burke, 2014) - but does that mean a slide back into socio-biology and biological determinism? - the lack of this means it is easier to slide back into old ways

What are the criticisms of the Bennett and Hacker approach (mereological fallacy) ?

- If the brain doesn't think, what is the mechanism by which the brain's functioning plays a role in me thinking? - Bennett and Hacker do not answer this question - A Wittgensteinians, B&H have a different view of the relationship between the language and mental reality that Quineans like Daniel Dennett, who see language as reflecting rather than shaping how we think - Dennett (2005); everyone knows the 'brains sees' is just shorthand for the 'brain does the information processing that results in the person seeing' - Cognitive neuroscience should be much more careful in how they describe their research and the cognitive assumptions associated with what they are doing.

Provide a recap of Hume's problem of induction

- The most basic question in the philosophy of science are we rationally justified in reasoning from instances or from counter instances of which we have had experience to the truth or falsity of the corresponding laws or to instances of which we have had no experiences? - Put simply; is the sun going to come up tomorrow morning? - we have to have faith the future will be like the past - i.e. how can we justify the belief that the world that we have experienced is representative of everything else? - Hume argues that we cannot justify this .... But justifying this seems implicit in the existence of 'laws' of science - otherwise they're not really 'laws' - we cannot justify it rationally or philosophical so we must have faith that the sun will rise tomorrow - We cannot really know what's true or not - let's just use the laws and predict the future based on the past

What is Fodor's language of thought (1975)?

- The most in-depth attempt to provide a secure metatheoretical basis for the mind-as-computer metaphor - to make sure it conceptually works Fodor argued that there is a surface structure and a deep structure to thoughts (following Chomsky's view of linguistics more or less); at a surface level, I might think in English and you might think in Hindu but at the deeper level, we both think in an underlying mental language, that Fodor dubbed mentalese - this fundamental language that we all speak is effectively information processing - this is what is happening at the deeper level Fodor has a problem to solve - how does mentalese have meaning? How do we get form computer programming language? To stuff that feels like it has meaning? (certain kind of set of information which surrounds the things we look at) - His argument is that atoms of thought are innate, and that we recombine these atoms into more complex thoughts

What are the principles of evolutionary psychology?

1. The brain is a physical system. It functions like a computer. Its circuits are designed to generate behaviour that is appropriate to your environmental circumstances - are going for the mind-as-computer metaphor information processing approach to psychology but adapting it to seeing humans as a certain kind of computer, that computer is not the whole story 2. Our neural circuits were designed by natural selection to solve problems that our ancestors faced during our species' evolutionary history. - physical computer which results from ancestors surviving 3. Consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg; most of what goes on in your mind is hidden from you... most problems that you experience as easy to solve are very difficult to solve- they require very complicated neural circuitry - linked with Freud, believed who we are is profoundly influenced by the fact that we are evolved creatures 4. Different neural circuits are specialised for solving different adaptive problems - the advantage of this is that these different modules can be worked on at different points in the evolutionary history for our genes to survive and grow. - the modularity of mind (Fodor) - have these modules to solve evolutionary problems so that our species can survive 5. Our modern skulls house a stone age mind that was shaped during an environment of evolutionary adoptedness. - the way that our minds deal with today's situations is how we would deal with stone age situations, evolved to deal with particular stone age situations. - In other words, we are not that much different than the Neanderthal humans based on our genes.

humanistic psychology is...

A collection of different theories in the 1950s to 70s premised on the fact that: 1. the individual has an innate tendency towards growth 2. and because of this, humans have a return to subjectivity and complexity. 3. Humanistic psychology rejects 'scientism' (and disagrees about what that is). 4. Psychology's job being to answer philosophical, moral and existential questions that are central to human experience. Thus, Leahey situates it in his psychological society chapter.

What is the Turing Test?

A test for intelligence in a computer, requiring that a human being should be unable to distinguish the machine from another human being by using the replies to questions put to both. E.g. early computers include Eliza, the Rogerian Therapist Computer scientists like Alan Turing figured out very early on (1950) that information processing machines would begin to do things that previously seemed like the domain of intelligent beings Turing argued that if computers got to the stage where you cannot tell which is human and which the robot that we may as well say that the computer is intelligent Functionally we may as well argue for intelligence based on computers The mind is like a computer

Neurophilosophy is associated with...

