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In one version of this story that can be traced back at least to Ribot (1879),
the epistemology of the 17th and 18th centuries culminated in the work of
Kant, who denied the possibility that psychology could become an empirical
science on two grounds. First, since psychological processes vary in only one
dimension, time, they could not be described mathematically. Second, since
psychological processes are internal and subjective, Kant also asserted that
they could not be laid open to measurement. Herbart, so the tale goes,
answered the first of Kant's objections by conceiving of mental entities as
varying both in time and in intensity and showing that the change in intensity
over time could be mathematically represented. Fechner then answered the
second objection by developing psychophysical procedures that allowed the
strength of a sensation to be scaled. Wundt combined these notions, joined
them to the methods of sensory physiology and experimental phenomenology
and, in 1879, created the Leipzig laboratory.
While there is undoubted truth in the received history, like all rationalizing
reconstructions, it tends greatly to oversimplify what is an exceptionally
complex story. Within the past 20 years, as primary resource materials have
become more widely available and as larger numbers of historians have
entered the arena, the received view has been amended many times. Within
the context of this exhibit catalogue, it will not, of course, be possible to
address this complexity. The reader who is interested, however, is referred to
the Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences and to Bringmann &
Tweney (1980), Danziger (1990), Rieber (1980), and Woodward & Ash
(1982) among others.
Because so many psychologists are at least broadly familiar with the lines
of Boring's story of the rise of experimental psychology, because the story
has been so frequently retold in the many other textbook histories, and
because it is a much more complex tale that it at first appears, this section and
the two to follow will sketch only the barest outlines of the intellectual
developments that led from Locke to Kant, from Bell to Müller, and from
Fechner to Wundt. Psychologists who have not read Boring are strongly
encouraged to do so. Despite its limitations, it is still the point of origin from
which much of contemporary scholarship proceeds; and, perhaps even more
importantly, it is the history of psychology that has become part and parcel of
American psychology's view of itself.
Employing a very general notion of "idea" that incorporated a disparate set
of entities among which modern psychologists would distinguish perceptions,
mental images, and concepts, Locke concerned himself with both the certainty
of our ideas experientially attained through reflection or the inner sense and
the truth of our ideas insofar as they depend on the outer sense. After Locke,
it would be possible to emphasize either the vivid character of the ideas
transmitted by the outer sense or the intuitive certainty of the inner sense. The
former view would lead to the sensationalism of Condillac [see 30], the later
to the intuitional realism of Reid and the Scottish school of faculty psychology
[see 31]. In the 60 or more years intervening between Locke and Condillac,
however, others, most notably George Berkeley and David Hartley, also
made use of notions contained in Locke's Essay.
George Berkeley (1685-1753) was born at Kilkenny, Ireland and educated
at Trinity College, Dublin. In 1709, he published his first book, Essay
Towards a New Theory of Vision [28, see figure 29]. Although Berkeley did
not explicitly discuss his immaterialism in the New Theory, it was everywhere
implicit in his views and combined with a proto-associational view of the
importance of connections between ideas, it provided him with the basis for a
theory of the perception of distance which became a prototype for later
associationist accounts. For Berkeley, distance is not immediately perceived
by vision. Rather, when "the mind has, by constant experience, found the
different sensations corresponding to the different dispositions of the eyes to
be attended each with a different degree of distance in the object...(and) there
has grown an habitual or customary connexion between those two sorts of
ideas, ... distance ... is ... the idea ... immediately suggested to the
understanding" (parag. 17). Here, among other things, Berkeley anticipated
the "context theory" of meaning popular in associationist accounts almost two
hundred years later.
Étienne Bonnot de Condillac (1715-1780) [see figure 31] was born in
Grenoble, educated in theology at Saint-Sulpice and at the Sorbonne, and
ordained to the priesthood in 1740. Of the two sources of knowledge in
Locke, sensations transmitted through the outer sense and reflection through
the inner sense, Condillac focused exclusively on the former. His Traité des
sensations [30], published in 1754, was designed to show that external
impressions through the outer senses, taken by themselves, can account for all
ideas and all mental operations. Using the famous example of a statue
endowed with no other property than a single sense, smell, he attempted to
derive attention, memory, judgment, imagination, the whole of mental life.
Condillac's views are, clearly, the most extreme form of the tabula rasa
perspective. Like all tabula rasa views, no matter how powerful the
correlative principle of association, Condillac's extreme sensationalism runs
afoul of the obvious fact of variation (species differences, individual
differences) in biological constitution.
In the Inquiry Reid articulated the basic intuitional postulate of the
"common sense" philosophy on which the Scottish faculty psychology was to
be built. Intuitions are native tendencies to mental action, aspects of the
fundamental constitution of the human mind which regulate the conscious
experience of all human beings from birth. Because intuitions require the
presentation of appropriate objects in order to be called forth in mental action,
the Scottish philosophy is a realism. Intuitions do not project the mind into
reality, they allow the mind access to it. Although intuitionalism is a
nativism of psychological process, it is a methodological empiricism in that
inquiry into the nature and existence of natively given principles of mind takes
place by induction from observed facts in self-consciousness. It was this
view, coupled with Reid's (1785,1788) later analysis of specific faculties that
dominated 19th century academic American mental philosophy. It was also
indirectly from Reid that Gall obtained the original list of 27 powers of the
mind that guided his attempt to map the localization of function in the brain.
