JF:>>This, in part at least, was a consequence of Stalin's regime opting to support the 'reflexology' of Ivan Pavlov and Vladimir Bekhterev. While we in the West tend to think of Pavlov as having been a psychologist, he did not view himself as such. He was trained as a physiologist and he always saw himself as a physiologist. He described his famous work on conditioned reflexes as part of the physiology of the higher nervous system. He was generally dismissive of psychology which he tended to view as a kind of pseudo-science.<<
But the agendas behind 'reflexology' weren't just physiology, were they? Not when you turn to the shared concerns that emerge from medicine, social sciences, logics and math, and philosophy. Perhaps Pavlov was skeptical that the various concerns that converged under the label 'psychology' would ever come together in some unified approach to research. It's also informative to see what two of his more important contemporaries outside the Soviet Union thought about such matters--such as Stumpf and Wundt. In retrospect we can see that psychology never did come together as a unified science, and contradictory approaches and philosophies don't so much compete as they do co-exist (often quite ignorant of each other). Finally, it's interesting to note how Vygotsky points out that the crisis is actually a 'bottom up' one, and not simply the concern of theoreticians. See: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/stumpf/#PsyMin 1. Biographical Sketch Stumpf's intellectual biography is rich and complex due to his long university career that lasted more than 50 years, his academic achievements, and his philosophical work. To complete this biographical sketch, the reader is invited to consult Stumpf's autobiography (published in 1924) and Sprung's biography, published in German under the title Carl Stumpf – Eine Biografie (2006). 1848 Carl Friedrich Stumpf was born on April 21, 1848 in Wiesentheid in Franconia, Germany. 1859-1863 Attended the Gymnasium in Bamberg; studied music and composed several pieces. 1864-1865 Attended the Gymnasium in Aschaffenburg where he studied Plato with Hocheder. 1865 Entered the University of Würzburg; during his first year, he studied aesthetics and law. 1866 Met Franz Brentano on July 14, during the disputatio for his habilitation and then decided to study philosophy with Brentano. During the period from 1867 to 1870 he attended Brentano's lectures on the history of philosophy, metaphysics, Comte and the positivists, and logic. 1867-1868 Because Brentano had not been habilitated to supervise dissertations, he recommended that Stumpf study with Hermann Lotze in Göttingen; Stumpf attended Lotze's lectures on psychology, history of philosophy since Kant, philosophy of nature, and practical philosophy; he also took courses from the physiologist G. Meissner and the physician W. Weber. 1868 Graduated on August 13, 1868 with a dissertation on Plato and then returned to Würzburg in order to study with Brentano. 1869-1870 Entered the ecclesiastical seminary in Würzburg and due to the influence of Brentano and Lotze, he resigned in July 1870. 1870 Returned to Göttingen to prepare his habilitation on mathematical axioms under the supervision of Lotze and successfully defended it in October 1870. 1870-1873 Lectured at the University of Göttingen where he founded the Eskimo society along with mathematician Felix Klein; he also met Fechner and probably Frege, who studied in Göttingen during this period. 1873 Published an important treatise on the origin of space perception, and dedicated it to Lotze. 1873-1879 Appointed to his first professorship at the University of Würzburg at the age of 25 to replace Brentano, who moved to Vienna in 1874. 1878 Married Hermine Biedermann (1849-1930). 1879-1884 Moved to Prague and in 1880 his friend Anton Marty arrived there; Marty was a professor there until the end of his career; Stumpf developed professional contacts with Mach and maintained a close relationship with Ewald Hering. 1882 Visited by William James in Prague, and this encounter marked the beginning of a lasting friendship between both philosophers. 1883 Published the first volume of Tonpsychologie. 1884-1889 Replaced Ulrici at the University of Halle and became a colleague of Georg Cantor and J. E. Erdmann. 1887 Husserl published his habilitation thesis on the origin of the concept of number, which was supervised by Stumpf. 1889-1894 Arrived in Munich in 1889 as successor to Prantl. 1890 Published the second volume of Tonpsychologie; he also worked with H. Ebbinghaus, H. von Helmholtz, and G. E. Müller, among others, on the prestigious journal Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane, of which Stumpf was one of the founding editors. 