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HS-02-PhilosophyContextweek1.pptxContemporary Issues: Historical Framework of Contemporary Psychology
Unit 2
The Philosophical Context
Psychology has a long past, yet its real history is short. For thousands of years it has existed and has been growing older; but in the earlier part of this period it cannot boast of any continuous progress toward a riper and richer development. In the fourth century before our era that giant thinker, Aristotle, built it up into an edifice comparing very favorably with any other science of that time. But this edifice stood without undergoing any noteworthy changes or extensions, well into the eighteenth or even the nineteenth century. Only in recent times do we find an advance, at first slow but later increasing in rapidity, in the development of psychology.
Ebbinghaus (1908)
A Long Past
Psyche
part of human that dwells with the gods
Psychology long past
Issues have long history in Philosophy
e.g., nature-nurture
e.g., how we acquire our knowledge of the world
epistemology
Psychology brief history
Psychology relatively new as a discipline when Ebbinghaus was writing in 1908
Wundt’s lab at Leipzig was only 29 years old
The APA was only 16 years old
A Long Past – Brief Hx
René Descartes (1596-1650) The Beginnings of Modern Science
French mathematician, scientist and philosopher
Educated in scholastic tradition at Jesuit College of La Flèche
Scholastic Aristotelian tradition based on final causal explanations
Renaissance skepticism
Religious crisis in Europe (questioning Church authority)
New Copernican system (heliocentric)
Sun, not earth is the center of the universe
D’s contemporaries Bacon (induction), Galileo
Bacon: Novum Organum (1620) – New Tool - a rethinking of Aristotle's Organum
Rationalist: Cogito ergo sum
"I am thinking therefore I exist.” (Discourse on Method )
Only certainty could serve as a basis for knowledge, and that he himself had a method for attaining such certainty.
Descartes: Discourse on Method
Discourse on Method – 1637 – four basic rules
Systematic doubt
Analysis – problems into subproblems
Synthesis – from simplicity to complexity
Check your work
Good presentism lesson here – revolutionary ideas at the time
Think for yourself – question authority
French commemorated the book’s
300th anniversary with a stamp in 1937
Descartes as a Nativist
Innate ideas vs. Derived ideas
Mind is born with ideas/knowledge
mind is not a 'blank slate' at birth, as later empiricists such as John Locke claimed.
not all knowledge is gained from experience and the senses
e.g., knowledge of God is innate in everybody as a product of the faculty of faith.
Leibniz (1646-1716) suggested that we are born with mathematical truisms - "necessary truths".
Descartes as a Dualist
a substance dualist
Mind and body as separate substances/essences
Body: spatially extended
Mind: it thinks (not spatially extended)
Cartesian dichotomy
Animals: mechanical bodies (no minds)
Humans: mechanical bodies + nonmaterial minds
Q: how can mind stuff influence body stuff
Reflexes & Mind-Body Interactions
Animals spirits and “filaments”
mechanical movements
Pineal gland as locus of mind-body interaction
The British Empiricist
Epistemology: nature & origins of knowledge
John Locke (1632-1704)
Key point all knowledge derives from experience
Tabula Rasa: blank slate
Sensation and reflection as primary processes
They “write on the slate”
Rejected innate ideas
The British Empiricist
Nature of reality: 10 vs. 2nd qualities of matter
Primary qualities: Objective properties of objects that are independent of any observer
such as solidity, extension, motion, number and figure
Secondary qualities: Subjective sensations in observers
such as color, taste, smell, and sound
"Associationist School”
Atomistic organizational structure for the mind
Complex ideas built from simple ideas
developed very specific principles elaborating how associations were developed & worked
Anticipated principles of conditioning & behaviorism
Ideas on education derived from empiricist philosophy
“shaping” children by controlling their experiences
George Berkeley (1685-1753)
Bishop, Church of Ireland
Subjective Idealism (orig. called immaterialism)
Denied distinction between primary & secondary qualities
Locke: all knowledge comes from experience
Thus: objects like tables and chairs are only ideas in the minds of perceivers (immaterial)
as a result, cannot exist without being perceived.
God (“permanent perceiver”)
An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision (1709) Applied empiricist ideas to visual perception
David Hartley (1705-1757)
Doctrine of Associations
“The course of reminiscence and of the thoughts generally, when not immediately dependent upon external sensation, is accounted for by the idea that there are always vibrations in the brain … determined by each man's past experience, and by the circumstances of the moment…”
Psychophysical parallelism
Rules of association reduce to Temporal & Spatial Contiguity
David Hume (1711-1776)
No innate ideas
desire not reason governed human behavior
Associationism (Impressions and Ideas)
Rules of association
Resemblance
Contiguity
Cause and effect
Causality as predictable regularity
A Treatise of Human Nature (1739)
humans have no actual conception of the self, only of a bundle of sensations associated with the self.
‘Treatise’ has been called "the founding document of cognitive science” by Jerry Fodor
John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)
Most extreme version of empiricism
Not many defenders.
Raised in true empiricist principles (re Hume)
Educated by father, James Mill, philosopher, economist and senior official in the East India Company
Jeremy Bentham (utilitarianism)
Francis Place (social justice)
Knowledge of external world is Phenomenological
things are merely permanent possibilities of sensation
No place for knowledge based on relations of ideas
logical and mathematical necessity is psychological
we are merely unable to conceive any other possibilities
Key Contribution: Scientific Method
Mill & Scientific Method
Mill: Causal Relations (Inductive Logic)
Question: Does Eating X cause indigestion?
Method of agreement (if X, then Y)
All 8 ate coleslaw - "Eating coleslaw caused the indigestion.”
Method of difference (if not X, then not Y)
All ate same things except for 1 who also ate coleslaw – this 1 got sick
Joint method (combines agreement and difference)
4 sick (group Exp) & 4 not (group Control)
ate in pairs, E had coleslaw, C didn’t
Analogous to modern experimental & control groups
Method of concomitant variation
Degree of correlation between X and Y
5 students various degree of illness & various degree of coleslaw consumption (from none to a double helping)
Modern correlational logic
Rationalist Responses to Empiricism
Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716)
New Essays on Human Understanding
“there is nothing in the understanding which has not come from the senses, except the understanding itself, or the one who understands
Replaced Locke’s white paper metaphor with “veined marble”
“if veins marked out the shape of Hercules, then the block of marble would be more determined toward that shape, although it will still take some work to make the statue
i.e., inclinations, potentialities, dispositions, or habits
Gottfried Leibniz: Monads
Monad: simple, immaterial, mind-like substances that perceives the world around them
Some are aware of what they perceive (i.e., possess sensation or consciousness) – souls
Fewer are capable of self-consciousness and rational perceptions – minds
2 basic types of mental states:
Perceptions/Petite Perception: internal representations of the world
Apperception: reflective knowledge of the internal state of perception
Note: Consciousness is a higher order perceptual process (must perceive the perception)
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
a priori knowledge (from the beginning)
knowledge that is independent of sense-perception
Critique of Pure Reason
a priori knowledge: that knowledge which is independent of all experience & structures it
Space, Time, Causality
No direct, objective observation of the mind
objects of experience are mere "appearances”
the nature of things as they are in themselves is consequently unknowable to us
No chance for psychology to be a true science
Rationalist Responses to Empiricism
