Chapter 11

Imageless thought

Belief that there are objective meanings in experience that are not associated with specific words, symbols, or signs.

Washburn's motor theory of consciousness

as animals prepare for action, they form a representation that precedes the action that in higher level animals can include a contemplation of the possible consequences. Awareness of the self acting in a specific environment and in reference to specific goals comes out of movement.

George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's philosophical system and psychology

(1770-1831) He believed the mind manifests itself in a set of contradictions that are ultimately integrated. "Things" and ideas have internal contradictions, which are ultimately recognized leading to the destruction of the existing form and emergence of a more complex form that better integrates the contradictions. Change is a dynamic process; any feature of a dynamic system, called an affirmation or thesis, contains within it an inherent contradiction, that through the functioning of the system becomes differentiated into negation or antithesis. The integration of the two produces a system with different functional characteristics. Competing alternatives can be complementary supporting factors.

Auguste Comte

(1798-1859) Argued that the sciences differ in their degree of positivity. Comte believed the social sciences could be positivistic, just not as positivistic as the natural sciences. The sciences vary in degree of authoritativeness or positivity. The material world operates according to gravity and other quantifiable laws; society also operates according to laws, which can be studied and quantified. Personal troubles, "cerebral crisis" of 1826: Significant emotional breakdown and after that, his writing took a much stranger slant.

George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's Encyclopedia of Philosophy or Philosophy of Right

(1821) contains Hegel's political philosophy: estates within the state; the "will" of the king is necessary to make the will of the people actual. For societies to prosper, they need very strong leaders. For society to function, the strength of a leader is necessary for the will of the people to actualized (Influenced the development of fascism)

Franz Brentano

(1838-1917) Founder of a system of psychological thought known as act psychology. He emphasized a developmental and pluralistic methodology and the active, participatory, creative, and intentional characteristics of mental life. Brentano received a PhD in philosophy in 1862, and was ordained as a Catholic priest in 1864; resigned priesthood in 1873; taught at U. of Wurtzburg and U of Vienna; published Psychology from an empirical standpoint in 1874- Experience is forward looking, active, manipulative, intentional; he did not do empirical work. Brentano viewed psychology as "the science of mental phenomena." Personal difficulties because of status as ex-priest; marriage lead him to lose a position, and prevented him from being hired from other.

William James

(1842-1910) began teaching psychology at Harvard in 1875. Received MD in 1869; held positions as professor of physiology, anatomy, philosophy, psychology. Principles of Psychology 1890-Lack of knowledge about nervous system, but his ideas on memory, habit, and emotion are very modern. The Varieties of Religious Experience 1902. Both still in print.

Carl Stumpf

(1848-1936) Student of Brentano and pioneer in the psychology of music. His holistic orientation focused on meaningful mental phenomena rather than arbitrary elements of consciousness (holistic approach to musicology). Studied law, but shifted to chemistry, philosophy, psychology. worked with Brentano, Ph.D. in philosophy in 1868 under Lotze, entered the ministry but left. 1873, U. of Wurtzberg; 1894 appointed to U. of Berlin. He protested reductionism, criticized Wundt. He emphasized the holistic nature of experience. He contributed to a broad collection of research areas in psychology. Emotion, the mental life of children, perception of space.

Hermann Ebbinghaus

(1850-1909) one of the great pioneers in psychology, remembered for developing the nonsense syllable as a means of studying memory experimentally while minimizing past associations. Also developed an early form of a completion test and argued for the legitimacy of pure and applied psychology. PhD in philosophy in 1873. Read Fechner's Elements of Psychophysics, which apparently inspired his memory experiments. 1885 published Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology and was appointed to University of Berlin (lost position as chair to Stumpf). Described forgetting curves, learning curves; developed a variety of methods still in use.

Freud

(1856-1939) was developing psychoanalytic theory in Vienna during the same period. MD in 1881. Studies on Hysteria, 1895 (with Joseph Breuer). Interpretation of Dreams, 1899.

Oswald Külpe

(1862-1915) Student of Wilhelm Wundt and well-known founder of an early psychological laboratory and school of thought at Würzburg, Külpe's experiments on imageless thought challenges the simplistic characteristics of other early system. Studied with Wundt and Müller, returned to Leipzig to complete Ph.D. with Wundt in 1887. Külpe and others worked on higher mental operations. They explored imageless thought and challenged reductionistic approaches of Titchener and Wundt. Students studied mental set. Külpe took a wider view of what psychology could and should include. He argued for the study of psychogenesis.

Edward Bradford Titchener

(1867-1927) One of Wilhelm Wundt's best-known students and founder of a system of psychological thought known as structuralism. Completed his PhD in 1892. Accepted a position at Cornell. The subject matter of psychology is experience. The problem of psychology involves the questions What, How, and Why: What are the elements of experience? How do these combine? What are the causal relationships involved? Titchener was a dominant force in US psychology from the early 1880s until his death in 1927. He viewed the scope of psychology in broad terms.