1891 Involved in a controversy with Wundt and his students on experiments and on Fechner's law. 1894 Joined the philosophy faculty in Berlin after a long period of hesitation; this marked the beginning of a new era in his intellectual life. 1896 Presided at the third International Congress of Psychology in Munich. 1898 Founded the Beiträge zur Akustik und Musikwissenschaft, which contains many treatises written by Stumpf and his students. 1900 Founded the Institute of Psychology in Berlin, which gave rise to Gestalt Psychology; started the Phonogramm-Archiv in Berlin, including some phonographic recordings of a Siamese company performing in Berlin; in the same year, along with Kemsies, he started the Berlin Gesellschaft für Kinderpsychologie. 1900-1901 Husserl's groundwork Logical Investigations was published and dedicated to Stumpf. 1904 Asked by the Board of Education to investigate the well-known case of “clever Hans”; and in 1907 the results of this investigation were published by Stumpf and his assistant O. Pfungst in the book Clever Hans (The Horse of Mr. von Osten): A Contribution to Experimental Animal and Human Psychology. 1906 Published three important treatises, which were extensively discussed by philosophers and psychologists: “Erscheinungen und psychische Funktionen,” “Zur Einteilung der Wissenschaften” and Über Gefühlsempfindungen.” 1907-1909 Accepted the honorific position of rector of the University of Berlin; pronounced his first address “Renaissance of Philosophy” on the state of philosophy since Lotze. 1908 Robert Musil, the author of The Man without Qualities, wrote a dissertation on Mach under the supervision of Stumpf. 1909 Wolfgang Köhler received his PhD with a dissertation supervised by Stumpf and published under the title “Akustische Untersuchungen I;” Travelled to Cambridge to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Darwin. 1911 Published Die Anfänge der Musik in which he summarized the results of his research on ethnomusicology. 1912-1913 Established a station for anthropoids on Tenerife for the Academy of Sciences; as a member of the Academy, Stumpf recommended his student Köhler as director of this station; Köhler began his investigations in 1913, the results of which were published in his classic book The Mentality of Apes (1917). 1921 Appointed as professor emeritus in Berlin and continued to teach philosophy in Berlin until Summer 1923. 1922 Köhler succeded Stumpf as director of the Institute of Psychology. 1923 With E. M. von Horbostel, edited four volumes of the classical Sammelbände für vergleichende Musikwissenschaft. The fourth volume contains a study on popular music in Romania by the well-known composor Béla Bartok. 1923 Festschrift in honor of Stumpf's 75th anniversary in the gestaltist journal Psychologische Forschung; this volume includes contributions by his students A. Gelb, C. von Allesch, W. Köhler, K. Koffka, M. Wertheimer, and K. Lewin, among others. 1926 Published the results of extensive research on the nature of vowels and sounds of speech in Die Sprachlaute; Experimentell-phonetische Untersuchungen. 1927-1928 Published a short biography on his friend W. James, based of their correspondence, William James nach seinen Briefen. 1928 Published Gefühl und Gefühlsempfindung, an important collection of papers on emotions and feelings. 1928 Celebrated his 80th birthday for which an allocution was given by his friend and colleague Max Planck. 1936 Carl Stumpf died on December 25 in Berlin at the age of 88. 1939-1940 On the recommendation of Max Planck, his son Felix Stumpf published the two volumes of his monumental work Erkenntnislehre. What Stumpf calls phenomenology in his two Academy treatises of 1906 is a field of study to which he dedicated many works, from his early investigation on the origin of spatial perception up to his 1926 book on vowels and phonetics. Note that this phenomenology is not to be confused with that of his student Husserl, whether in the latter's Logical Investigations, in which it is defined as descriptive psychology, or in his subsequent books, namely the first book of Ideas, in which it is understood as a transcendental phenomenology, and refers to a general program in philosophy. On the one hand, the field of phenomenology in Stumpf's sense is limited to phenomena and their properties, and is defined narrowly as a science of phenomena; on the other hand, while recognizing the significant contribution made by Husserl to phenomenology, Stumpf believes that the very idea of a “pure” phenomenology in Ideas I is simply a contradiction in itself. Stumpf's phenomenology is also different from Mach's phenomenalism and the latter's conception of the objects of physics as “permanent possibilities of sensation,” to use the expression found in J.S. Mill. Mach's doctrine of elements, while making an important contribution to the domain of phenomenology, must