Associated with Patricia Smith Churchland and her 1986 book Neurophilosophy: Towards a unified science of the mind/brain Must be careful about the distinction between 'the philosophy of neuroscience' and 'Neurophilosophy' for Churchland the B. Libet study is Neurophilosophy, it saying something about the way that our minds work and the philosophical dilemmas involved using neuroscientific research Churchland argued for a new discipline that combined philosophy of mind and neuroscience, that there would be a co-evolution of both philosophy of mind and neuroscience

Eliminative materialism is associated with... and claims...

Associated with Paul and Patricia Churchland (and Paul Feyerabend, earlier) Eliminative Materialism claims: 1. the folk psychology belief-desire account of mental causation is false and misleading, and we only like it because we're used to it. - but science such as the B. Libet study show that this is wrong account of what happens in our head must be neuroscientific 2. It will be entirely replaced in the future by neuroscience - this will entirely displace the desire-belief account and any free-will questions that come with it (free-will doesn't exist) - Paul Churchland has some interesting theories about how the mind functions on vectors, which broadly speaking work similarly to connectionist cognitive models.

How did computers assist scanning the brain in advancing cognitive neuroscience?

At end of 1960's get the start of brain scanning/imaging - EEG had been around for a while and ERP predated WW2 - but too difficult to calculate until 1960s when computers were invented and could compute all this. But the advent of the 'Computer of Average Transients' technique in 1969 led to an explosion of EEG studies which were taken to say something about cognition - because now could do calculations with computer But this was nothing compared to the 1990s, the 'Decade of the Brain', with the rise of the fMRI techniques - how the brain results in the stuff we can do. Living at the rise of neuroscience saying something about psychology- brain has something to do with behaviour and the mind Benjamin Libet (1983): Brain activity happens before the conscious decision to make that action (question free will) These techniques say something about psychology - what it is that happens when we think?

Evolutionary psychology is...

Best seen as an attempt to deal with the issues that come along with socio-biology - find things in psychology that are more the result of evolution than culture Metatheory of psychology which has a set of assumptions about what psychology is and how psychology should be looking at things - Cosmides & Tooby

What was involved in cognitive psychology's explosion of riches...

By 1970 there were more psych journal articles using cognitivist key words than behaviourist keywords These days, most psychology research is either explicitly cognitivist (e.g. psyc236) or at least couches their theory on cognitivist language (Mackay and Petocz, 2013) E.g. The Rescorla-Wager model of classical conditioning recasts conditioning as information processing - Cognitive behavioural therapy isn't really cognitivist, but its sounds like it is

What is the relationship between Cognitivism, Fisherman statistics and Popperian philosophy of science

By the 1960's, the inductivist hypothetico-deductive explanations of the logical positivists were in disarray, and deductivist philosophy of science was in its ascendancy (e.g. Popper), theories no longer had to be simply laws that mathematically explain behaviour The philosophy of science changed and became much more about theories Fisherian experimental design and statistics meant that cognitive psychologists had a rationale for experiments where they varied stimuli between randomised groups, and then tested whether there were statistically significant differences between those groups - e.g. make one group of people look at red dot, and one group look at blue and look at reaction time when change colour - can tell something about the underling processing But should remember these experiments never falsified anything

Explain how cognitivism fits in with the Cartesian 'way of ideas'

Cartesian dualism where there is sort of a ghost in the machine i.e. a little soul that causes your body to do what it does because free will etc. Bennett & Hacker argue a similar kind of thing that it uses the same structure of argument that Descartes had. But instead of having the little ghost we just have a brain that does it all. But then argue that is incorrect because it's not the brain that does it all, it's whole person. A brain without connection to anything doesn't have thought, it just sends electrical impulses around.

Explain the structure and function of cognitivism

Cognitive science tends to talk about modules - which can be seen as a return to structuralism or faculty psychology (e.g. Aristotle) - different structures, sees the mind made up of different structures, different things in the mind broken into modules or different components - like the modularity theory Fodor (1983): Faculty psychology is getting to be respectable again - this is the rationale for a lot of the research cognitivists do - identify a particular module and the way these modules interact and feed information two and from each other - The cognitive modules are very much about function - in this sense cognitivism is also drawn from functionalism - positing certain structures that have to underlie the way these things function - To some extent cognitivism melds together the structuralism and functionalism by using structure to understand function - because it posits certain structures that have to underlies the way that things function

Describe Maslow on humanistic psychology...

