The History of Psychology







(UNCG-PSYCHOLOGY 515)

[key concepts and names] [study questions] [Getting Started on the Research Project]
[suggested project outline] [sample test questions]
  [web discussion]

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Wilhelm Wundt , founder of the first laboratory in experimental psychology, surrounded by his assistants at the Leipzig Institute for Experimental Psychology (circa 1880).
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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During the nineteenth century, the subject matter of psychology, which had been a part of philosophy, began to be approached using scientific methods. At the end of that century, as Western Science flourished, experimental psychology emerged as a separate discipline of scientific inquiry. The course examines how the enduring questions of philosophical psychology were approached by two different paradigms that dominated the new scientific psychology.  They are mechanism and organicism.  We will discuss how they differ and how each attempted to solve enduring mysteries of mind and behavior. We will focus on  problems such as the relationship between mind and body, the influence of nature and nurture, the relationship between humans and animals, the importance of reason versus experience, the role of individuality, and on debates about the value of experimentation in scientific approaches to psychological phenomena.
 

TODAY in the history of psychology

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Central Figures and Concepts

• Mechanism
• Vitalism/Organicism
• Machian Positivism
• Hume: On liberty and necessity
• Historical Implications of Darwinism
• Links to the German/Austrian Founders
• Links to the American Founders
• Links to the French and Swiss Founders
• Links to Darwin
• Links to the British Philosophers and Pioneers
• General Research Links
• Structuralism
• Sigmund Freud: Marc Fonda's index of the Standard Edition

1. Necessity in physical objects is necessary cause and effect: e.g. if one event occurs the next event [its effect] absolutely must occur. The first is caused by the second.

2. But we experience no gentle causal force connecting these two events; our idea of necessity does not originate in our experience.

3. All that we experience is the temporal [or spatial] contiguity between the two events. Hume says:

"We can never penetrate so far into the essence and construction of bodies as to perceive the principle on with their mutual influence depends. 'Tis their constant union alone with which we are acquainted, and 'tis from this constant union that [our idea of] necessity arises".

5. We draw the same causal inference in understanding mental events and behavior, but this too, is based only in our experience of temporal [or spatial] contiguity.

Example: We do not expect an infant of two years to engage in philosophical reasoning. Infancy and the contiguous mental abilities we have observed in two year olds lead us to believe that philosophical reasoning in infants is causally impossible. We infer such non-existent causal relations all the time in our comprehension of the psychology of everyday life.

7. But, [critics say] isn't the mental realm characterized by free will [liberty]?

8. Hume says 'no'. We usually infer free will in ourselves, not others. And when we do, we have observed only one half of the contiguous sequence that normally leads us to infer necessity in the actions of others: only the effect. In the absence of a correlated contiguous event, we sense a "looseness or indifference" that we believe to be liberty.

9. Therefore, neither liberty nor necessity is sensed in the relations among objects or beings, and,as empiricists, we cannot be sure that either exists. Both ideas arise from temporal contiguity or its absence, and we have no basis for distinguishing between them.