be dissociated from his empiricism, according to which objects of physics, just as those of psychology, are reducible to elements or to complexes of elements. Stumpf's reference regarding phenomenology is that of the physiologist E. Hering. Hering deserves merit for having recognized, for physiology and psychology, the importance of a preliminary study of phenomena and having thus conferred a privileged status to the field of phenomenology, in comparison to that of physics and physiology, serving as a starting point for empiricists such as Helmholtz. In fact, by adopting this starting point in Sehdinge, Hering would have recognized the methodological primacy of phenomenology over the other sciences and its propaedeutic status in the study of the essential properties or attributes (space, intensity, brightness, etc.) of sense phenomena. The study of formations and of objects of thought in general belongs to this second neutral science called “eidology,” an expression that Stumpf borrowed from Herbart. Stumpf first introduced the notion of formation [Gebilde] in 1902 in order to characterize the specific contents of functions or what he also calls the objective correlates of a psychical function. Formations are contents that enter into the consciousness by carrying out specific functions in the sense that to every class and subclass of acts there corresponds a certain content specific to each and every act. All psychical functions, from the simplest to the most complex, have their specific contents: concepts, states of affairs and values, to name only the most important ones. For example, the act of abstraction, which is responsible for the formation of concepts, namely the concept of space, has a concept as its own specific content. States of affairs are contents of judgment, and they are comparable to Meinong's objectives, Husserl's objectivity, and Bolzano's “proposition in itself,” and they play a central role in Stumpf's logic. They are “correlates” of thought, and contrary to individual acts, they have an objective character. The objectivity of formations, however, is not to be understood in terms of intentional inexistence (Brentano) or in the sense of Platonic realism (Bolzano and Frege), because any formation is logically dependent of the act that produces it, and the existence of states of affairs is logically linked to that of the act of judgment. States if affairs are therefore abstracted in the sense that they cannot exist independently of the acts by which they are produced. The same rule can be found in the field of more complex functions such as emotions, desires and voluntary actions, whose specific contents are values. The very possibility of a neutral science such as eidology shows that we can study values for themselves, independently of functions. Yet Stumpf claims that it is not possible to dissociate formations from their original functions. Relations form the third group of objects whose study belongs to a general theory of relations. This theory represents an important part of logic and of formal ontology whose task, in fact, is to study those laws governing formal relations between objects and parts of objects. This aspect of the general theory of relations is comparable to Husserl's pure logic, while in the field of psychology it corresponds to what Lotze calls “relational thought” and to the analysis of elementary mental structures in Dilthey's descriptive psychology. The relations of structure between psychical functions and the hierarchy within the domain of simple and complex functions obey what Stumpf refers to as “laws of structure” between parts or aspects of a whole. Its task is to establish relations between phenomena, functions, and formations and to investigate the origins of complex relations in simple relations, fixed by means of definition, and to determine the structural laws to which they obey. To these Grundverhälnisse or fundamental relations belong, among others, the concepts of analogy, equality, and fusion that Stumpf examines succinctly in the second volume of Tonpsychologie, as being the relations of logical and real dependency, the part-whole relations, and relations of real dependency between psychical functions. These relations are not “forms of thought” in a Kantian sense; they are not imposed on sensory material by means of any psychical functions; rather, they are immanent to phenomena and are perceptible directly and without intermediary. Sensory contents are noticed or remarked in themselves, and each of these relations is, to again use the scholastic expression, anens rationis cum fundamento in re. The notion of fusion designates one of the forms of relations that structure the sensory material. It defines itself as the relation between two phenomena (or contents of sensation) by virtue of which