Introduction: Why the philosophy of science?

I have chosen to start this survey of the historical and philosophical foundations of psychology with an examination of some of the major theories put forward in the philosophy of science. This might, at first sight, seem to be a rather unnatural place to start, but there are good reasons for it. Firstly, given that most psychologists think of their discipline as a science and of themselves as scientists, it is important to investigate ideas about what science actually is and what, if anything, are the characteristics that differentiate it from other, non-scientific, intellectual disciplines.

But there is another reason for looking at the philosophy of science to start off with, and that is that there is a good deal of overlap between ideas in the philosophy of science and psychology. Both the philosophy of science and psychology are concerned, at least in part, with the question of how we know about the world. As we shall see, many of the themes that will arise in the course of this presentation of the philosophy of science will re-emerge later in the history of psychology. Indeed, all of the philosophers of science that will be discussed in these three chapters make use of psychological ideas about the nature of knowledge.

Introduction

We saw in the previous chapter that the behaviourists, in their different ways, sought to change the focus of psychology from the study of putatively internal mental states to the study of overt behaviour. In particular, mental states were said to be subjective and private and therefore not amenable to objective scientific study whereas behaviour was amenable to objective scientific study. Thorndike argued that mental states were, in any case, only of interest because they are intimately connected with behaviour; if they had nothing to do with how we act then they would be mere epiphenomena. Watson was to take this further: he argued that there were no mental states as traditionally conceived, only behaviour. Cartesian philosophy viewed people as mechanical bodies that were connected with thinking and feeling souls. Watson rejected the existence of the soul or mind and reconceived the human being in a purely materialistic way as only consisting of the mechanical body. As the philosopher Charles Taylor put it, materialism of this sort was “dualism with one term suppressed” (Taylor 1975, p. 81).

Introduction

The importance of Wundt in the development of psychology was not confined to his own research and writing, but in the large numbers of future psychologists who were trained in his laboratory. But these students did not always merely reproduce Wundt’s ideas; they took certain aspects of his thought and changed them to fit in with their own philosophical presuppositions, which sometimes differed from those of Wundt. In this chapter I will discuss the work of one of Wundt’s former students, Edward Bradford Titchener (1867–1927), who provides a prime example of how differing philosophical presuppositions, both about the nature of the mind and the nature of science, lie behind and are manifested in individual psychologists’ approaches to their work.

The example of Titchener is particularly significant because, until recently, in textbooks there was often confusion between Wundt and Titchener. It was suggested that their approaches to psychology were basically the same and ideas and pronouncements expressed by Titchener were often thought to be expressions of Wundt’s psychology by one of his students. This, however, is far from the truth (Leahy 1981). In fact there were many important differences in their approaches.

Introduction

We saw in Chapter 7 that Schopenhauer and Nietzsche questioned the Enlightenment idea that human beings are motivated by rational thought and argued instead that we are driven largely by unconscious urges. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche envisaged the unconscious as not only hidden from conscious inspection, but as qualitatively different from conscious thought: it operated according to its own bizarre logic and did not follow the path of reason. Conscious rationality was, far from being the most important influence on our actions, merely the tool of the unconscious drives and existed solely to serve their ends. These ideas, as we shall see in this chapter, were also at the root of Freud’s view of the mind, but he attempted to give them a new, biological, interpretation that owed something to the psychophysical ideas of Helmholtz and Fechner.

The biological background

For Freud, the basic drive behind our behaviour is the drive to minimise stimulation within the nervous system. This, as we shall see, is the fundamental conception that underlies the whole Freudian view of the world. Our nervous system, as a result of stimulation, becomes excited and full of energy. Though the precise nature of this nervous energy was not clear to Freud, as a materialist he had no doubt that it was some form of physical energy. In this, Freud’s position was completely in accord with the principles put forward by leading German physiologists of the day, such as Helmholtz (in whose laboratory Freud’s own teacher, Brücke, had worked). As we saw in Chapter 8, Helmholtz and his colleagues argued that there was no such thing as a spiritual ‘life force’ that animated living things, but that everything, including the energy coursing through the nervous systems of people and animals, was purely physical.

Introduction

We saw in the previous chapter that Descartes, in his search for absolutely certain knowledge, argued that real knowledge was innate and was not derived from the senses. The senses, he believed, were often misleading and could not, therefore, be the source of the true and infallible knowledge that he sought.

