The repudiation of Wundt’s psychology (Psychology 304)
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| The repudiation of Wundt’s psychology (Psychology 304) Wundt successfully mobilized some very effective techniques in service of some every limited goals but he quickly found that these techniques turned into forces that passed completely out of his control and were about to destroy the framework of “physiological psychology” within which he had put them to use. This was true of the link between introspection and experiment, as well as the form of experimental psychology he put into practice. Wundt as many have noted had no disciples; he was the father of a discipline whose fate is more reminiscent of Totem and Taboo (sons kill the father) than of the myth of Chronos. Virtually everything that has happened in modern psychology since Wundt was a repudiation of Wundt. To understand this we must turn to Wundt’s conception of psychological practice. Wundt’s theory and practice of introspection diverged sharply from many of his students. In this regard Wundt never emerged from the shadow of Immanuel Kant which meant that he basically accepted the object of psychology (inner experience) to which the method of introspection corresponded. But as we have seen, Wundt denigrated the method itself. While Wundt never wavered as to the object of psychology (inner experience), he agreed with Kant and later critics like the positivist Comte and Lange that introspection as a method could not turn the object of inner experience into a science. In fact, Wundt went so far as to ridicule an introspectionist as being like the Baron of Munchhausen for attempting to pull himself out of the bog by his own pigtail. Yet Wundt believed that he had a way to make consciousness available to scientific introspection in spite of these objections. How? At the basis of his proposal there was a distinction, also made by Franz Brentano about the same time (1874), between actual introspection (Selbstbeobachtung) and internal perception (innere Wahrnehmung).This distinction is simply one between being aware of subjective events and observing them in a systematic way (a distinction foreshadowed as we saw by Kant). Now as Wundt saw the problem of a scientific psychology of the mind it was to create conditions under which internal perception could be transformed into something like scientific observation (rather than philosophical awareness). It was not enough to turn one’s gaze inward and give a systematic account of experience for one would then not be observing the ongoing events but rather would be reflecting on what one thought one’s experience had been. The latter “bad introspection” and no science could be based on it. The way out for Wundt was to manipulate the conditions of internal perception in a way that approximated the conditions of external perception. This was accomplished by means of the psychological experiment. In the laboratory, observation and report should follow immediately on the original perception of the event without time for self-reflection. This way the conditions of internal perception could be reported on like the conditions of external perception (or ordinary scientific observation). Moreover, the laboratory experiment made it possible to replicate specific experiences at will in order to observe them. Thus, the assumption was that in the lab we could manipulate external stimuli in way that we could reproduce them at will in the conscious subject. Replication as Wundt appreciated was crucial to science. If we could replicate the physical stimulus then we would be able to replicate the conscious introspection of the physical stimulus since presumably these corresponded to the external stimulus manipulation (i.e., representation). In order to pull this off Wundt realized that he had to stick to concrete and very simple sensory stimuli and sensory judgments. In practice this meant reports limited to judgment of size, intensity, and duration supplemented by judgments of their simultaneity and succession (see Ch. 4). In fact, a significant number of studies from the Leipzig lab did not even contain this much introspection. These studies consisted merely of time measurements and reaction time studies to which Wundt attached much theoretical importance. Other studies using response measures depended wholly on the activity of the autonomic nervous system. A kind of introspection would then be called upon to check the effectiveness of the experimental manipulations (e. g., fluctuation in level of attention) but purely introspective data were not recognized as a basis for knowledge in Leipzig. Wundt in fact would have been horrified to be classed an introspectionist. Ironically, he held fast to the idea that the proper object of psychology was inner experience of the human mind. Thus, there was a tension from the very beginning of psychology between method and subject matter (object) in psychological research. Wundt had his own way of dealing with this tension. He severely limited the scope of the experimental method. Thus, the same Wundt whose laboratory pioneered experimentation in psychology also severely restricted the scope or use of experimentation! One restriction was the range of topics to which the experimental method could be applied. The coordination of stimulus manipulation and inner observation could be achieved only in the domains of sensation and perception. Like on the stimulus side, Wundt hoped that a similar coordination might be achieved on the action (response) side involving reaction time measurements and later measurements of autonomic arousal (i.e., that physical measurement held good not only or the stimulus but also for the response side). But this hope was unfounded and this may be why Wundt