Comes across in the way that Maslow does his psychology - Maslow didn't really do experiments, looked at people's biographies to determine behaviour etc. - argued that he was doing pre-science.

Provide context for Karl Popper

Deductivist philosopher - Viennese philosopher, born in 1902, died in 1994 - Before writing The Logic of Scientific Discovery, he made cabinets, worked for Alfred Adler, and completed his 'cognitive psychology' PhD. - Moved to New Zealand in 1937 to escape Nazi invasion of Austria

Explain Lewontin's perspective of biological determinism

He was against it. Argued that the members of human societies sometimes cooperate closely in insectant patterns, but more frequently they compete for the limited resources allocated to their role-sector. The best and most entrepreneurial of the role-actors will gain disproportionate share of the rewards. - Wilson, 1975 - implying that humans are competitive, aggressive and selfish - comes in across in other books of the era - Human societies can be very, very different across place and time - Wollongong in 2019 is very different to Wollongong in 1959 or London in 1945 - changes perspectives - Lewontian makes the point that human societies are complex and varied - disagrees with Wilson that cultures can be applied to other societies e.g. ant culture to human society is incompatible

Criticisms of evolutionary psych include zealous adaptionism, this refers to...

Evolutionary psychology assumes, based on the 1970s modern synthesis population genetics of Richard Dawkins etc. that evolution is incredibly powerful - however the assumptions had about this in the 70s were very much over turned with the rise of DNA sequencing equipment However, more modern research suggests evolution is a weaker force than that - most mutations are neutral, and genetic drift means that some of the things in our genes are basically there by accident Perhaps it easier to assume (i.e. Skinner) that what has evolved is an ability to adapt quickly to circumstances?

Explain computational cognitivism vs consciousness

Example from Frank Jackson (1986) - 'What Mary Didn't Know' - thought experiment of a super-scientist called Mary who basically has solved the problem of understanding the exact cognitive process by which we perceive colour... Except that she has lived her whole life locked in a black-and-white environment, never once having actually seen colour She then escapes from the locked room and sees colour for the first time... does she see anything new?

What are the six conditions of Roger's person centred therapy?

For therapy to occur it is necessary that these 6 conditions exist: 1. That two persons are in contact 2. That the first person, the client, is in a state of incongruence, being vulnerable, or anxious. 3. That the second person, the therapist, is congruent in the relationship 4. That the therapist is experiencing unconditional positive regard toward the client 5. That the therapist is experiencing an empathic understanding of the client's internal frame of reference 6. That the client perceives, at least to a minimal degree, conditions 4 and 5, the unconditional positive regard of the therapist for him, and the empathic understanding of the therapist - This is what causes therapy and people to get better - interaction of two people where one person is changed

What are the influences on humanistic psychology?

Freud is a big influence his approach to both science and therapy (Rogers and Maslow both appreciated Freud's focus on transference, repression, defence etc., and Maslow followed Freud's scientific thinking) - Behaviourism Maslow did his PhD with Harry Harlow on sexual behaviour and dominance in monkeys William James Pragmatism had a 'lets not worry about knowing the truth of things but rather what's practical'

What does theologian Reinhold Niebuhr say about psychology (in relation to humanistic psych)?

Fundamental level at which past behaviour can't predict future behaviour because free will exists. Meaning we may not behave exactly as we have done in the past. can't predict future behaviour based on the past because free will exists. Tension between inability to predict future behaviour because we have free will vs Skinner/Freud behaviour influenced by environment

Psychological society according to humanists was...

Humanistic psychologists felt that 1950s society was awful Rollo May felt that America was in an 'age of anxiety', and that many were 'hollow people' - in fact, it was the healthier people who were more likely to seek therapy Maslow: self-actualised people are very rare - people who actually reach potential is really small Erich Fromm: 'the pathology of normalcy'; what's actually pathological is society e.g. if you live somewhere that's not a nice place to live you're likely to not be very happy

Explain the Wason Selection Task in terms of humanistic psychology...

If a card is a 3, its reverse must be read. Indicate the cards that need to be turned over to test whether any of the cards are wrongly marked. - not necessarily part of the logic is that the red card will have a 3 on the other side. If you make these logic problems social it becomes obvious: - One side of a card indicates age, the other indicates what they're drinking. Indicate the cards that need to be turned over to test whether someone is drinking illegally. - Cosmides argued that people are better at socially motivated reasoning than abstract reasoning - This is not what you would expect from a straight cognitive perspective, but it is what you would expect from a massively modular, evolutionary psychology perspective; we have evolutionary motives to pick cheaters who break social rules.

