PSY 362 History of Psy

Secondary laws

According to J. S. Mill, the laws that interact with primary laws and determine the nature of individual events under specific circumstances.

Primary laws

According to J.S.Mill,the general laws that determine the overall behavior of events within a system.

Categorical imperative

According to Kant, the moral directive that we should always act in such a way that the maxims governing our moral decisions could be used as a guide for everyone else's moral behavior.

Petites perceptions

According to Leibniz, a percep- tion that occurs below the level of awareness because only a few monads are involved.

Monads

According to Leibniz, the indivisible units that compose everything in the universe. All are characterized by consciousness, but some more so than others. Inert matter possesses only dim consciousness, and then with increased ability to think clearly come plants, animals, humans, and, finally, God. The goal of each is to think as clearly as it is capable of doing. Because humans share this with matter, plants, and animals, sometimes our thoughts are less than clear.

Quality

According to Locke, that aspect of a physical object that has the power to produce an idea.

Reflection

According to Locke, the ability to use the powers of the mind to creatively rearrange ideas derived from sensory experience.

Apperception

Conscious experience.

Malebranche, Nicolas de (1638-1715)

Contended that the mind and body were separate but that God coordinated their activities.

Ficino, Marsilio (1433-1499)

Founded a Platonic academy in 1462 and sought to do for Plato's philosophy what the Scholastics had done for Aristotle's.

Antisthenes (ca. 445-365 B.C.)

Founder of Cynicism.

Epicurus of Samos (ca. 341-270 B.C.)

Founder of Epicureanism.

Mach, Ernst (1838-1916)

Proposed a brand of posi- tivism based on the phenomenological experiences of scientists. Because scientists, or anyone else, never expe- rience the physical world directly, the scientist's job is to precisely describe the relationships among mental phe- nomena, and to do so without the aid of metaphysical speculation.

Interactionism

The version of dualism that accepts the separate existence of a mind and a body and claims that they interact.

Psychic mechanics

The term used by Herbart to describe how ideas struggle with each other to gain conscious expression.

Heliocentric theory

The theory, proposed by Coper- nicus, that the planets, including the earth, rotate around the sun.

Lombard, Peter (ca. 1095-1160)

Insisted that God could be known through faith, reason, or the study of his work in nature.

Geocentric theory .

The theory, proposed by Ptolemy, that the sun and planets rotate around the earth

Law of resemblance

According to Hume, the ten- dency for our thoughts to run from one event to similar events, the same as what others call the law, or principle, of similarity.

Averroe ̈s (1126-1198)

A Muslim physician and phi- losopher, who, among other things, wrote commentaries on Aristotle's work on the senses, memory, sleep and waking, and dreams.

Avicenna (980-1037)

A Muslim physician and philos- opher whose translations of, and commentaries on, the works of Aristotle strongly influenced subsequent Western philosophers.

Petrarch, Francesco (1304-1374)

A Renaissance humanist referred to by many historians as the father of the Renaissance. He attacked Scholasticism as stifling the human spirit and urged that the classics be studied not for their religious implications but because they were the works of unique human beings. He insisted that God had given humans their vast potential so that it could be utilized. views about human potential helped stimulate the many artistic and literary achievements that characterized the Renaissance.

Erasmus, Desiderius (1466-1536)

A Renaissance humanist who opposed fanaticism, religious ritual, and superstition. He argued in favor of human free will.

Ptolemaic system

A conception of the solar system that has the earth as its center. During the Middle Ages, it was widely accepted because it (1) agreed with everyday experience; (2) was able to predict and account for all astronomical phenomena known at the time; (3) gave humans a central place in the universe; and thus agreed with the biblical account of creation

Bonaventure, St. (ca. 1217-1274)

A contemporary of St. Thomas Aquinas who argued that Christianity should remain Augustinian and should reject any effort to assimilate Aristotelian philosophy into church dogma.

Idea

A mental event that lingers after impressions or sensations have ceased.

Active mind

A mind equipped with categories or operations that are used to analyze, organize, or modify sensory information and to discover abstract concepts or principles not contained within sensory experience. The rationalists postulated it

Passive mind

A mind whose contents are determined by sensory experience. It contains a few mechanistic principles that organize, store, and generalize sensory experiences. The British empiricists and the French sen- sationalists tended to postulate it

Jesus (ca. 6 B.C.-A.D. 30)

A simple, sensitive man who St. Paul and others claimed was the Messiah. Those who believe Jesus to be the son of God are called Christians.