became less and less sanguine about the possibility of an experimental psychology of thought or emotions or feelings (except the simplest feelings). There was simply no hope of finding a direct and reliable coordination between external conditions and internal perception when it came to these higher mental processes, and hence no experimentation on the higher mental processes was possible. [Understand this correctly. Inner experience or observation in no way corresponds to external events (manipulated) at least beyond the level of simply sensation and perception…and without this correspondence there was no “control” or measurement of inner experience.] Wundt throughout his career expressed himself with various degrees of optimism and pessimism about this state of affairs; that is, whether experimentation could be extended beyond simple sensation/perception. Whatever conclusions he drew at the time, he never repudiated was his view that experimental psychology cannot ever be coextensive with the entire field of psychology. Thus experimentation was always dependent upon the nature of the specific psychological problem formulated. At one extreme there were problems for which the method was an excellent source of data, at the other extreme it could offer nothing scientifically. Wundt maintained the view that sensation/perception were at one extreme, thinking emotion, voluntary activity, social-cultural psychology at the other extreme. In between there were such areas as memory, imagination, attention where possibly the experimental method could contribute something of scientific worth. While the dividing line may depend on technological advances, and hence is the dividing line is a historical one, Wundt fundamental claim that experimental psychology could never be coextensive with the entire discipline of Psychology remained true in principle. In fact, already in the first period of his life, before coming to Leipzig, Wundt recognized the need for a non-experimental type of psychology. What he called Volkerpsychologie (historical, ethnographic, comparative analysis of human culture and society as products of the human mind) could not be experimentally investigated. Especially, language (literature), myth, and custom were excluded from experimental psychology. For all his interest in experimentation and for all his professional identity as a physiologist, Wundt stood in the German idealist tradition of Geist (Spirit) or idealism and so rejected the idea that the isolated individual human mind (the “individualism” of empiricism) could ever exhaust the subject matter of psychology. Of course, it was precisely the concept of psychological experimentation which made the individual human mind the object of study and hence any effort to understand the remainder of psychology would have to turn to objective manifestation of human mind in institutions, culture, and society (“objectifications” of mind, as Hegel called them). Ironically, the “father of experimental psychology” after 1900 published his ten-volume Volkerpsychologie and I doing so, Wundt had eclipsed most of what he began as experimental psychology. While Wundt’s formulation of the relationship between experimental psychology and the Volkerpsychologie underwent several changes during his lifetime he remained true to three fundamental points:
Now Wundt not only restricted the range of experimental topics he also held to a general theory of scientific method that carefully circumscribed the role of experimentation of the scientific enterprise as a whole. Perhaps not remarkably, his view of experimental science was decidedly anti-reductionist. Wundt held to a view of science in which the role of experimentation was to demonstrate the logical coherence of the world by revealing its underlying causal relations, but it was not to collect endless data from which one then drew generalizations/laws (as we might today)! Wundt argues that physical science (physical causality) had been created precisely by ignoring subjective perception (secondary qualities) but this meant that there was something left over and this psychology as a science was to supplement. Whereas physical science framed its explanations in terms of physical causality, psychological science would do so in terms of psychic causality. The principles of psychic causality always remained a bit vague (“creative synthesis”) but this did not affect the role these principles played in psychological investigation. Thus Wundt believed that there were psychological determinants at work in experience (quite apart from physiological ones) and these had to be demonstrated experimentally because psychic energy was in fact causally efficacious. Nevertheless, Wundt held that the laws of psychic causality would be qualitative in nature and this obviously limited the functionalism of his experimental approach severely. It is quite evident in the above that Wundt’s scientific practice involved a big leap between the experimental and theoretical level of science and this leap is closely related to the tension between his method (introspection) and object of investigation (inner experience). For psychological experiments to be relevant to, to demonstrate psychic causality, it was necessary for the data to consist of introspective reports. Only in human consciousness could one find and demonstrate the operation of psychic causality. One could not do so with animals or abnormal humans. Thus while Wundt hardly qualifies as an introspectionist at the level of experimentation, he was and always remained a mentalist on the level of theory. He saw clearly that without mentalism (without mind), psychology would not have a distinct subject matter, even as without experimentation (stimulus manipulation and measurement) psychology