One such contribution, as we have already noted, was Kant's defining the
prerequisites that would need to be met for psychology to become an
empirical science. Another consisted of a bonafide psychological treatise,
Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht [32], published in 1798. Long
ignored, probably in part because of its pronounced sympathy for a soon to be
discredited physiognomy, the Anthropologie is, nonetheless, a fascinating
little book. Here Kant analyzes the nature of the cognitive powers, feelings of
pleasure and displeasure, affects, passions, and character in the context of a
denial of the possibility of an empirical science of conscious process. The
Anthropologie went through two editions during Kant's lifetime and several
later printings and helped to define the context within which not only Herbart
and Fechner but phenomenologically oriented physiologists such as Purkyne,
Weber, and Müller worked to establish the science of conscious phenomena
that Kant was unable to envision.
7. The 17th and 18th Centuries: The Epistemology of Mind
According to the received view (Boring, 1950), scientific psychology
began in Germany as a physiological psychology born of a marriage between
the philosophy of mind, on the one hand, and the experimental
phenomenology that arose within sensory physiology on the other.
Philosophical psychology, concerned with the epistemological problem of the
nature of knowing mind in relationship to the world as known, contributed
fundamental questions and explanatory constructs; sensory physiology and to
a certain extent physics contributed experimental methods and a growing
body of phenomenological facts.
Since we have already discussed Descartes and briefly touched on Leibniz,
we can pass directly to the founder of both empiricism and associationism,
John Locke (1632-1704) [see figure 28]. Locke was born in Wrington,
Somerset, England. reared in a liberal Puritan environment, and educated at
Christ's Church, Oxford. His Essay Concerning Humane Understanding
[27], dated 1690 but actually published in 1689, like much of the rest of 17th
century philosophy, is a reaction to Descartes. Unlike Spinoza, who attacked
the mind-body dichotomy metaphysically, Locke moved the discussion into
the purely psychological realm of experience, contrasting inner sense (the
mind's reflective experience of its own experience of things) with outer sense
(the mind's experience of things). While Bacon (1605) and Descartes had
both raised the question of the method suitable for attaining knowledge,
Locke, from his empiricist perspective, was the first to propose the
epistemological question of the limits of knowledge.
In the Essay on Humane Understanding, Locke had distinguished
between primary and secondary qualities. Primary qualities such as solidity
or extension are completely inseparable from the bodies in which they inhere
and are simply perceived by the senses. Secondary qualities are the powers
inherent in objects to produce sensations in the perceiver such as color, odor,
or sound. The colors, odors, and sounds, however, do not themselves inhere
in the objects. Berkeley's "immaterialism" [see section III] was simply the
notion of secondary qualities expanded to include primary qualities and taken
out of objects and placed in God.
David Hartley (1705-1757) was born at Luddenden, Halifax, England and
educated at Jesus College, Cambridge. In 1749, he published his two-volume
Observations on Man [29, see figure 30]. While the general principle of
association was in use long before Hartley and the phrase, "the association of
ideas," can be traced to the Appendix of the 4th edition of Locke's Essay, it is
with Hartley, as Young (1970) tells us, that "the association psychology first
assumed a definite form and a psychological character not wholly derived
from epistemological questions. Hartley was the first to apply the association
principle as a fundamental and exhaustive explanation of all experience and
activity ... Moreover he joined his psychological theory with postulates about
how the nervous system functions. His sensations were paralleled by
vibrations ... or 'elemental' particles in the nerves and brain ... In relating the
phenomena of sensation, ideation, and motion to the nervous system he lays
down the principles of physiological psychology which Ferrier would later
combine with the concept of cerebral localization" (p. 95-97).
In direct contrast to Condillac, Thomas Reid (1710-1796) chose to
emphasize Locke's inner sense, building on the simple notion of reflection to
develop an elaborate theory of the intuitions and faculties of the human mind
given by its fundamental constitution. Reid was born near Aberdeen and
educated at Marischal College. Initially influenced by Berkeley, his antipathy
to the implicit assumptions in Hume's Treatise of Human Nature (1739)
turned him away from both Berkeley and Hume and toward the reformation
of philosophy. His major work, An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the
Principles of Common Sense [31], was published in 1764, the year in which
he accepted appointment as Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University
of Glasgow.
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) [see figure 32] was born, lived, and died at
Königsberg, in East Prussia. It is said that in the entire course of his life, he
never traveled more than forty miles from the place of his birth. The
suggestion from Ribot that 18th century philosophy culminated in the work of
Kant was probably not an unreasonable one; although it might be an even
fairer appraisal of Kant's influence to say that 19th and 20th century
philosophy followed Kant much as the earlier philosophy had followed
Descartes. Kant's indirect influence on scientific psychology was therefore
enormous. His direct contributions, although admittedly more circumscribed,
were also of considerable importance.
Continue
Citation:
Wozniak, Robert H. "Mind and Body: Rene Déscartes to William
James"
http://serendipstudio.org/Mind/;
Bryn Mawr College, Serendip 1995
Originally published in 1992 at Bethesda, MD & Washington, DC by the National
Library of Medicine and the American Psychological Association.
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