Explain Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment.

Imagine that I am locked in a room with boxes full of Chinese symbols (which I can't read), and I have a rule book... I receive symbols and I look up in the rule book what i am supposed to reply, I pick up symbols for the boxes and manipulate them according to rules in the rule book, and hand out the required symbols argues that this system is basically what a computer is doing - what I don't know is I am part of the information processing machine; the rule book is a computer program written to attempt to pass the Turing Test - BUT no understanding of Chinese in that room; suggests that Fodor and the information mind as a computer metaphor has not explained how we understand meaning - something about understanding language which a computer cannot do Responding to symbols presented and looking them up in the rule book and responding is exactly what a computer does - let's say the rule book is sophisticated enough to pass the Turing test - Turing would say that the computer is, for all intents and purposes intelligent - the computer understands Chinese BUT the Chinese room is semantically empty - cannot process the meaning of words - only syntax - Shows the limitations of the cognitive approach in a big way

What was humanistic psychology's relationship with drugs?

In the early 1960s, humanistic psychologists became fascinated by psychedelic drugs, thanks to Timothy Leary's early work (e.g. Maslow and Leary Chaired a panel together in 1962) - Leary was famous for popularising psychedelic drugs Correlations between Maslow's peak experiences and the experiences of people on psychedelic drugs - being on drugs resembled Maslow's self-actualisation

What are the problems with socio-biology?

Lewontin was a fellow evolutionary geneticist... imagine how much sociologists hated E.O. Wilson - Lewontin believed in evolution and we are influenced by evolutionary history socio-biology was criticised for having no way to distinguish between evolved adaptations and historically contingent ways in which humans behave it also didn't bother about mechanism - e.g. how do these genes cause such mechanism? - humans are very adaptable animals

How does positive psychology smuggle in value judgements?

Martin (2007) critique of positive psychology; despite its talk of being scientific, it nonetheless smuggles in value judgements (which sit poorly with science) when it tries to define things like happiness or eudemonia Seligman is trying to have it both ways: He says that science must be descriptive (how we actually act) and not prescriptive (how we should act; ethical). It's not the job of positive psychology to tell you that you should be optimistic, or spiritual... it is rather to describe the consequences of those traits but that he also seeks a fresh and scientifically grounded answer to the Aristotelian question of what is the good life? (2002) Descriptive vs normative statements - descriptive vs the way that things should be Martin worries about science distorted by moral judgements, and psychologist presenting themselves are moral experts Thought positive psychology is better at being scientific than humanistic psychology - it still has the fundamental assumption of behaviour happening because of beliefs and desires or reasons - smuggles in free will

Bennet and Hacker (2003, 2008) argue what about neuroscience in psychology?

Max Bennett (neuroscientist) and Peter Hacker (philosopher) - Their 2003 book Philosophical foundations of Neuroscience already has thousands of references on Google Scholar - Generally, makes the argument that cognitive neuroscience is rife with unjustifiable metatheoretical assumptions about the nature of mind - cognitive neuroscientists typically make these assumptions without really being able to justify them

Describe Rogers on Humanistic psychology

More scientific - argued for an 'authentic human science' premised on: careful observation of inner cognitive processes... and inner, personal emotional meanings... it will be based on understanding the phenomenological world of man.' - referring to Kant; who argued about the noumena and phenomena But unlike Maslow was more of a stickler for operational definitions - only perception not confirmation without a definition Psychology that has given up on trying to be quite as scientific as B.F. Skinner - where Skinner and Freud had a deterministic, materialistic view of the world, Maslow and Roger's are not trying to be determinists or materialists, they argue for a psychology that has reasons rather than causes for human behaviour - where we have some measure of free-will

Explain positive psychology as following from humanistic psychology

Most associated with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (flow, 1990) and Martin Seligman (flourish; A visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being, 2011) Seligman suggests a new kind of psychology called positive psychology - he talks about flourishing, nurturing etc. other humanistic topics - some of the words he uses are familiar to humanistic psychology Positive psychology can be considered humanistic psychology is disguise Positive psychology first termed appeared as a chapter title in Maslow's book Motivation and Personality

The first principle of realism is...