would have nothing trustworthy to say about its subject matter. This constituted a profound dualism in Wundt’s scientific investigative practice and this was because he never cut himself off from either his physiological and philosophical roots. He never really altered the physiological techniques he inherited from the recently constituted physiology, and he never really changes the object of investigation (which was the part of Kant he took over but which, regrettably, the part Kant took over from the empiricists namely the distinction between inner and outer). Wundt made no major changes in moving from physiology and philosophy to the new science of psychology! In fact, Wundt had no interest in what was to become crucial for his successors in 20th psychology, namely the practical applications of psychology and, importantly, Wundt had no interest in establishing psychology as an autonomous discipline independent of philosophy. Wundt belonged to a German generation of academics for whom the refusal of practical social engagement outside of the university was an effective condition of academic freedom. In addition he was quite satisfied with the existing division of academic labor that allocated psychology as a branch of philosophy, a discipline to which Wundt also made his own unique contributions (he wrote a massive two-volume Ethics, and a multi-volume work on System of Philosophy). He essentially saw psychology as merely another contribution to the philosophy of mind, culture, and society (although he obviously hoped that the experimental psychology would have major impact on philosophy). What Wundt hoped to achieve was to rejuvenate/reform philosophy by new means; it was not to establish an entirely new (autonomous) discipline. To do this the traditional object of philosophy (mind) had to be preserved even as the means of studying mind had to be radically changed (by appealing to experiment). A change in psychology’s “disciplinary project” Wundt project was then to reform philosophy and the human (social/moral) sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) through new psychology. This was an idiosyncratic vision. It pleased neither the philosophers nor those who deemed philosophy irrelevant to the project to scientific inquiry. It was especially Wundt’s restrictions on introspection and experiment that worked against the plausibility of his wider claims. These restrictions meant that the yield of his experimental program was very limited. One could of course accept this and restrict the role of experimental psychology to that of a competent craftsman in a small number of specialized areas with little or no practical significance. Wundt’s student, G. E. Muller at Gottingen, did precisely that but in the highly competitive world of German academia this was neither a prescription for personal or disciplinary success. It might work on a large scale once the institution and intellectual framework for psychology was well-established – but of course this was precisely what was lacking as yet. Therefore, Wundt’s legacy was both positive and negative, On the positive side were the institutional arrangements of a psychological laboratory for conducting experimental research but on the more strategic side the new psychology did little for his students who faced a very different world and had very different ambitions. What was at stake here can be referred to as a “disciplinary project” that is a vision of the discipline as fitting into existing institutional structures of both “knowledge generating domains” and the discipline’s contribution to public knowledge and social practice. As I said above, Wundt “disciplinary project” for psychology did not sever its relationship with philosophy or nurture its independence as an academic endeavor. In fact, Wundt opposed this move explicitly when some of his younger colleagues tried to do so. Psychology remained tied to philosophy and its function was to contribute as a very limited experimental science. In fact, Wundt was quite out of step with the times. At the time the psychologizing of philosophy was just beginning in Germany and there was at yet little opposition – and Wundt took advantage of it and saw that a considerable number of philosophy chairs (professorships) at German universities might eventually go to psychologists. This in fact occurred but it also took little time for philosophers to react with the claim that the new psychology did little if nothing for philosophy. [Wilhelm Windelband, the neo-Kantian philosopher of the Baden School and a historian, sarcastically commented: “For a time things in Germany had almost got to the point where the ability to occupy a chair of philosophy was regarded as established once someone had learned to push electrical buttons in a methodical manner”.] Wundt’s plan for the rejuvenation of philosophy ran into hostile philosophers and experimental psychology was rejected by forces that were to provide it with an academic home base. Psychology was increasingly forced to make its own way an independent discipline (rather than remain part of a philosophy or physiology department). In contrast, in the US, the advantages of an independent discipline of Psychology were clear from the start. American universities favored specialization and rejected anything that might resemble the German philosophical establishment (especially of a Kantian or idealism nature). The issues here are complex, but in Germany there had been a long period during which sectarian religious control of the universities had been replaced by the political authority of philosophical establishment and in the late 19th c. this was still strongly in place (political authorities were largely philosophically minded civil servants). In contrast, in American