Historical and conceptual issues in psychology, by Brysbaert, M and Rastle, K (second edition) - a summary
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Foundation of Psychology
Chapter 3
Eighteenth- and nineteenth- century precursors to a scientific psychology
A characteristic of current Western society is that people derive their self-image and self-esteem from their own qualities and accomplishments rather than from the position of their family in society.
Individualisation: trend in a society towards looser social relations and a greater focus by individuals on themselves than on the groups they belong to.
Historians believe that this process of individualisation started sometime around the end of the Middle Ages and is still growing.
Following factors are contributions:
Interim summary
Since the end of the middle ages there has been increasing individualisation in society. Factors hypothesised to play a role include:
Descartes was the first Western philosopher after the Ancient Greeks to value new and independent thinking.
Epistemology: branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of knowledge.
Empiricism instead of rationalism
The traditional rationalist view
The traditional view of understanding in philosophy was based on rationalism.
Rationalism: view according to which knowledge is obtained by means of reasoning; usually through deductive reasoning on the basis of innate knowledge.
Empiricism
As natural philosophers developed the scientific method, observation and inductive reasoning gained importance.
Empiricism: view according to which knowledge is obtained by means of perceptual experiences; usually involves the idea of association between ideas to combine the individual perceptions; also emphasis on inductive reasoning.
The human mind at birth is a black slate (a tabula rasa) on which experiences leave their marks and make associations with the marks already present.
Interim summary
Rationalism
Empiricism
Epistemology in troubled waters: idealism
Although John Locke is generally considered to be the father of empiricism, his writings were rather cautious.
Berkeley and Hume
It didn’t take long before other philosophers took up Locke’s idea of the mind as a black slate and showed that it could lead to far-reaching, counter-intuitive conclusions.
George Berkeley (1685-1753)
If the contents of the soul entirely consist of impressions acquired through observation, then we have no guarantee, except for God, that the contents of the soul are a faithful rendition of the world.
We have no guarantee that there exists something like an outside world. The contents of the mind could be fully self-generated.
The method of observation promoted by the men of science did not necessarily lead to a true understanding of the world. It could be equally well suited in one grand illusion.
Idealism: view within philosophy that human knowledge is a construction of the mind and does not necessarily correspond to an outside world; the truth of knowledge depends on the coherence with the rest of the knowledge in the social group.
Realism: view within philosophy that human knowledge tries to reveal real properties of the outside world; the truth of knowledge is determined by the correspondence of the knowledge with the real world.
David Hume (1711-1776)
Pointed out that idealism questioned the scientific endeavour of unearthing causes and effects.
When we experience he co-occurrence of events, we tend to see one event as the source of the other.
This gives us an illusion of deeper knowledge beyond senses and memory, but actually there is no guarantee that something in the world corresponds to our postulated causal relationship.
We assume that our impression of causality is due to the existence of a cause-effect relationship in the outside world, which we have discovered, but from an empiricist perspective there is no guarantee for such an assumption. The link could arise entirely form the mind alone.
Hume pointed to a second principle humans use to group sensations, association by similarity.
Because two sensations resemble each other, we assume they come from the same entity in the world.
Again, there is no guarantee that this is true.
Kant
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
Kant agreed with Berkeley and Hume that we cannot have direct knowledge of the outside reality (the thing-in-itself) through perception.
Humans not only perceive, they also thing about their perceptions.
By combining input from their senses with understanding, they come to concepts and judgements that generalise across the perceived instances and go beyond basic experiences.
In doing so, the mind adds knowledge (to sensations) that is not derived from the observation itself and, hence, can be considered innate.
The most important types of knowledge added by the mind to incoming stimuli
Human perception could not arise in an environment completely at odds with the sensations.
Even if sensations are subjective, they can only exist if the perceiver inhabits a world that is in line with the input from the senses.
Successive sensations must form continuity and unity to be understood, otherwise they are experienced as incoherent and meaningless snapshots.
Humans do not have direct access to their experiences.
All they can observe is the objects of their experiences and these objects require stimulation that remains constant in time (that continues to exits when unobserved).
Humans are not merely centres of knowledge, they are also agents, operating in the environment on the basis of their knowledge.
Not all of these actions are successful, suggesting that an outside reality constrains human activities.
Scottish common sense
Thomas Reid (1710-1796) argued that it was time for a return to what he called ‘common sense’.
Perception was a direct interaction between the perceiver and the real object, and did not result in a separate stage of perceptual representations, which may or may not be a truthful copy of the outside world.
Rational and empirical psychology
As philosophers became ever more interested in the human mind, the theme ‘psychology’ was added as the fourth part of metaphysics.
Metaphysics: the study of the nature of the universe.