Margaret Floy Washburn

(1871-1939) first woman to earn a doctorate in psychology and the second female president of the American Psychological Association. Started graduate study at Columbia as an auditor (Columbia did not admit women). Wundt published her dissertation. Washburn was heavily influenced by Darwin and early behaviorists such as Pavlov and made significant contributions to the study of comparative psychology and was well known for her "motor theory of consciousness." She argued that animal consciousness is a topic for psychology.

Edwin Boring

(1886-1968) He was Titchener's student. Undergraduate degree in engineering. Research on stomach distention as a factor in satiety. Worked on intelligence testing; very skeptical about objectivity. Boring's book History of Experimental Psychology gave a lengthy exposition of Titchener's work. First significant historian of psychology; taught at Clark and then Harvard; persuaded Harvard to separate philosophy and psychology departments.

Hegel's dialecticism would influence Freud and many other theorists

..... paradoxically Karl Marx and the philosophers of fascism. - Being in itself becomes nothing, then becomes a higher form of itself

Introspection

A species of observation, but the subject to be observed is in experience itself. Thus, introspection is a kind of "looking in" to identify elements of experience and the way these elements combine, or the processes and adaptations of experience. Titchener specified introspection as the primary method of human psychology. He started with investigation of elementary mental processes, primarily study of the senses. Sensations are the elements of perceptions. Images are elements of ideas, memory, & thought. Affections are elements of emotion.

Structuralism

A system of psychological thought associated primarily with Edward Bradford Titchener, who attempted to model psychology after the more mature sciences, especially chemistry. This employed the method of introspection to search for the elements of consciousness and the rules by which elements combine.

Washburn's The Animal Mind

A textbook of comparative psychology, 1908, that discussed behavior of over 100 species of animals; dominant text in comparative psych. The similarity of neuroanatomy of humans and animals argued for consciousness. She was influenced by phylogenetic contiguity. Thought can be traced to movement, planned and inhibited by the presence of objects or competing movement tendencies.

James-Lange theory of emotion

A theory of emotion advanced by William James and Carl Lange. The theory emphasizes the somatic substrate of emotional experiences and argues that the experience of emotion is the experience of the activity of the body—thus, the famous statement: We see a bear, we run, and we are afraid. James' later vision of emotion emphasizes constitutional determinants and the impossibility of separating cognition and emotion. Basically, we react to environmental stimuli with patterns of physiological arousal → Sensing the arousal, we feel emotions and in later iterations, he adds a cognitive appraisal.

Desire

According to Brentano, a way of being conscious of an object marked by attraction or repulsion.

Judgement

According to Brentano, consciousness of an object marked by belief or disbelief

Presentation

According to Brentano, consciousness of an objects marked by simple awareness of the presence of the object.

Affect (affection)

According to Titchener's early theory, affections are the elementary mental processes associated with emotions. Later, he viewed affections primarily a sensations of pleasantness or unpleasantness. Sensations and images all have attributes of quality, intensity, clearness, and duration. Affections only have quality, intensity and duration.

Attributes of elementary mental processes

According to Titchener, elementary processes such as sensations include four attributes: quality, intensity, clearness, and duration.

Context theory of meaning

According to Titchener, meaning depends on context or the association of a stimulus with other relevant surrounding stimuli. Meaning is context, a function of laws of attention in combination with laws of the connection of sensations, plus images that result from memories of previous encounters with the aggregate of sensations. In distinction, consider the Gestalt view of object segregation.

Primary attention

According to Titchener, this is involuntary and typically activated by a sudden or strong stimulus.

Secondary attention

According to Titchener, this is learned and persists under difficult conditions (e.g., staying alert wile studying even under noisy circumstance)

System

An organized way of envisioning the world or some aspect of the world. Psychological systems include: definitions of the domain, major terms and concepts, assumptions about major issues, prescriptions about acceptable methodologies, and specifications of the subject mater. Scientific and philosophical systems may be open or closed to new sources of information, may differ in views of time, and may vary along the conservative-liveral continuum.

Titchener's Psychophysical parallelism

Argues that the mental and physical worlds are two aspects of the same world, really more like predicate dualism, aka, monism. Titchener differentiated between primary attention (involuntary) and secondary attention (voluntary); secondary attention may revert to primary attention. Titchener studied association (like that of the British empiricists) and emphasized association by contiguity (closeness in time or space), he argued for the study of the physiology of association (technology had not been invented yet), and he took an associationist approach to meaning in context.

Comte's Course in Positive Philosophy

Attempts to provide a foundation for "social physics" (a term also used by Quetelet). Attempts to coordinate all positive knowledge from the physical sciences (mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry), biology, and the emerging social sciences. The law of three stages: humanity passes through stages: theological, metaphysical, and positive, as the human mind searches for causes of phenomena.