universities religious dogma was soon replaced by “scientism” and academic appointments were vested in businessmen, politicians, and those engaged in professional practice (e.g., education), rather than by philosophically trained state officials as was the case in Germany. Hence, psychology, as a new science, had to legitimize its project of scientific psychology in very different ways in Germany than in the US. Although psychology emerged on both continents it was far more clearly linked to an autonomous “disciplinary project” in the US than it was in Germany. Contrary to Wundt conception, the new psychology did not prosper in its links with philosophy, linguistics, history, and anthropology (the Geisteswissenschaften) as he wished. Instead, it shifted its weight to the other foot, biology, and affiliation with the natural sciences. Of course, in this move it was greatly encouraged by the swelling rise of the natural sciences in the 19th c. notably the influence of Darwin’s evolutionary theory (see Ch 5.). The progress in the natural sciences promoted the idea that only its methods were the methods for securing reliable and valid knowledge about anything (i.e., scientism). Insights, theories, understanding, etc. that were not directly tied to these methods were deemed to be empty speculation unworthy of attention. The split between the natural (Naturwissenschaften) and human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) had become an unbridgeable gap and psychology was caught in the middle. What Wundt had tried to keep together now broke apart. Not surprisingly all those students who came to him because of his laboratory (virtually all American students) ended up on the natural science side doing experimental research and consigning the rest of Wundt’s psychology (his ten-volume Volkerpsychologie – social-cultural psychology – the higher mental processes) to the graveyard of metaphysics. There were two themes in this surge of scientism (both in Germany and the US). (1) Technical-utilitarian assimilating truth to usefulness and practical application; scientific knowledge was basically useful knowledge and therefore superior to speculation/contemplation. (2) Scientific knowledge was superior because it was closely grounded in observed fact and avoided all metaphysical speculation (e.g., Wundt’s psychic causation). (The major underpinnings for this positivist position in Germany (but also in the US – see Ch. 6) were Ernst Mach and R. H. L. Avenarius whose writings strongly influenced key figures in psychology in the generation immediately following Wundt.) Both these themes were normative in the sense that they not merely specified what good science was but rather what good science ought to be. Good science ought to be useful (make predictions – prediction became the criterion of explanation) and it ought to avoid any theory beyond the generalizations that summarized the data. That is, science ought to avoid ivory-tower intellectual and it ought to avoid the philosopher of metaphysics. (One can see here already why American psychology was so practically oriented – e.g., educational, industry, work, clinical, etc. and why it was so “hard-nosed” in “data-collection” allowing predictions. This in contrast to Wundt’s view that experiments had to do with demonstrations about the coherence of the world.) In the US both these themes converged but differently in different people. For example the American developmental psychologist at Clark University, G. Stanley Hall, was hardly meticulous in gathering facts but he was very practically oriented (in Education), whereas the British experimental psychologist at Cornell University, Edward Titchener, was a stickler for laboratory finesse but cared little for practical consequences. Nevertheless, both these sides rejected Wundt’s synthesis of philosophy, psychology and physiology. After Wundt, Psychology became a specialized positive science, divorced from philosophy, looking to the natural sciences for its methodological and theoretical models. I want to first examine the experimentalist orientation. As I have emphasized Wundt held experimental psychology to be but a small and limited part of the overall enterprise with the remainder taken up by Volkerpsychologie of the psychic causality and creative synthesis of the higher mental processes. Both of these aspects were rejected as “unscientific” or “metaphysical” by his followers who deemed experimental psychology to be the whole of psychology (able to investigate also the higher mental processes). Strangely, while Wundt’s restriction on the method was rejected, the object of psychology was not so easily rejected – inner experience, or mind – and hence this required that the role of introspection be greatly expanded (to include the “higher mental processes”). Dead-end: “systematic experimental introspection” Some of Wundt most influential students, notable Kulpe in Germany (see Ch. 4) and Titchener in the US (see Ch. 7) took this path and thereby inaugurated a very off episode in the history of psychology’s investigative practices – a period that has been called “systematic experimental introspection”. It was but a brief period from about 1903-1913, but it was a fateful period because it revealed many problems inherent in Wundt’s effort to synthesize rigorous experimentation and mentalistic objects (inner experience). The crisis that ensued in this program of “systematic experimental introspection” virtually eliminated Wundt’s psychology and favored the development of psychology along very different lines. One problem in trying to understand this new all embracing approach to introspection on the part of some of Wundt’s students is of a historiographic nature. Thus, the behavioristic turn in American psychology (1913) by-passed almost everything that preceded it. John Watson, in good American style, simplified the image of the opposition assimilating various diverse positions together under the simple label “introspectionism”. However, doing so obscured very fundamental differences that existed between Wundt and his students – differences that were critical for the development of psychology as an independent discipline. Thus, the change in introspective methods certainly seemed significant to say Titchener who describes it this way in 1912: Those who remember the psychology laboratories of 20 years ago (Wundt at Leipzig) can hardly escape an occasional shock of contrast which, for the moment, throws into vivid relief the difference between the old order and the new. The experimenter in the early 1890s trusted, first of all his instruments; chronoscope, kymograph and tachistoscope were – it is hardly an exaggeration to say – of more importance than the observer. There were still vast reaches of mental life which the experiment had not touched….meanwhile certain chapters of psychology were written rather in the light of “system” (referring to Wundt’s “disciplinary project”) than by the aid of fact. Now 20 years after we have changed all that. The movement towards qualitative analysis has culminated in what is called, with a certain redundancy of expression, the “method of systematic introspection”… a great change has taken place, intensively and extensively, in the conduct of the introspective method (Titchener, 1912 American J. of Psychology). “Extensive change” refers here to the extension of introspection to include such areas as memory, thinking, and complex feelings (topics Wundt had believed unsuitable to experimental introspection). The Wurzburg school (see Ch. 4) experiments were the most promising examples of the new fashion in intensive introspective analysis (even as qualitative introspection had many adherents outside the Wurzburg school such as Titchener, Alfred Binet, and Theodor Lipps. Wundt in his well-known attack on the Wurzburg extension of introspection reiterated that unless the objects of introspection were directly tied to external physical objects one did not have the necessary conditions for scientific investigation of inner life. Among the intensive changes in the application of introspection, Titchener noted two which are particularly striking.
(2) Closely connected with this shift towards subjective reports as data is another feature of systematic experimental introspection, namely the interest in qualitative description. While Galton’s (1883) studies of imagery had already anticipated this trend, qualitative description was definitely not acceptable to Fechner or Wundt. It was especially Alfred Binet in France who challenged Wundt’s introspection on Wundt’s own home ground. Binet (1903) published a series investigating two-point thresholds in which he did not limit himself to collecting customary introspective reports (noting whether the difference between the two points were felt or not when the stimulus was applied), but he also questioned his subjects as to what they experienced when making this judgment thereby gathering qualitative data which Binet claimed showed that the simple quantitative threshold data (gathered by way of Wundt’s introspective method) was an over-simplification of just what was involved when subjects made threshold judgments. Binet used qualitative introspective data similar to the Wurzburg school which led him to claim priority for himself. Interlude Let’s be very clear about what is involved here when we add qualitative judgments to the quantitative data which Wundt and Fechner collected. For example, Fechner numerically graded his physical stimuli and, importantly, restricted the subject’s responses to these stimuli (this was the essence of the psychophysical methods – see the text). The subject was limited to simple judgments and that could be “digitalized” to a yes/no answer type. Only under these kinds of conditions was it possible to get the kind of relations (laws) that, for example, Weber and Fechner found. For example, the subject agreed to limit his response to alternatives like “heavier versus lighter (in the case of weights) or “equal versus unequal” (in case of comparative brightness judgments). Because Fechner experimented on himself the goal of the experimenter and subject were brought together but in a functional sense they were still distinct. There is an indispensable element of social control wherever the subject’s responses are subordinated to the goals of the investigation (stimulus conditions), although the social aspect may remain hidden in the voluntary nature of the agreement (subject’s task) and by the impersonal nature of the requirements of the experiment (obviously this remains relevant/true today). Sometimes the practice of controlling the form of the subject’s response in the interest of quantification did lead to debates among experimentalists in which the social basis of the practice emerges clearly enough. Numerization (measurement) required that the responses be dichotomous (yes/no). But what do we do about the category of “doubtful”? There were two alternatives to this dilemma. One was to prevent subjects from taking this liberty by insisting that all answers be yes/no (method of right and wrong cases) or one could be more permissive and allow for the doubtful responses but then afterward manipulate the data so that the effect of such responses was washed out say by dividing the doubtful items among yes/no categories as Fechner did (a kind of averaging). For Fechner and others that followed him this seemed perfectly justifiable because they were studying what they took to be “sensations” which they assumed were the