Humanism

A viewpoint that existed during the Renaissance. It emphasized four themes: individualism, a personal relationship with God, interest in classical wis- dom, and a negative attitude toward Aristotle's philosophy.

Conceptualism

Abelard's proposed solution to the realism-nominalism debate. Abelard argued that concepts do not have independent existence (realism), but that, being abstractions, they are more than mere names (nominalism).

Bruno, Giordano (1548-1600)

Accepted the mystical non-Christian philosophy of Hermetism and Copernicus's heliocentric theory because he mistakenly believed that it supported Hermetism. He was burned at the stake for his beliefs.

Spontaneous activity

According to Bain, behavior that is simply emitted by an organism rather than being elicited by external stimulation.

Law of compound association

According to Bain, contiguous or similar events form compound ideas and are remembered together. If one or a few elements of the compound idea are experienced, they may elicit the memory of the entire compound.

Law of constructive association

According to Bain, the mind can rearrange the memories of various experi- ences so that the creative associations formed are different from the experiences that gave rise to the associations.

Voluntary behavior

According to Bain, under some circumstances, an organism's spontaneous activity leads to pleasurable consequences. After several such occurrences, the organism will come to engage in the behavior that was originally spontaneous

Vibratiuncles

According to Hartley, the vibrations that linger in the brain after the initial vibrations caused by external stimulation cease.

Dialectic process

According to Hegel, the process involving an original idea, the negation of the original idea, and a synthesis of the original idea and its negation. The synthesis then becomes the starting point (the idea) of the next cycle of the developmental process.

The Absolute

According to Hegel, the totality of the universe. constitutes the only true knowledge, and separate aspects of the universe can be understood only in terms of their relationship to this. Through the dialectic process, human history and the human intellect progress toward it

Apperceptive mass

According to Herbart, the cluster of interrelated ideas of which we are conscious at any given moment.

Law of cause and effect

According to Hume, if in our experience one event always precedes the occurrence of another event, we tend to believe that the former event is the cause of the latter.

Imagination

According to Hume, the power of the mind to arrange and rearrange ideas into countless configurations.

Impressions

According to Hume, the relatively strong mental experiences caused by sensory stimulation. For Hume, it is essentially the same thing as what others called sensation.

Dogmatist

According to the Skeptics, any person claiming to have arrived at an indisputable truth.

Augustine, St. (354-430)

After having demonstrated the validity of inner, subjective experience, said that one can know God through introspection as well as through the revealed truth of the scriptures. also wrote extensively on human free will.

Hume, David (1711-1776)

Agreed with Berkeley that we could experience only our own subjective reality but disagreed with Berkeley's contention that we could assume that our perceptions accurately reflect the physi- cal world because God would not deceive us. For him, we can be sure of nothing. Even the notion of cause and effect, which is so important to Newtonian physics, is nothing more than a habit of thought. distin- guished between impressions, which are vivid, and ideas, which are faint copies of impressions.

La Mettrie, Julien de (1709-1751)

Believed humans were machines that differed from other animals only in complexity. believed that so-called mental experiences are nothing but movements of particles in the brain. He also believed that accepting materialism would result in a better, more humane world.

Locke, John (1632-1704)

An empiricist who denied the existence of innate ideas but who assumed many nativistically determined powers of the mind. distinguished between primary qualities, which cause sensations that correspond to actual attributes of physical bodies, and secondary qualities, which cause sensations that have no counterparts in the physical world. The types of ideas postulated included those caused by sensory stimulation, those caused by reflection, simple ideas, and complex ideas, which were composites of simple ideas.

Anselm, St. (ca. 1033-1109)

Argued that sense per- ception and rational powers should supplement faith. (See also Ontological argument for the existence of God.)

Copernicus, Nicolaus (1473-1543)

Argued that the earth rotated around the sun and therefore the earth was not the center of the solar system and the universe as the church had maintained.

Primary qualities

Attributes of physical objects: for example, size, shape, number, position, and movement or rest.