Wolff
Christian Wolff (1679-1754)
Wolff took ideas from Aristotle, Bacon and Newton to define the subject of psychology.
First, he defined rational psychology very much as Aristotle had done for theoretical knowledge.
On the basis of deductive reasoning, these axioms would lead to the ‘demonstration’ of new knowledge.
This rational approach guaranteed true conclusions about the human soul and allowed the philosopher to penetrate more deeply into the matter than by simple observation.
Wolff agreed with Bacon that pure reason without observation entailed risk of error. Long chains of reasoning without reality checks invited mistakes.
So, psychology needed a close interaction between reason and observation, or empirical psychology.
Empirical psychology according to Wolff was built on introspection.
Introspection: research method in psychology consisting of a person looking inward and reporting what he/she is experiencing; usually done under controlled circumstances.
In his view, the human mind could perceive its own operations and use this information to build a science of psychology.
Wolff suggested that psychology should aim for mathematical demonstrations. Only then would there be full understanding.
He called this approach ‘psychometrica’.
Kant again
Kant contemplated the issue of ‘psychology’, as part of this struggle to integrate rationalism and empiricism.
In doing so, he came to a conclusion that was pretty devastating for the scientific ambitions of psychology.
This led to ‘a historical doctrine of nature’, which was below the level of natural science
Natural science required rational analysis, a system of un-disputable axioms and demonstrations.
A proper natural science required the axioms and demonstrations to be written as mathematical laws.
Kant’s objections can be summarised as follows:
Comte
Auguste Comte denied psychology the scientific status of psychology.
Psychology was excluded from his hierarchy of sciences because of the problems with the introspective method.
The only ways in which the human mind could be studied scientifically, according to Comte, was on the basis of biology and the basis of observation of the products produced by the mind.
Interim summary
Psychological studies of the mind
Epistemology
Rational and empirical psychology
Because of psychology’s increasing impact within philosophy, a growing number of psychology courses were taught at university, not only to philosophy students, but also to students of religious and educational studies.
This created a marked for text-books on psychology, which shaped people’s views.
Kant
Kant published a textbook on human functioning, ‘Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinischt’, based on the lecture notes of a course he was teaching.
Kant did not treat the topic as a science, but as a collection of narratives. Nor did he call the subject psychology, but anthropology.
Kant devoted a part of his book to deriving people’s characters from their appearance and behaviour.
Physiognomy: belief that the personality of an individual can be deduced from their appearance, in particular from the shape of the head and face.
Herbart
Johan Friedrich Herbart (1776-1841)
His book ‘Lehrbuch zur psychologie’ was written in particular for use in educational studies.
Herbart was convinced that knowledge of psychology was for principal importance to teachers.
Upham
In the United States, students had to take courses on moral and mental philosophy.
The contents were heavily influenced by Scottish common sense realism, but increasingly took a distinctive American look with locally produced books.
A particularly popular textbook was ‘Elements of intellectual philosophy (1827)’ by Thomas Upham (1799-1872)
Upham’s book starts with:
Bain
The United Kingdom saw an impressive series of psychology-related textbooks published.
Arguably the most influential were two books published by the Scottish philosopher and educationalist Alexander Bain (1818-1903).
These books formed the template of nearly all subsequent English psychology textbooks.
An important new element Bain introduced was the inclusion of physiology in his books.
Interim summary
The increased importance of psychology has resulted in the production of textbooks since the late 1700s, which illustrate the themes considered important and which also influenced people’s views of psychology. Four books have been discussed:
While philosophers in metaphysics were debating the status and contents of psychology, some natural philosophers started to run Baconian experimental histories that nowadays would be classified as psychology experiments.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, the findings of these experiments would encourage scholars to establish ‘laboratories of experimental psychology’.
Human perception
Given the importance of observation in natural science, it was normal for men of science to be interested in the possibilities and limits of (human) perception.
Quite a lot was already known about the topic before the scientific revolution.
Hooke
Robert Hooke (1635-1703)
Was interested in determining the minimal visual angle that could be discriminated.
This was important for the use of telescopes and later also determined the degree of detail that could be seen through the newly built microscopes, of which Hooke made extensive use.
On the basis of his studies, Hooke concluded that humans could discriminate lines that covered a visual angle of 1 minute of arc, a retinal wide of 0,0035mm.
Mayer
Hooke’s research was replicated and much extended nearly a century later by the German astronomer Tobias Mayer (1723-1762).
Mayer used more types of stimuli than Hooke had used.
He found that for black dots, the limit of vision was nearly half that of Hooke’s estimate while the limit of gratings was comparable to Hook’s estimate.
He also observed that the relationship between the distance of a candle and the limit of vision was not linear but curvilinear.