psychological “atoms” that could be incrementally added if they were of the same kind. The data produced in this way could not contradict the assumptions that sensations were psychological atoms/elements and hence they rationalized the numerization of ambiguous (doubtful) responses. For example, in the investigation of tactile two-point discrimination thresholds so called “paradoxical” judgments were common. The subject’s skin would be stimulated by either a single point or by two points some distance apart in an attempt to measure their tactile sensitivity. Without the help of visual cues the subject had to say whether he or she felt one or two points. Now while it was expected that when the two stimulated points were close together only one point of stimulation would be felt, it was not expected that a single stimulated point would be reported as feeling like two points. Moreover, the proportion of such “errors” tended to decrease (often massively) as the experiments were repeated. This result meant that the numerical values of the sensitivity threshold could vary widely depending on when in the experimental series the threshold was calculated. These results generally led to a search for technical improvements and auxiliary hypotheses rather than to any questioning of the fundamental practices on which the attempts at numerization rested. Reductions in “paradoxical” responses (like “doubtful”) were said to be due to the effects of “practice”. But this was hardly an explanation for it left in the dark just what the word “practice” referred to. It was Alfred Binet (also of mental testing fame) who was prepared to probe further and who achieved considerable insight into the basis of psychophysical numerizing practices. The suggestion of what might going on what supplied by his fifteen year old daughter whom he had put through a number of these experiments only to find the usual practice effects. “I knew better what a sensation meant” she told her father at a later session. “When a sensation was a little big, I thought there might be two points because it was too thick for one point.” What Binet’s daughter picked up on was the rather elastic meaning of the category “two” that had to be employed in this experimental situation. Fortunately Binet had no stake in the psychophysical methods pioneered by his German rivals and he decided to pursue the matter further. Using adults who were allowed to freely report on their experience, Binet found that Fechner’s simple dichotomous variable (one or two) disintegrated. Subjects reported sensations between oneness and two-ness – “broad”, “thick”, and “dumbbell shaped” sensations - that could be categorized as one or two depending on the subject’s interpretation of the schema that the experimenter wished to apply. Binet concluded that the threshold of a two-point discrimination task could not be scientifically (quantitatively) determined. Now such radical conclusions were the exception rather than the rule. Subsequent investigations did lead to the recognition of the qualitative complexity of even something as simple as a tactile sensation. But the constant feature of the various introspective descriptions of the underlying tactile experiences was their arithmomorphic form. Of course, one could always add intermediate categories and number them, but the difficulty with this procedure was that there was lack of agreement among investigators on the number and quality of the additional categories that constituted the series. Thus one investigator found five categories between oneness and two-ness, and another eight categories. The arbitrariness of the whole experimental procedure became obvious. The advantage of a simple two point threshold (sensory experiment) was that some social consensus could be achieved on the basis of the physical instrument of stimulation that was common and that physicals instrument actually did have two points. Note however that before this physical two-point stimulus could be translated into a two-point subjective sensation that was to be the basis of psychological measurement, a little social construction had to be performed. The agreed upon definition of “two” had to be arrived at by the participants in the investigation. Were the tactile sensation that were verbally reported as “point or circle” or “elongated oval” to be reported as “one” or as “two” (points)? For Binet’s daughter this might simply be a matter of pleasing her father (social desirability), but with adult subjects there might well be much more room for misunderstanding, especially when the usually assumptions of the experimental situation were not shared by subjects and experimenter (i.e., the lab is a different place than the world at large). In fact, anthropologists who conducted the discrimination threshold experiments with South-sea Islanders found very different discrimination thresholds for these people than they did for Englishmen. It was Titchener who guessed the reason: Englishmen wanted to impress by sticking strictly to the social norm refusing to call anything “two” unless they were absolutely sure, whereas South-sea Islanders eager to please/impress the anthropologists reported “two” whenever there was any doubt whatsoever. E. G. Boring (the historian of psychology and student of Titchener) maintains that the meaning of the judgment ‘two’ is indeterminate unless a criterion has been established. That is, the practice of psychological measurement was clearly grounded in the imposition of agreed-upon definitions on the raw material of individual experience. What was true of the category of ‘two’ in case of two-point discrimination thresholds (that it was ambiguous), was surely true of other basic judgments like equal and unequal, on which psychophysical experiments