Idols of the tribe

Bacon's term for biases that result from human's natural tendency to view the world selectively.

Idols of the marketplace

Bacon's term for error that results when one accepts the traditional meanings of the words used to describe things.

Idols of the cave

Bacon's term for personal biases that result from one's personal characteristics or experiences.

Idols of the theater

Bacon's term for the inhibition of objective inquiry that results when one accepts dogma, tradition, or authority.

Kant, Immanuel (1724-1804)

Believed that experi- ences such as those of unity, causation, time, and space could not be derived from sensory experience and therefore must be attributable to innate categories of thought. He also believed that morality is, or should be, governed by the categorical imperative. He did not believe psychology could become a science because subjective experience could not be quantified mathematically.

Descartes, Rene (1596-1650)

Believed that much human behavior can be explained in mechanical terms, that the mind and the body are separate but interacting entities, and that the mind contains innate ideas. With him began comparative-physiological psychology, stimulus-response psychology, phenomenology, and a debate over whether innate ideas exist. also focused attention on the nature of the relationship between the mind and the body.

Hobbes, Thomas (1588-1679)

Believed that the pri- mary motive in human behavior is the seeking of plea- sure and the avoidance of pain. For him, the function of government is to satisfy as many human needs as possible and to prevent humans from fighting with each other. believed that all human activity, including mental activity, could be reduced to atoms in motion; therefore, he was a materialist.

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von (1646-1716)

Believed that the universe consists of indivisible units called monads. God had created the arrangement of the mon- ads, and therefore this was the best of all possible worlds. If only a few minute monads were experienced, petite perceptions resulted, which were unconscious. If enough minute monads were experienced at the same time, apperception occurred, which was a conscious experi- ence. (See also Petites perceptions.

Reid, Thomas (1710-1796)

Believed that we could trust our sensory impressions to accurately reflect physical reality because it makes common sense to do so. attributed several rational faculties to the mind and was therefore a faculty psychologist.

Kepler, Johannes (1571-1630)

By observation and mathematical deduction, determined the elliptical paths of the planets around the sun. also did pioneer work in optics.

Mill, John Stuart (1806-1873)

Disagreed that all complex ideas could be reduced to simple ideas. proposed a process of mental chemistry according to which complex ideas could be distinctly different from the simple ideas (elements) that constituted them. believed strongly that a sci- ence of human nature could be and should be developed

Helvétius, Claude-Adrien (1715-1771)

Elaborated the implications of empiricism and sensationalism for education. That is, a person's intellectual development can be determined by controlling his or her experiences.

Aquinas, St. Thomas (1225-1274)

Epitomized Scholasticism. He sought to "Christianize" the works of Aristotle and to show that both faith and reason lead to the truth of God's existence.

Spinoza, Baruch (1632-1677)

Equated God with nature and said that everything in nature, including humans, consisted of both matter and consciousness. proposed solution to the mind-body problem is called double aspectism. The most pleasurable life is one lived in accordance with the laws of nature. Emotional experience is desirable because it is controlled by reason; passionate experience is undesirable because it is not. deterministic view of human cognition, activity, and emotion did much to facilitate the development of scientific psychology

Newton, Isaac (1642-1727)

Extended the work of Galileo by showing that the motion of all objects in the universe could be explained by his law of gravitation. Although he believed in God, he believed that God's will could not be evoked as an explanation of any physical phenomenon. viewed the universe as a complex machine that God had created, set in motion, and then abandoned.

Limen

For Leibniz and Herbart, the border between the conscious and the unconscious mind. Also called threshold.

Innate ideas

Ideas, like perfection and the axioms of geometry, that Descartes believed could not be derived from one's own experience. Such ideas, according to Descartes, were placed in the mind by God.

Intuition

In Descartes's philosophy, the introspective process by which clear and distinct ideas are discovered.

Maimonides (1135-1204)

Jewish physician and philosopher who attempted to reconcile Aristotelian philosophy and Judaism

Anthropology

Kant's proposed study of human behavior. Such a study could yield practical information that could be used to predict and control behavior.

Preestablished harmony

Leibniz's contention that God had created the monads composing the universe in such a way that thid existed among them. This explained why mental and bodily events were coordinated.