Ontology. --> Nature of the world, idea that the world and its facts exist independently of minds - the world and all its facts exist independently of any mind's apprehension of them - usual starting place for realism - argument is that fall into antirealism - everything is deterministic, materialistic - hard to find people who disagree that the world exists independently of the mind - ontological egalitarianism: only one kind of reality; deterministic, materialistic universe. Everything exists in space and time.

cognitive neuropsychology...

Research which investigates the effects of brain lesions on cognitive abilities.

Explain Popper's reasoning for Freud's explanations of behaviour as also unfalsifiable

Popper: Freud is useful but not science - Freudian therapists can explain any human behaviour (e.g. can apply some part of Freudian theory to any situation/instance and it will sound plausible) - BUT - a correct theory of human behaviour should be able to explain any human behaviour! - Any Freud makes plenty of claims that are in principle falsifiable

What is the importance of relational logic to psychology?

Psychology is about relations of mental processes to behaviours, ideas to their content, cognitions and objects --> NB: psychology being about relations is DIFFERENT from psychological objects being 'relationally defined' - Supposed 'relational' nature of psychological concepts

What is the curious state of psychology? i.e. are we flourishing or struggling?

Psychology is flourishing in terms of research and ideas Psychology is struggling to tell the difference between these ideas - struggles to test them and identify correct and incorrect ideas. Focuses on empiricism at the expense of having conceptually well thought out theories This has resulted in the replication crisis - people are now trying to replicate research because they are not convinced of the validity/correctness of the first attempt at the study - suggests both flourishing and struggling EMPIRICAL EXPANSION BUT THEORETICAL DISARRAY

At the birthday of cognitive science (MIT 2nd symposium on information theory) a paper titled 'Three Models for the Description of Language' By Noam Chomsky was presented, it proposed...

Put language into a logical syntactic structure so that something like the logical information processing system could process it - uses information processing principles to arrive at a generative grammar theory in linguistics; to explain the way linguistic information can be organised using symbols to mean different things and to explain the logical structure of language, transformed the field - put language into logical syntactical structure

The second principle of realism is...

Realist epistemology. --> We can and do have objective knowledge of the world - this is direct - epistemological corollary - we see things rather than representations of things - the implication from ontological to epistemological realism - theory of direct perception - psychology is usually representational perception, where this contrasts realist epistemology - we see things, not merely representations of things.

What is the relationship between Lakatos and evolutionary psychology?

Remember, Popper's falsificationism has massive problems - Lakatos' revision; Scientists have research programmes with a basically unfalsifiable hard core and a falsifiable auxiliary belt - progressive programme is one that has a strong positive heuristic for new unexpected findings - Evolutionary psych is in many Lakatosian than Popperian

Critisicisms of evolutionary psychology include just so stories, these are...

Rudyard Kipling's 'just so stories' (1902) - the just-so story about why the Camel got its hump - The story about what happened in the environment of evolutionary adaptiveness are unfalsifiable - The environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA) is difficult to be certain about, what with our lack of time machines - don't have the ability to understand the full extent of society 500,000 years ago

Explain psychology's slow turn to realism

Slowly, psych has been warming up to the idea that representationalism theories of mind have too many problems (the homunculus problem, the problem of meaning etc) and that we may want to go direct realist point of view (enlightenment philosopher, Thomas Reid) - we are not perceiving representations of the world, we simply perceive the world.

If we are evolved creatures and cultures can be evolved as well, to what extent is our culture a result of our evolution?

Socio-biology; the New synthesis by E.O. Wilson in 1975 attempted to explain evolutionary mechanisms behind altruism, aggression, childrearing - the main principle was gene rather than the individual as the unit of selection Explains why ant societies have evolved - ultimately, a worker ant who gives most of their food to others and never reproduces does so because they are descended from ants with such genes - means that the genes they have help spread through the population even if they don't individually reproduce - helping similar genes survive even if it's not you specifically reproducing Wilson also applied this to human culture and evolution... cue controversy!

discuss opposition to the statement 'we are the robots'

Something weird about the idea that we are computer robots - The mind-as-computer metaphor has been very useful for psychology, all things said... But many strongly dislike the idea that we are robots that are nothing but computers There are several important philosophical criticisms of the whole mind-as-computer thing

The third principle of realism is...