But not all thinkers agreed with this position. In contrast to Descartes, they argued that sensory experience was the ultimate source of knowledge. This school of thought is called empiricism. In this chapter, we will discuss the work of two major empiricist philosophers, John Locke and George Berkeley. These two thinkers built on an established tradition of philosophy that emphasised the importance of experience. We have already seen in Chapter 1 that Francis Bacon (1561–1626) argued for the importance of empirical observation in the building up of scientific knowledge. Another important forerunner of the later empiricism of Locke and Berkeley was Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679). Hobbes was a contemporary of Descartes and, indeed, published a set of objections to Descartes’ Meditations to which Descartes subsequently replied in an attempt to rebut Hobbes’s criticisms.

Introduction

Descartes (see Box 4.1) is often thought of as the inaugurator of modern (as opposed to ancient or mediaeval) philosophy. Any chopping up of intellectual history into distinct periods is, of course, going to be somewhat arbitrary but Descartes does nevertheless represent an appropriate starting point for our discussion of the philosophy of mind, not only because of his canonical status as the starting point of modern philosophy, but because of the immense influence of his ideas on later developments in psychology and philosophy.

The roots of many contemporary debates, from the question of innate linguistic representations to the relationship between the mind and the body, are to be found in Descartes, and many psychologists and philosophers still define themselves explicitly as aligned with or – more commonly – in explicit opposition to Descartes’ ideas. For this reason, the intellectual framework within which much psychological thinking proceeds is still largely Cartesian, even if the thinking in question is only an attempt to get away from the Cartesian framework. Descartes is still the reference point relative to which many psychologists and philosophers still define their stances. Nowhere is this truer than in the context of the relationship between mind and body. Descartes effectively changed the intellectual landscape so that nearly all discussions of the mind–body problem today will start with an account of Descartes’ own thoughts on the topic. And this is with good reason – the mind–body problem in its modern guise really did start with Descartes. The body and the mind were, thought Descartes, completely different substances: whereas the body was made out of the same matter as the rest of the physical world, the mind, argued Descartes, was a non-physical substance. Explaining how two such different entities could possibly interact with one another is the nub of the mind–body problem, and the difficulty of providing such an explanation has, as we shall see, provoked many thinkers to argue that there must be something fundamentally wrong with the idea that body and mind are different substances.

INTRODUCTION

Article 63 TFEU deals with the free movement of capital and of payments. The former concept describes any kind of investments in bonds, shares or real estate as well as loans, gifts, inheritances and other transfers. The latter describes transactions that constitute remuneration for goods, employed or self-employed services or capital provided, and therefore are a necessary correlate to the other Treaty freedoms.

While the free movement of capital was not fully implemented until the late 1980s, the movement of payments was already liberalized in the decade that followed the signature of the Treaty of Rome. Article 106 EEC required Member States “to authorise, in the currency of the Member State in which the creditor or the beneficiary resides, any payments connected with the movement of goods, services or capital, and any transfers of capital and earnings, to the extent that the movement of goods, services, capital and persons between Member States has been liberalised pursuant to this Treaty.” As the Treaty freedoms had to be realized by the end of the transitional period in 1969, Member States could no longer restrict the movement of payments from this point onward.

Introduction

The ideas of Hume and Kant, which we will be examining in this chapter, are of great importance for the future development of psychology. In particular, the contrasting ways in which they conceived of human experience formed the metaphysical bedrock of differing approaches to psychology. The Humean conception of experience as consisting of, fundamentally, discrete sensations only held together by fortuitous associations underpinned such schools of psychology as structuralism and behaviourism. The Kantian view of experience as something intrinsically structured, on the other hand, was a philosophical presupposition of thinkers such as Helmholtz and Wundt. Such profoundly differing conceptions meant that the psychologists who held them not only disagreed in the answers that they gave, but in the questions that they asked in the first place.

Hume and Kant were both creatures of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was the outcome of and fulfilment of a general trend in European thought that, since the time of Descartes and the scientific revolution, had distrusted and questioned traditional authorities. Its proponents argued against what they saw as superstition and urged instead that we put our trust in human reason. In the words of Kant, the motto of the Enlightenment was “dare to know”. One should have the courage to use one’s own reason instead of just accepting what tradition or authority tells one to believe, even if that means questioning and rejecting long-standing beliefs or indeed whole belief systems. This spirit of Enlightenment was above all manifested in the progress of science, particularly in the work of Isaac Newton. In his physics he seemed to many of his contemporaries to have discovered the fundamental laws of the universe, and was proof of the heights to which human reason could soar when unhampered by tradition and superstition.