Law of continuity

Leibniz's contention that there are no major gaps or leaps in nature. Rather, all differences in nature are characterized by small gradations.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1770-1831)

Like Spinoza, believed the universe to be an interrelated unity. He called this unity the Absolute, and he thought that human history and the human intellect progress via the dialectic process toward the Absolute. (See also The Absolute.)

Diogenes (ca. 412-323 B.C.)

Like his mentor Antisthenes, advocated natural impulse as the proper guide for action instead of social convention.

Montaigne, Michel de (1533-1592)

Like the earlier Greek and Roman Skeptics, believed there was no objective way of distinguishing among various claims of truth. His doubts concerning human knowledge stimu- lated a number of subsequent thinkers such as Bacon and Descartes.

Herbart, Johann Friedrich (1776-1841)

Likened ideas to Leibniz's monads by saying that they had energy and a consciousness of their own. Also, according to him, ideas strive for consciousness. Those ideas compatible with a person's apperceptive mass are given conscious expression, whereas those that are not remain below the limen in the unconscious mind. is considered to be one of the first mathematical and edu- cational psychologists.

Paradox of the basins

Locke's observation that warm water will feel either hot or cold depending on whether a hand is first placed in hot water or cold water. Because water cannot be hot and cold at the same time, tem- perature must be a secondary, not a primary, quality.

Magnus, St. Albertus (ca. 1200-1280)

Made a comprehensive review of Aristotle's work. Following Aristotle's suggestion, he also made careful, direct observations of nature.

Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de (1714-1780)

Main- tained that all human mental attributes could be explained using only the concept of sensation and that it was therefore unnecessary to postulate an autonomous mind.

Mill, James (1773-1836)

Maintained that all mental events consisted of sensations and ideas (copies of sensa- tions) held together by association. No matter how complex an idea was felt that it could be reduced to simple ideas.

Pico, Giovanni (1463-1494)

Maintained that humans, unlike angels and animals, are capable of changing themselves and the world. He believed that all philo- sophical positions should be respected and the common elements among them sought.

Abelard, Peter (1079-1142)

One of the first Western philosopher-theologians to emphasize the works of Aristotle.

Dualist

One who believes that a person consists of two separate entities: a mind, which accounts for one's mental experiences and rationality, and a body, which functions according to the same biological and mechanical princi- ples as do the bodies of nonhuman animals.

Constantine (ca. 272-337)

Roman Emperor whose Edict of Milan in 313 made Christianity a tolerated religion within the Roman Empire. Under leadership, widely diverse Christian writings and beliefs were formalized, thus facilitating the widespread acceptance of Christianity.

Berkeley, George (1685-1753)

Said that the only thing we experience directly is our own perceptions, or secondary qualities. offered an empirical explanation of the perception of distance, saying that we learn to associate the sensations caused by the conver- gence and divergence of the eyes with different distances. denied materialism, saying instead that reality exists because God perceives it. We can trust our senses to reflect God's perceptions because God would not create a sensory system that would deceive us.

Bentham, Jeremy (1748-1832)

Said that the seeking of pleasure and the avoidance of pain governed most human behavior. also said that the best society was one that did the greatest good for the greatest number of people.

Gassendi, Pierre (1592-1655)

Saw humans as nothing but complex, physical machines, and he saw no need to assume a nonphysical mind. had much in common with Hobbes.

Bacon, Francis (1561-1626)

Urged an inductive, practical science that was free from the misconceptions of the past and from any theoretical influences.

GalileoGalileo (1564-1642)

Showed several of Aristotle's "truths" to be false and, by using a telescope, extended the known number of bodies in the solar system to 11. argued that science could deal only with objec- tive reality and that because human perceptions were subjective, they were outside the realm of science.

Aristarchus of Samos (ca. 310-230 B.C.)

Sometimes called the Copernicus of antiquity, speculated that the planets, including the earth, rotate around the sun and that the earth rotates on its own axis, and he did so almost 1,700 years before Copernicus.

Double aspectism

Spinoza's contention that material substance and consciousness are two inseparable aspects of everything in the universe, including humans.

Ptolemy (fl. second century A.D.)

The Greco- Egyptian astronomer whose synthesis of earlier and contemporary astronomical works came to be called the

Scientism

The almost religious belief that science can answer all questions and solve all problems.