Speakability. --> all argument rests of the possibility of discourse - in order to make an argument must be speakable, expressed linguistically as a set of premises - discourse must be coherent to say anything of meaning - we have to be able to argue about it, if we can't, it's probably not real.

How is neuroscience still cognitivist?

Still inferring mental states - Cognitive psychology vs cognitive neuroscience; where cognitive psychology infers mental states from behaviour, cognitive neuroscience infers mental states from brain imaging (in conjunction with behaviour) (e.g. EEG, fMRI, PET, MEG, etc.) Either way, we are still inferring mental states - and thus cognitive neuroscience often borrows from psych metatheory - so fundamentally cognitive neuroscience has the same assumptions as in cognitivism There is also non-cognitive neuroscience e.g. research on how synapses works - which is different - not necessarily cognitive

Explain how neuroscience is location rather than explanation

Tells you where something happens - doesn't tell you why that happens - Why does Tim have this accent? He's from Australia - For this to be an explanation of why Tim has that accent, you have to further explain what it is about Australia that plays a role in Tim having that accent - Similarly, just knowing the location of neural processing doesn't tell us that much about a cognitive ability on its own (especially with the limits of fMRI)

The major theoretical/metatheoretical group in psychology; cognitive/neuroscientific experimentalism is...

The Establishment position - the majority view, majority of psych's view this as correct - does explicitly argue that the mind is an information processing machine and this machine is neutrally implemented - the kind of psychology that has brain-body dualism - kind of follows Descartes argument even thought hundreds of years of history suggests we probably should not

Define ethnology...

The biological discipline of ethnology studies the behaviour and cultures of animals on the assumption that they are evolutionarily adaptive - those cultures of the animals have been put there by previous generations of the same species of animals Began with concepts like fixed action patterns, imprinting (of geese for example), habituation, etc. - ways animals seem to be instinctually, genetically primed to act Links with Bowlby in the Neo-Freudians Lecture or from discussion of issues with behaviourism

The fourth principle of realism is...

The non-constitutive nature of relations. --> nothing can be defined by its relations to anything else; nothing may have its relations intrinsic to it - for 2 things to be related (in any way) they must indeed be two identifiably separate things (have intrinsic properties) - Or there are no things to relate - A thing has to be made up of other things but can be one thing or two things etc.

Explain Positive psychology vs humanistic psychology

The positive psychologists claim that their work is more scientific because it is research based, in contrast to the humanistic psychologists, who claim they never developed a research tradition, are guilty of founding a cult of narcissism and are antiscientific - Taylor, 2001 E.g. positive psychologists don't want people to think they're all about yoga and shamanic counselling Cult of Narcissism = blamed for baby boomers

Explain the psychotherapeutic counter culture of humanistic psychology in the 60s and 70s

There comes a point where if you're giving up some of the ideals of science in the name of free will and so forth, it's hard to find a rigorous set of ideals that everyone agrees on as what is science; demarcation problem In the late 1960s and 70s, the original humanistic psychologists went through a series of transformations, from group leaders and individual therapists to biofeedback researchers, ethnobotanists, transpersonal therapists, yoga and meditations teachers who focus on consciousness and healing Unsurprisingly psychology faded away from this area

Explain Bennett and Hacker's (2003, 2008) brain-body Dualism

There is a big problem with brain-body dualism (obviously related to mind body dualism) - Suggesting that brains don't think - we are mistaken to think that they do Cognitive neuroscience as a whole are rife with people making this assumption that the brain does things which have the property of thinking e.g. reasoning, having opinions etc. - Use adjectives to describe the brain that should rather describe a person (not a brain). They do this, they argue, because we still think in cartesian terms even though we try not to. We try not to think in terms of the mind being a soul but instead all the stuff we had previously ascribed to a soul or ascribed to a mind which was outside deterministic reality we now kind of apply to a brain. This is a big mistake rife within cognitive neuroscience.

Thomas Kuhn's context is...

Thomas Kuhn (1922-1966) was born in Ohio, USA Received a PhD in physics in 1949 Taught a course on the history of science from 1948 at Harvard Published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions while at UC Berkeley

Popper, brought about falisificationism, this refers to...

