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TASK 3 (Article: The philosophical influences on psychology (The…

- - - - = the question of distinction between mental and physical qualities – Descartes tried to resolve this problem
      -  According to Descartes the mind and the body influence each other in a mutual and bidirectional relationship
    - - = idea that an external object (stimuli) can bring about an involuntary response
      -  Precursor of modern behavioral stimulus- response psychology
    - - Mentalism
        = Berkley’s position that all knowledge is a function of mental phenomena and dependent on the perceiving or experiencing person -> perception = only reality of which we can be sure
        
        George Berkley (1685-1753)
        
        = Irish philosopher and religious man
        
        • First one to raise the discussion of idealism vs. realism
        
        • Agreed with Locke that all knowledge from the external world comes from experience
      - Positivism
        = doctrine that recognizes only natural phenomena or facts that are objectively observable
         By Auguste Comte
      - Materialism
        
        = doctrine that considers the facts of the universe to be sufficiently explained in physical terms by existence and nature of matte; proposed that even human consciousness could be understood in terms of principles of physics and chemistry
        
         Work on mental processes focused on physical properties
- - - - = Descartes identified the soul as being divine and independent of everything else. Dualism is the view of the mind-body relation according to which the mind is immaterial and completely independent of the body. Descartes was convinced that the soul had an innate knowledge, which could be recovered on the basis of reasoning (rationalism)
    - - o The material cause = what parts is a phenomenon made of
      - o The formal cause = what is the plan of a phenomenon
      - o The efficient cause = which processes make a phenomenon work
      - o The final cause = what is the purpose of a phenomenon
    - - o His views primarily benefited science
      - o He conjectured that the soul could influence the body via the pineal gland
      - o He separated religion and science from each other (protecting one from another) as the body and mind
  - - - = name given to the western philosophy and cultural life of the 18th century, in which autonomous thinking and observation became advocated as the primary sources of knowledge, rather than reliance on authority
      -  American war of independence (1775-1783)
      -  French Revolution (1789-1799)
      -  Natural sciences provided knowledge that was objective
    - -  coined by Aguste Comte (1798-1857) , who advanced the hypothesis that civilizations pass through 3 progressive stages
        
        Law of three stages by Comte
        
        1) The theocratic stage = gods and spirits dominate the culture, transitions from animism to monotheism
        
        2) The metaphysical stage = philosophical explanations predominate, aims to explain the fundamental nature of the world and the human being
        
        3) The positivistic stage = explanations are provided by the natural sciences
    - - = they saw science more as an ally than an adversary. For them scientific knowledge was dangerous if not guided by religion
      - • The relationship deteriorated in the 1870’s when scientists began to react against what they felt to be the patronizing attitude of church authorities (argument about the Earth’s Age)
    - - = movement in the late 1700s to early 1800s that the mechanistic worldview based on scientists is wrong & that the universe is a changing and living organism
      - • Saw a universe as a changing organism and stressed everything that deviated from rationalism
      - • Jean Jacques Rousseau as an example
    - - = trend in a society towards looser social relations and a greater focus by individuals on themselves than on the groups they belonged to
      -  Contribution to the development of psychology
        
        • People derive their self-image and self-esteem from their own qualities and accomplishments rather than from the position of their family in society
        
        • Started around the age of middle ages and is still growing
        
        Philosophical studies of the mind - the 17th century saw a great revival of philosophical thinking. This focused on epistemology and on the human mind (psychology) rather than on the universe
        
        Epistemology
        = branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of knowledge
        
        Empiricism
        = knowledge is achieved by perceptual experiences; human mind is a tabula rasa – Deduction - John Locke, he published an essay on empiricism – all knowledge arises from sensory experiences and deduction. The human mind at birth is a blank state – tabula rasa
        
        o For Locke the mind was not an empty room, but rather a complex information-processing device prepared to convert the materials of experience into organized human knowledge
        
        only eceptions for tabula rasa is language and perceptual distinction between black-white
        
        Idealism -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
         Extreme form of empiricism
        
        George Berkeley (1685–1753)
        
        = published a book in which he argued that 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 an outside world
        
         Also called mentalism - all knowledge is a doctrine of mental phenomena
        
        David Hume (1711-1776)
        
        = pointed out that idealism questioned the scientific endeavor of unearthing causes and effects. Because causes are never observed directly, we derive them from experiencing the co-occurrence of phenomena (e.g. sun and light)
        
        • When we experience co-occurrence of events we tend to see one event as the source of another
        
        • Because two sensations resemble each other, we assume that they come from the same entity
        
        Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
        = agreed with Berkeley and Hume that we cannot have a direct knowledge of the outside reality through perception
        
        1) Perception is much richer than postulated by Berkeley and Hume
        
        a. Humans are conscious of the perceptions
        
        b. The most important type of knowledge added by the mind to incoming stimuli are those of time, space and case-effect
        
        2) Such perception can only exist in a world of things that is no contradiction with it: sensations can only exist if the perceiver inhabits a world that is in line with the input from the senses
        
        a. According to Kant “every event has a cause”, as a result, the mind sees cause-effect sequences wherever possible
        
        Rational and Empirical Psychology
        = the theme “psychology” was added as the 4th part of metaphysics (= study of the nature of the universe)
        
        1) Ontology = study of the universe and its entities
        
        2) Natural theology = study of gods
        
        3) Universal science = study of the axioms and demonstrations on which theoretical knowledge is based
        
         Psychology became the main subject of the 18th and 19th century
        
        Christian Wolff (1679-1754)
        = he published two books, Psychologica empirica & Psychologica rationalis.
        
        defined rational psychology as Aristotle had done for theoretical knowledge. It started from axioms (self-evident truths) which had to be derived from more fundamental disciplines, such as physics and metaphysics. On the basis of deductive reasoning, these axioms would lead to the “demonstration” of new knowledge
        o This guaranteed true conclusions about the human soul and allowed the philosopher to penetrate more deeply into the matter than by simple observations
        
        • He suggested that psychology should aim for mathematical demonstrations, similar to Newton’s laws of Physics – called psychometria
        
        Kant (2nd) critique on psychology
        = in Kant’s view natural science required rational analysis and demonstrations to be written as mathematical laws (chemistry wasn’t a proper science yet), thus psychology was not a proper science to him
        
        • The outcome of introspection cannot be formulated in mathematical terms because there are no aspects of substance or space in inner observations, only time
        
        • Inner observations cannot be separated and recombined at will
        
        • The act of introspection by itself changes and displaces the state of the observed mind
        
        • Psychology can never become a natural science
        
        Comte
        = he denied the scientific status of psychology too. The only way in which the human mind could be studied scientifically according to him was on the basis of biology and on the basis of observation
        
         He made a hierarchy of six sciences (lower levels depending on the higher ones )
        
        1) Mathematics
        
        2) Astronomy
        
        3) Physics
        
        4) Chemistry
        
        5) Biology
        
        6) Sociology
      - Contributors to individualization = rising complexity of societ, increased control by state, individuality promoted by christianity, mirrors-self-awareness, printing and post.as means for expression