they do not merely form a sum, but a whole. Stumpf argues that those elements which fuse into a whole, for example the quality and intensity of sounds in a melody, are not changed, but that this relation of fusion establishes a narrower unity between these contents that is perceptible as a gestalt. To use the well-known case of the melody, moments of quality and of intensity form in that case a unitary whole which is perceptible as a “quality of form,” and it is precisely the unitary character of this perception, the fact that it is perceptible in one stroke and immediately as unitary form, that Stumpf tries to account for through his notion of a relation of fusion. Now, what is the place of philosophy in this classification of sciences? Considering Stumpf's involvement in the empirical fields of acoustics and ethnomusicology for example historians of philosophy have made contradictory judgments as to the philosophical bearing of his work. However, even in Stumpf's empirical research, philosophy has always remained the “lady of the house.” It is true that philosophy must start from below and that this bottom-up procedure is akin to the methodology of the natural sciences; but Stumpf's philosophy is as much alien to positivism as it is to constructivism and speculative philosophy in general. The importance he attached to the research domain of neutral sciences in philosophy and the task assigned to the sciences of nature in the study of these domains, clearly shows his distance from Kantianism. Stumpf believes, however, that the social sciences, understood as the sciences of complex functions, are privileged over the sciences of nature for reasons that explicitly concern the foundational status of descriptive psychology for human sciences and its central position in philosophy. In this regard, the philosophical disciplines par excellence, such as logic and ethics, are based on mental functions which, as we know, belong to the field of psychology. But philosophy as a whole is also distinct both from the sciences of nature and from the sciences of mind, in that it is the most general science of all. It defines itself as the science of the most general objects or metaphysics. As such, philosophy is prima philosophia, although in a sense quite different from the classical metaphysics, since it is meant as being in continuity with existent sciences. Its tasks are numerous and diverse, ranging from treating general issues related to time, and space to treating those related to mind-body problems. One of the questions to which Stumpf paid a particular attention was that of the psychophysical relations. In his studies on Spinoza and in his conference entitled “Body and Soul,” for example, Stumpf criticized the theory of parallelism that was dominant in the nineteenth century since Fechner, and which had adopted, after Lotze, the theory of interactionism, which recognizes the causal action of bodily processes on the psychical and vice versa. This interactionnism goes hand in hand with a form of critical realism, according to which the hypothesis of the existence of the spatiotemporal world is a necessary and unavoidable assumption, one that is also generally believed in the natural sciences. -------------------- http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilhelm-wundt/ In founding the experimental science of psychology, Wundt, in effect, simply “triangulated” a media via between the available options: he rejected Fechner's mysticism while maintaining his experimental approach; at the same time, Wundt went beyond the purely physical interpretation of physiological experiments à la Helmholtz, arguing that at least in humans experimentation could reveal law-like regularities of inner (psychological) reality. Thus, to use the phrase of Ben-David and Collins, he established the “hybrid science” whose dual provenance is expressed in Wundt's name for it, “physiological psychology” (Ben-David and Collins, 1966: 459; Kusch, 1995: 122, ff.).[21] Wundt's interest, both to scholars of the history of philosophy and to contemporary philosophers of mind, flows ultimately from the definition, methodology, and “metaphysics” of this physiological psychology. Sections 3 and 4 are devoted to a description of its definition, method, and doctrine, while Section 5 concerns its theoretical underpinnings. The practical and theoretical limits of experimental psychology will be treated in Section 6, on Völkerpsychologie. ---------------------- http://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/crisis/psycri13.htm And we assert that this line will lie in between the formulas of Husserl and Feuerbach. The thing is that in Marxism the problem of epistemology with regard to psychology has not been stated at all and the task of distinguishing the two problems about which Høffding