Introduction

The two philosophers of science to be discussed in this chapter, Imre Lakatos and Paul Feyerabend, were both strongly influenced by Popper’s falsificationism. In the case of Lakatos, this influence was positive and he sought to build upon Popper’s ideas. In particular, he wanted to develop a more sophisticated falsificationist philosophy that maintained the rational core of Popper’s approach while reflecting the actual practice of science and also minimising the risk of falsifying a theory prematurely. Feyerabend, on the other hand, although a one-time student of Popper’s, reacted against the idea that falsificationism captures the essential feature of scientific method. Indeed, as will be seen, he questioned whether there was any single ‘scientific method’ and argued that science sometimes only progresses by breaking methodological rules.

Imre Lakatos

Imre Lakatos (1922–74) saw his task as improving on Popper’s essential insights in order to avoid falling into what he thought of as Kuhn’s irrationalism. Kuhn rejected falsificationism and, in so doing, had, according to Lakatos, replaced rationality with irrationality: “in Kuhn’s view scientific revolution is irrational, a matter for mob psychology” (‘Falsification and the methodology of scientific research programmes’, p. 178; hereafter referred to as ‘Methodology’). Given that there are no rational criteria for deciding between paradigms, or even comparing them, the switch from one to the other can only come about because of social factors, irrational preference, and faith. But, says Lakatos, Kuhn has rejected, and shown to be wrong, only a naïve and simplistic version of falsificationism. A more sophisticated falsificationism may avoid succumbing to irrationalism and mob psychology by finding rational grounds for theory change.

Introduction

In the previous chapters, on Wundt and Titchener, we saw that one of the most fundamental problems for early psychologists was the nature of experience and, in particular, how the coherent world of our experience came to be structured. For the likes of Titchener, experience was ultimately composed of individual sensations that were tied together through the laws of association. They came to be associated with one another through experience. Wundt, on the other hand, believed that the mind itself possessed inherent organising principles that imposed a structure on the world of our sensations.

In putting forward these views, Titchener and Wundt were following two established traditions in the philosophy of mind – empiricism and Kantianism – with Titchener following the former and Wundt the latter. But what both of these traditions agreed on – despite disagreements about many other things – was that experience was in need of structuring in some way because it was fundamentally composed of individual, discrete sensations. The research tradition that I will be discussing in the present chapter, Gestalt psychology, disagreed with this fundamental assumption of both empiricism and Kantianism. The term Gestalt is German for ‘form’ or ‘shape’ or ‘figure’ and it is to the overall form or pattern of the perceptual world rather than to discrete elements that the Gestalt psychologists gave precedence. Rather than start with the parts – the individual sensations that both empiricism and Kantianism thought were the building blocks of experience – the Gestalt psychologists believed that the parts could only be understood in terms of how they functioned within the whole perceptual field. They were, in other words, only to be understood in relational, functional terms rather than in terms of their own intrinsic characteristics.

Introduction

In this chapter I will introduce the work of John Dewey (1859–1952) (see Box 15.1) and an approach to psychology called functionalism. (Dewey himself preferred the term ‘instrumentalism’, but ‘functionalism’ tends to be the term most commonly used to refer to this approach.) Functionalism can be contrasted with the structuralist approach, exemplified by Titchener. Whereas structural psychology was an attempt to codify the structural elements, such as basic sensations, that went together to make complex states, the functionalists argued that there were no such elements. They argued that psychological phenomena should be understood in terms of processes and functions rather than fixed structural features.

This basic functionalist idea is present in Dewey’s thought in the following ways. Firstly, because psychology is to be understood in terms of processes rather than structures, the things that it deals with are not defined by their intrinsic characteristics, but by the functions that they perform. We should not, then, speak of memory, for example, as if it were a thing, but rather of the process of remembering. In addition, there are no parts of this process that are intrinsically memorial; anything – sensations, emotions, cognitions – that plays a role in the process is, for as long as the process lasts, part of what we call memory. Secondly, functionalists believe that psychological phenomena can only be understood as part of a broader network of connected processes. If we want to understand more about something in psychology, we should not attempt to narrow our focus and isolate it from everything else as if we were looking though a microscope. On the contrary, we should expand our field of view to see how that process functions within the wider context of other processes within the organism and the environment. When we do this, says Dewey, we find that many of the dualisms that have bedevilled philosophy – such as those between body and mind or between thought and action – do not reflect deep-seated metaphysical differences, but only differences of function. According to Dewey, when we see processes in context we find that they are not opposed to one another, but are necessary parts of an overall process. I hope to show in the course of this chapter how Dewey’s functionalist approach allows him to reconcile what were previously thought to be opposing sides of philosophical dichotomies.