Weber and Fechner
Ernst Heinrich Weber (1795-1878)
He was in the first place interested in tactile senses.
He published two treatises that would turn out to be highly influential for the history of psychology.
Weber ran two types of studies
That was finding inspired Gustav Fechner (1801-1887) to develop a mathematical law connecting sensation magnitude to stimulus intensity.
Fechner realised that there could be a Newtonian mathematical function connecting the magnitude of the sensation to the magnitude of the stimulus.
Psychophysics: part of psychological research dealing with the relationship between physical stimuli and the corresponding sensation.
The speed of signal transmission in the nervous system and mental chronometry
The personal equation
Two main tasks of astronomers are:
Before the development of modern equipment with automatic registration, both tasks required a close coupling of clock reading and star-gazing.
This went reasonably well until 1796 when Nevil Maskelyne noticed that the times registered by his assistant were about half a second later than his.
The fact that people differed from each other in the time needed to register precise events became well established among astronomers and other men of science. As a result, scholars became interested in the time needed to transfer information in the nervous system and to perform simple mental operations.
Von Helmholz
Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894)
Started a series of studies to measure the speed of nerve impulses
By stimulating the nerve in a frog at a certain place and measuring the passage of the signal at several distances, he could estimate the conduction of speed of the nerve.
This meant that information transmission in the nervous system became measurable and had practical consequences.
Donders
Franciscus Cornelis Donders (1818-1889)
Wondered whether he could use a similar technique to measure the speed with which humans could perform elementary mental tasks.
Mental chronometry: using reaction times to measure the time needed for various mental tasks; on the basis of a comparison of different tasks, models of the mental processes involved in the tasks are postulated.
Interim summary
Characteristics and limitations of human perception and information processing interested the natural philosophers, who began to run Baconian experimental studies. They discussed two lines of research:
Darwin’s theory
The right zeitgeist
In hindsight, Darwin’s theory about the evolution of species was bound to be discovered around the mid-nineteenth century, most likely in the United Kingdom.
Cross-fertilisation and natural selection
A first observation that struck Darwin was that, although many plants were capable of self-fertilisation, they seemed to avoid it.
If it happened, the offspring were on average less healthy.
Darwin was at loss to understand how the new offspring could start to dominate and eventually replace the old variety.
Darwin red and economic book and realised that the struggle for existence in a world of limited resources was the reason why some variants hand an advantage and started to outgrow the variants without that advantage.
Natural selection: process in Darwin’s evolutionary theory by which the environment results in the continuation and multiplication of organisms with certain genetic features and hinders the reproduction of organisms with other genetic features; the first type of features are called favourable (within the prevailing environment), the second type unfavourable.
Survival of the fittest: term introduced by Herbert Spencer to describe the outcome of natural selection: only organisms that fit within the environment and can produce viable offspring survive.
The origin of species: book by Charles Darwin (1859) in which he presented the evolutionary theory.
The dilution problem
Although the book was a instant success and led to lively debates, its initial impact was less impressive than we nowadays think.
Common misunderstandings of evolutionary theory
There is no direction in the genetic changes
All that happens is that the material now and then has a random alteration.
Most of these changes result in offspring that do not differ in an observable way from the parents.
Sometimes, a change results in a descendant that is barely to further generations.
Occasionally, an alteration results in a characteristic that is particularly well adapted to the prevailing environment and that increases the chances of the organism to survive and have descendants.
This new variant gradually increases in number at the expense of the variants without the characteristic.
Organisms do not become better or stronger
Just more likely to survive in a certain environment
An example of Darwin’s influence: Galton
Francis Galton (1822-1911)
Searched to find evidence for the argument that features were inherited.
He set out to measure human intelligence.
Interim summary
Evolutionary theory
Common misunderstandings of evolutionary theory
An example of Darwin’s influence: Galton
Psychological research requires the analysis of many observations to detect the underlying patterns
The development of statistics was another innovation of capital importance for the emergence of psychological research.
A crucial difference between physics and psychology is that processes in the former usually yield very much the same outcome each time they are repeated.
Because of the intrinsic variability in psychological (and biological) measures, it is not possible to get rid of the noise simply by trying to improve the accuracy of the measurement.
Quetelet’s contribution
Adolphe Quetelet (1796-1874)
Analysed crime statistics.
He was able to predict how many crimes there would be in the next year and which variables affected this number.
Statistics help to design a proper study
Statistics not only allowed researchers to analyse their data, they also provided them with information on how to design biological and behavioural studies, so that valid conclusions could be drawn.
Interim summary
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This is a summary of the book: Historical and conceptual issues in psychology, by Brysbaert, M and Rastle, K. This book is about the history of Psychology and how now-day psychology came to be. The book is used in the course 'Foundations of psychology' at the second year of
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