To falsify something is to show that it's incorrect - for something to be falsifiable means that, in principle, you could show that its wrong - Popper argued that falsificationism was the main demarcation principle for science - the thing that separates science from pseudoscience is the ability to falsify it - For Popper, a theory is scientific only if it is refutable by a conceivable event. - E.g. the daily astrological charts in the paper - 'you'll meet a tall dark stranger' - are unfalsifiable, because they are vague enough that they'll probably be right in some way

Explain cognitive psychology before information processing (1956)

Unsurprisingly, since we have minds, it didn't take psychologists until 1956 to study cognition: William James in 1890 distinguished between 'primary memory' (i.e. short term) and 'secondary memory' (i.e. long term) Piaget's works looked at the cognitive abilities of children (e.g. object permanence) along Neo-Kantian lines (e.g. The Language and thought of the child, 1923) Tolman and the methodological behaviourists e.g. cognitive maps in rats The social psychologists (Festinger etc) who discussed e.g. cognitive dissonance BUT information processing gave cognitivism a justification for being scientific

What was Karl Popper's solution to the problem of induction?

We might not be able to justify knowing what's true but we DO know what's untrue - science is therefore all about trying to prove theories wrong, and seeing what remains. Where what remains might not be true but its closer to true - this is the reason for science and the thing that separates science from pseudoscience/non-scientific phenomenon - what remains might not be true, but its closer to true, the best we've got, better than the things proven untrue - can't prove a theory true but close enough

What are the objections to the Chinese room?

With a complicated enough rule book to pass the Turing Test, it devolves to being a special example of the problem of other minds (goes back to Descartes there is no You Think therefore You are; can't know that others think) - the difference between a computer and a person is meaning e.g. we can't be sure whether Chinese people understand Mandarin, or whether they are merely sophisticated biological computers following rule books.

Cognitive science...

an umbrella term for a range of disciplines that assume a cognitivist metatheory. Including (often) cognitive psychology.

What are the main classes of psychological concepts according to principle four of realism?

conative (Wishes, Desire, Drive, etc) and cognitive (beliefs, cognitions, schemas, representations, scripts, images etc.) - relational intentional nature; wishes for X, beliefs about Y, thoughts being relational, intentional, have an aboutness to them, suggests that if thoughts are relational they are not things - intentionality; thoughts have an aboutness, suggests that if thoughts are relations, it means they are not things

The fourth principle of realism, The non-constitutive nature of relations, means there is the logic of relations. what does this mean?

for entity A to have a relation to entity B, they must existentially be separate entities; B must be something in itself, not defined as solely 'in relation to A' - If A & B are the one thing - defined as solely 'in relation to A' - i.e. there is only A, then it cannot relate to B, only as a subpart (because A is defined as having B as a subpart now) - of course, if B is a sub part of A, it is not defined as A & then it can relate to B.

Cognitivism...

is a metatheory, idea of the mind as an information processing machine

The difference between pre-1956 and cognitive psychology and post-1956 cognitive psychology was...

its scientific rationale; information processing Newell & Simon (1956) provided psychology with a serious, detailed scientific rational for accepting mentalism (existence of mind outside deterministic universe) Boring (1946) wrote 'The Mind as Mechanism' - predicted this change from a behaviourist point of view - mentalism means the idea that we have a mind and this is outside the deterministic universe - anthropomorphic is the idea that thought is subjective and soulish and human

The major theoretical/metatheoretical group in psychology: Heterogenous group involves...

opposition to the establishment position - a rag tag set of different people who are united by having a metatheory in the first place but a metatheory which is not the establishment position - oppose the metatheoretical position of the establishment (realists)

the philosophy of neuroscience...

philosophy that discusses the metatheoretical issues of neuroscience - the assumptions that underlie the research - the philosophical dimensions of neuroscience

cognitive psychology...

research which infers things about the mind based on behaviour

cognitive neuroscience...

research which investigates the relationship between neurons and cognitive abilities. - the theme of this lecture - looks at thing with a cognitivist metatheory

Problems for Karl Popper included string theory, why was this a problem?

string theory in modern physics is currently unfalsifiable, but explains the data - perhaps pseudoscience just ignores falsification? Not that things are unfalsifiable but that the people behind the pseudo-science just ignore it - but... science also does that all the time

Explain direct realism as opposed to representational realism...

you perceive the world as it is, not perceived in a representation - Representational realism (realism of the establishment position) - instead of perceiving the real thing, you perceive a representation of the physical stimuli which is constructed in your head by your brain - For realism, the heart of it is that the world exists independently of mind, of our apprehension of it - This is a naïve realist position quickly abandoned by psychology