Mental Set

Predisposition to respond in a given manner or tendency to organize an event in terms of an existing bias.

Brentano's practical psychology

Distinguished between genetic psychology (third person observation and experimentation) and descriptive (introspective or empirical) psychology. Diagnosis of attitudes, methods of changing attitudes. Brentano differentiated between inner observation (not really possible) and inner perception (retrospective consideration of the immediate past and the flow of events). Mental phenomena are always acts: intentional, complex; physical phenomena are facts in consciousness that we are aware of- saw mental activity as chosen, goal-oriented, complex; rejected any skepticism about the existence of the external world—argued we are aware of the world in consciousness and that awareness if generally veridical.

Positivism

Extremely influential during the 19th Century. Positive method varies by field of science. Science never achieves truth, but approximations of it. Comte would not have viewed "introspection" as a form of observation (but its practitioners saw them as an extension of positivism). Influences on behaviorism and the idea of "operational definitions" are clear.

Titchener argued against the James-Lange theory of emotion

He suggested that some inborn tendencies are automatically laden with affect. He argued that affect is also affected by environmental context and organic conditions. For him, sentiments are more complex than emotions. Sentiments may include discrimination, critical functions, and other factors (e.g., patriotism is a sentiment, not one that can be described as having purely positive valence, depending on the context). Sentiments are derived from emotions but involve higher order thinkings. Titchener distinguished between emotion (more complex) and affect (hedonic). Affect may be nothing more than sensations of pleasantness or unpleasantness.

Wundt's System

Investigated consciousness in humans, investigated physiological and the function of the nervous system, used multiple research methods, and saw domains of psychology as broader than the domains he worked in.

Retroactive inhibition

Learning a second task interfered with performance on a previously learned task.

Brentano and the unity of experience

Parts of experience cohere: we can perceive a number of physical things simultaneously, but experience only one mental phenomenon at a time (wine, music, sunset)-not multiple experiences. The self is the reality that incorporates and integrates other realities. We have no unconscious mental phenomena, but mental phenomena may be of very low intensity. Brentano's influence comes through his system but also through his teaching. His teaching influenced Freud, figures in Gestalt Psychology, William James and many others; his idea that mental activity is active, chosen and future oriented and not automatic influences James' work.

Brentano developed a classification system for mental phenomena

Phenomena were viewed as part of three intertwined categories: Presentations: an event or presence in experience; can be the result of sensory input and perception or purely mental events. Judgments: belief or disbelief in a presentation; purely mental events Desires: our attraction to or repulsion from the presentation; our reaction

George Elias Müller

Prominent German psychologist remembered for his work in psychophysics, memory, learning, and vision. Ph.D. under Lotze in 1873; replaced Lotze at U. of Gottingen. Numerous early psychologists studied with Müller at the University of Göttingen. He was the first to use the term retroactive inhibition. Studied perseveration; individual differences. Identified multiple variables affecting task performance: learning, mental set, perseveration

Stumpf debunked several odd-ball claims

Such as: Device to convert photographs of sound waves into sound. Clever Hans, the horse who could do arithmetic (his student, Oskar Pfungst, conducted the demonstrations).

Comte's thinking changed after the death of a lover

System of Positive Polity, subtitled Treatise on Sociology Instituting the Religion of Humanity argues for social revolution where women and the proletariat would be the vanguard and beneficiaries of positive society. Objected to colonialism, slavery, imperialism. The brain is the organ through which dead people act on living ones; humanity consists more of dead than living people; worship is worship of "great men" of history and is what is appropriate for society.

Psychogenesis

The study of the development of mental phenomena.

Wundt's Contemporaries

Wundt's contemporaries focused on a variety of basic research questions-Methods, focus, etc. Psychological issues reflected philosophical issues-gradually differentiating itself from its roots; empirical philosophy rather than speculative or rational. They encouraged interest in applied psychology: studies of development, education, task performance.

Element

an abstraction referring to a simple irreducible sensation

Ebbinghaus forgetting curve

a curve demonstrating that forgetting of nonsense material is rapid immediately after learning. After an initial rapid decline, the rate of forgetting slows down.

Act Psychology

a system of psychological thought advanced by Franz Brentano emphasizing the forward-looking, intentional, playful character of experience. Brentano strongly rejected the simplistic characteristics of many of the early systems of psychological thought

Positive knowledge

based on observation, the objective and mathematical treatment of data derived from observation

Authoritative knowledge

derived from sensory experience and logical and mathematical treatment of such observations

George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit

discusses the nature of consciousness, the development of self-consciousness (seeing one's self as an object in the consciousness of others who are also self-conscious); cultural artifacts as a mirror for societal self-consciousness

George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's Philosophy of history

sees teleology unfolding; importance of powerful great men