depended. An argument was made that some objective basis of psychological measurement could be rescued by assuming that this social construction of numerical categories held good only within a series (experiments) but did not affect the entire itself. But the obvious reply to this is that it is not the numerical series that is at issue but the qualitative distinctiveness of the sensations that were supposed to form a series. All this led to the “quantity objection to psychophysics” and it was remarkably inconclusive. [Mathematization in psychology (the subject response) is not the same as in physics!] Both sides of this debate shared a common definition of the problem of psychological measurement. It was seen as mental measurement; that is, measurement of a private event. If mental measurement of this kind proved to be impossible the only conceivable alternative was that what masqueraded under the name of psychological measurement was really physical measurement. This was manifested in the notorious “stimulus error” to which psychologists were said to be prone (namely that the (measurement of) the physical event – the stimulus - was confused with the (measurement of) the psychological event). [Of course, this error was one that was very liable in the empiricist tradition which would hold that the psychological event was a representation of the physical event.] Of course the experimentalists on their side were able to point to their successes such as Weber’s and Fechner’s laws. But if the sensation side of Fechner’s equation was not based on mental but physical measurement, then Weber’s law would be a law of physics, or so they argued. Yet the claim that what were measured were purely private conscious sensations was equally suspect. What both sides in this debate underestimated was the socially constructed nature or stipulative aspects of so-called mental measurement. Investigators were indeed able to construct numerizable series of judgments that were different from the operations of physical measurement, although there need be no isomorphic series of private experiences that stood in one-to-one relationship to the public judgments. Private experience has a vast potential for interpretation and sets few constraints on what social constructions might be imposed on it. The psychological products (data) that were the result of these socially constructed scales of measurement had a reality of their own but it was not the reality that could be neatly classified in terms of binary categories of the traditional duality of physical body and private mind. We will see this problem again when we take stock of the notion of ‘behavior’ in behaviorism. End of interlude Continued from page 9, above The impulse that caused a significant number of experimental psychologists to turn towards experimental systematic introspection was the very opposite of metaphysical. It was precisely because they wanted to replace the old-style speculation about matters like Wundt’s psychic causality by direct observation of mental events (higher mental processes) that they turned, ironically perhaps on hindsight, to qualitative introspective data. In doing so they were only following the time-honored basis of scientific experimentation which provided for a distinct province of witnessed facts on the basis of which a general consensus could be achieved. Such a body of consensually validated facts could provide a more satisfactory way of grounding disciplinary knowledge than would say Wundt’s theoretical system of psychic causation (and his descriptions that characterized his Volkerpsychologie). But as is well-known this entire program of systematic introspection came to grief just a few years later and the reasons for this is significant for the history of psychology’s investigatory practices. Thus, we have to distinguish between two kinds of criticism of qualitative experimental systematic introspection. (1). One criticism is directed towards the object (inner experience) of introspective practice. Later behaviorists used this argument. Thus, John Watson maintained that even if knowledge of inner experience was possible it would yield no practical implications. Psychology was above all for the behaviorists a practical endeavor; psychology had to be useful according to Watson (unlike Wundt or Titchener who for very different reasons rejected this idea of pragmatic value of knowledge.)
In Europe, in contrast, there was no interest in changing the object of psychology (by those who criticized Wundt’s limited role for introspection) but there was dissatisfaction with what Wundt’s experimental introspection had produced. There were a number of attempts to get around this lack of results but the most important critique of introspection was that it became evident that the problem of introspection was a problem of communication (language) rather than the problem of private individual consciousness. Thus, it became evident that the problem was not the privacy of inner experience (object) that was observed in introspection but the means available to establish consensus that would transcend this privacy in descriptions of this privacy. In ordinary scientific observation experiences are also private after all (no two scientists see the same thing) but the problem is overcome by use (stipulation) of special media of communication that make agreement possible. Thus, these media are partly physical, relatively simple and artificially structured spatial patterns, for example, and partly linguistic (stipulative definition or, later, operational definition). Wundt and the psychophysicists were well aware of the former (data points and their representation in instrument readings or numerized on paper), and therefore the interest began to shift toward language. Was