Reformation

The attempt of Luther and others to reform the Christian church by making it more Augustinian in character. This effort resulted in the division of western European Christianity into Protestantism and Roman Catholicism.

Pantheism

The belief that God is present everywhere and in everything.

Deism

The belief that God's creation of the universe exhausted his involvement with it.

Empiricism

The belief that all knowledge is derived from experience, especially sensory experience.

Occasionalism

The belief that bodily events and mental events are coordinated by God's intervention.

Positivism

The belief that only those objects or events that can be experienced directly should be the object of scientific inquiry. actively avoids meta- physical speculation.

Direct realism

The belief that sensory experience represents physical reality exactly as it is.

Cynicism

The belief that the best life is one lived close to nature and away from the rules and regulations of society.

Epicureanism

The belief that the best life is one of long-term pleasure resulting from moderation.

Utilitarianism

The belief that the best society or gov- ernment is one that provides the greatest good (happi- ness) for the greatest number of individuals. Jeremy Bentham, James Mill, and John Stuart Mill were all this

Hedonism

The belief that the good life consists of seeking pleasure and avoiding pain.

Faculty psychology

The belief that the mind consists of several powers

Associationism

The belief that this provides the fundamental principles by which all mental phenomena can be explained.

Psychophysical parallelism

The contention that bodily and mental events are correlated but that there is no interaction between them.

Positivism

The contention that science should study only that which can be directly experienced. For Comte, that was publicly observed events or overt behavior. For Mach, it was the sensations of the scientist.

Introspection

The examination of one's inner experiences.

Comte, Auguste (1798-1857)

The founder of posi- tivism and coiner of the term sociology. He felt that cul- tures passed through three stages in the way they explained phenomena: the theological, the metaphysical, and the scientific.

Simple ideas

The mental remnants of sensations.

Deduction

The method of reasoning by which con- clusions must follow from certain assumptions, principles, or concepts. If its assumed that everything in nature exists for a purpose, then one can conclude that humans, too, exist for a purpose. proceeds from the general to the particular

Induction

The method of reasoning that moves from the particular to the general. After a large number of individual instances are observed, a theme or principle common to all of them might be inferred. A different reasoning starts with some assumption, whereas this reasoning does not. This reasoning proceeds from the particular to the general.

Internal sense

The moral right that individuals use in evaluating their behavior and thoughts. Postulated by St. Augustine.

Renaissance

The period from about 1450 to about 1600 when there was a rebirth of the open, objective inquiry that had characterized the early Greek philosophers.

Rationalism

The philosophical position postulating an active mind that transforms sensory information and is capable of understanding abstract principles or concepts not attainable from sensory information alone.

Commonsense philosophy

The position, first pro- posed by Reid, that we can assume the existence of the physical world and of human reasoning powers

Mental chemistry

The process by which individual sensations can combine to form a new sensation that is different from any of the individual sensations that con- stitute it.

Protestantism

The religious movement that denied the authority of the pope and of Aristotle. It argued against church hierarchy and ritual and instead wanted a simple, deeply personal, and introspective religion like that described by St. Paul and St. Augustine.

Sensation

The rudimentary mental experience that results from the stimulation of one or more sense receptors.

Animal spirits

The substance Descartes (and others) thought was located in the cavities of the brain. When this substance moved via the nerves from the brain to the muscles, the muscles swelled and behavior was instigated.

Dialectic method

The technique used by Abelard in seeking truth. Questions are raised, and several possible answers to those questions are explored.

Secondary qualities

Those apparent attributes of physical objects that in fact exist only in the mind of the perceiver—for example, the experiences of color, sound, odor, temperature, and taste. Without a perceiver, these phenomena would

Categories of thought

Those innate attributes of the mind that Kant postulated to explain subjective experi- ences we have that cannot be explained in terms of sensory experience alone—for example, the experiences of time, causality, and space.

Luther, Martin (1483-1546)

Was especially disturbed by corruption within the church and by the church's emphasis on ritual. He believed that a major reason for the church's downfall was its embracing of Aristotle's philosophy, and he urged a return to the personal religion that Augustine had described. He accepted Augustine's concept of predestination but denied human free will. His attack of the established church contributed to the Reformation, which divided Europe into warring camps.