Notes for History and Systems-March 22nd

Dropbox Professor Davies your paper proposal by Monday at the ABSOLUTE LATEST.

First true laboratories begin to pop up, with some sciences having been established
for a long duration. Biology is slowly but surely on its way.
Connecting basic mental phenomenon to physical and psychical processes. The
loudness of the sound that I hear is the physical magnitude of the sound to me.
Here is the physical magnitude of the light stimulus. Whats flickering is perceived
as steady, though it is flickering at a rate.

There is a strong effort to declare psychology a solely materialistic science. This

strikes at a central discourse on the mind-is it a material or abstract construct?

Evolution was lauded as a means of providing guidelines to all of psychology.

Whatever constraints are being forced on biology are equally applicable to those on
the former science. Do we understand psychological phenomenon, such as
psychology, through natural settings? This question is formulated under the modus
operandi of evolution.

Kant steadfastly asserted the notion that psychology could never be a science.
Herbart was in agreement, suggesting that it could never be an experimental
science, as complicated by introspection.
Additionally, Herbart found contention with the assumption of superposition. In
isolating one facet of a problem, its been effectively alienated from its overarching
context.
Reductionism vs. Holism
Titchner asserts that, in order to comprehend the mind, it must be reduced to its
individual elements.
Herbart advocates that psychology can be converted, and understood as, a
mathematical science. His studies concerned far greater relationships than those of
the psychophysicists. He hoped to understand the relationship between ideas and
understand how thy give rise to conscious thinking.
Herbarts overall goal, thus, was to TURN PSYCHOLOGY INTO A MATHEMATICAL
SCIENCE

Wundt enters the picture and obverses this claim completely. Suggesting that
science must be understood in entirely different terms. He was a student of Bunsen,
Muller and Helmholtz (very much a rationalist heritage).

He was both a contradiction and a conundrum. He divided his program into equally
contradictive parts.
1. Inductive Experimental Science should be developed as a means of
understanding immediate consciousness as it occurs-specifically, if it is based
in sensation.
2. Volkerpsychologie: This bears greater resemblance to folk psychology, as it
pertains to history and anthropology. Unlike the prior element, this is hardly
an experimental science. He asserts that, in order to understand mental
consciousness and activity, one must understand the mental and
developmental social processes that understand that.
-Language, art, myth, customs. These require a mode of explanation
appropriate to their external, yet non-physical experiences.
Volkerpsychologie, he argues, cannot be studied by experimental science. Or,
rather, that is what Wundt suggested. I accept that challenge.
Future resultants can never be determined in advance
This quote, alone, is already incongruous with everything hitherto understood about
science. This is very much aligned with Wundts deterministic tendencies.
Wundt is more affiliated with his reductionist propensities.
Defining an Experimental Psychology
Recall Herbart and Kant: can psychology be a science?

YES:
Understand immediate consciousness (as it occurs)
Immediate vs. Mediate experience (whats really objective)?

NO:
Useless in higher mental processes and their contents: language, art, myth,
customs. These require a mode of explanation apposite to their external, yet nonphysical phenomenology.

Wundt begins this dichotomy between mediate and immediate experience. That is
to say, the notion that there is a divide between stimulus and experience. There is
something distinctly dividing experience and nonexperience.

Principles of Physiological Psychology

What are your measurables?
Wundt suggests that you can comprehend ones immediate consciousness through
experimentation.
Wundt the Experimentalist:
What are your measurables?
-They will ideally be objectively knowable and, ideally, measurable stimuli.
-

What youre measuring are the judgments. Well Wundt, good point, what are you
going to do about it? He hardly finds a way to differentiate himself.

Elements of Conscious Thought

Used methods to isolate sensations:
Modality, intensity, quality.
Aroused by physiology (sense organs + brain)

Sensation accompanied by feelings: qualities of conscious experience that do not

come from sensations.
Tri-dimensional theory of feeling
Excitement-Calm

Pleasantness-Unpleasantness

Strain-Relaxation

Feelings through the qualities of conscious experience that dont come through the
sensations themselves.
Sensations carry with them feelings-complex sensations give rise to complex
feelings. Specific patterns of which may be defined as emotions.

When an individual loses the ability for apperception, they essentially become
schizophrenic, as they fail to organize the sensory information of the world.
Apperception is the fundamental element of Wundts methodology.

Wundt, at the end of the day, still ultimately employs introspection.