it possible to develop anything like a scientific language that could be used reliably describing the experiences evoked by experimental systematic introspection? The effective use of such a language would mean a certain attitude on the part of both participants in the experimental situation, experimenter and subject alike. The desired description would have to be of a kind which allowed for a certain distance with respect to the object. This obviously provided no difficulty for the experimenter (in describing the subject’s experience) but for the subject, because it was his/her experience, adopting distance from this experience required a special “introspective attitude” (e.g., Titchener, see Ch. 7). This may be possible but at what cost? There is a cost for something is lost between the original (inner) experience and the report (in words employing the special “introspective” attitude). While in the natural science something is also lost between the experience of the observer and the data reported, in psychology which was all about the quality of the original experience it would defeat the entire endeavor of psychology to eliminate the original experience just to satisfy linguistic (descriptive) consensus required of scientific data. The proponents of systematic experimental introspection faced a dilemma. They could impose either (1) an artificial language and impose consensus on what would be the facts of experience or else (2) they could remain close to their subject’s original experience and risk not obtaining any consensus on the “facts”. In practice the language of scientific description turned out to be the language of sensationism (at least in case of Titchener). By reducing experience to reports on sensations, systematic experimental introspection could imitate the path taken by observational reports in the natural sciences. This is what Titchener advocated and implemented in his Cornell laboratory. But Titchener was only able to argue this way because he had reified (made sense word real) the words of his sensationist language and persuaded himself that the basis of experience was nothing more than an assembly of sensations (see Ch 7). Titchener now faced war on two fronts: (1) his fellow introspectionists refused to sacrifice their phenomenal object (the object of inner experience) at the altar of Titchener’s reductionist sensationism (all experience could be reduced to sensations), and (2) his more practically oriented American colleagues (functionalists and behaviorists) refused to be interested in the construction of an object which had no practical relevance to life. Titchener’s “disciplinary program” was heading for defeat. (In fact Titchener like Wundt left no disciples who carried his program forward.) What was the problem? Systematic experimental introspection was a methodological effort to extend scientific observation to the most private areas of experience: thinking and feelings (which remember Wundt said could not be so investigated scientifically). But that would mean that one (Titchener) could give the same unambiguous and analytical descriptions of these higher mental processes as one could give of a simple visual stimulus in a perception task (as Wundt and the psychophysicists did). It was soon realized if one did not like Titchener insist on such descriptions of sensations, then the spontaneous reports of subjects in experiments would hardly fit any scientific description requirements. Subjects’ report were more like “expressions” than descriptions of sensations, especially descriptions of object that were experienced in an attitude of “distance”. If you ask someone to report what they are thinking or feeling in an experimental task, you can expect nothing but variation of discourses. That is, subject even in an experimental task give expression to the Gestalt (holistic) quality of their experience, only when requested to take “distance” on the experience do they begin to describe and then only elements of their experience (and not as sensations). This insight led to the important distinction between description (Beschreibung) and expression/communication (Kundgabe). Systematic experimental introspection therefore faced an impasse. If it rejected Titchener’s reduction of experience to observed sensation (which if such reduction were possible would be the deconstruction and loss of experience), it could either
These options entailed a radical change in the social structure of the experiment. Consider that for Wundt the experimental subject was the scientific observer (of his/her own mental/inner states) and reported what he/she experienced/observed, and the experimenter was really only an assistant. But if we treat the experimental subject’s report as Kundgabe, as expression, rather than description of his/her experience (as Titchener tried), then the subject is no longer a scientific observer. That role has now been passed onto the experimenter who records what the subject descries/says (presumably in some regimented manner or else by way of questionnaires or rating scales). The Wurzburg school already appreciated this point. The implication of this change is enormous for it demonstrated that the nature of the object of psychological investigation was linked to the social structure of the experiment (or investigative situation). A fundamental change in the object from observation/report of inner experience to the expression of experience meant a change in the investigative situation. Wundt’s entire “disciplinary project” gave way when the object of inner experience was no longer the object of psychological inquiry. I assume you have read Chs. 4, 7, 8, and 9. Yüklə 94 Kb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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