is talking did not arise. The idealists, on the other hand, elaborated this idea with great clarity. And we claim that the viewpoint of our “Marxists” is Machism in psychology: it is the identification of being and consciousness. It is one of two things: either the mind is directly given to us in introspection, and then we side with Husserl; or we must distinguish subject and object, being and thinking in it, and then we side with Feuerbach. But what does this imply? It implies that my joy and my introspectional comprehension of this joy are different things. There is a citation from Feuerbach that is very popular in Russia: “what for me [or subjectively] is a [purely] mental, non-material, suprasensory act, is in itself [or objectively] a material, sensory act” [Feuerbach]. It is usually cited in confirmation of subjective psychology. But this speaks against it. One may wonder what we must study: this act as such, as it is, or as it appears to me? As with the analogous question about the objective existence of the world, the materialist does not hesitate and says: the objective act as such. The idealist will say: my perception. But then one and the same act will turn out to be different depending on whether I am drunk or sober, whether I am a child or an adult, whether it is today or yesterday, whether it regards me or you. What is more, it turns out that in introspection we cannot directly perceive thinking, comparison – these are unconscious acts and our introspectional comprehension of them is not a functional concept, i.e., it is not deduced from objective experience. What must we, what can we study: thinking as such or the thinking of thinking? There can be no doubt whatsoever about the answer to this question. But there is one complication which prevents us from reaching a clear answer. All philosophers who have attempted to divide psychology have stumbled upon this complication. Stumpf distinguished mental functions from phenomena and asked who, which science, will study the phenomena rejected by physics and psychology. He assumed that a special science would develop which is neither psychology nor physics. Another psychologist (Pfander, 1904) refused to accept sensations as the subject matter of psychology for the sole reason that physics refuses to accept them. What place is left for them? Husserl’s phenomenology is the answer to this question. In Russia it is also asked: if you will study thinking as such and not the thinking of thinking; the act as such and not the act for me; the objective and not the subjective – who, then, will study the subjective itself, the subjective distortion of objects? In physics we try to eliminate the subjective factor from what we perceive as an object. In psychology, when we study perception it is again required to separate perception as such, as it is, from how it seems to me. Who will study what has been eliminated both times, this appearance? But the problem of appearance is an apparent problem. After all, in science we want to learn about the real and not the apparent cause of appearance. This means that we must take the phenomena as they exist independently from me. The appearance itself is an illusion (in Titchener’s basic example: Muller-Lyer’s lines are physically equal, psychologically one of them is longer). This is the difference between the viewpoints of physics and psychology. It does not exist in reality, but results from two non-coincidences of two really existing processes. If I would know the physical nature of the two lines and the objective laws of the eye, as they are in themselves, I would get the explanation of the appearance, of the illusion as a result. The study of the subjective factor in the knowledge of this illusion is a subject of logic and the historical theory of knowledge: just like being, the subjective is the result of two processes which are objective in themselves. The mind is not always a subject. In introspection it is split into object and subject. The question is whether in introspection phenomenon and being coincide. One has only to apply the epistemological formula of materialism, given by Lenin (a similar one can be found in Plekhanov) for the psychological subject-object, in order to see what is the matter: the only ‘property’ of matter connected with philosophical materialism is the property of being an objective reality, of existing outside of our consciousness ... Epistemologically the concept of matter means nothing other than objective reality, existing independently from human consciousness and reflected by it. [Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism] Elsewhere Lenin says that this is, essentially, the principle of realism, but that he avoids this word, because it has been captured by inconsistent thinkers. Thus, this formula seemingly contradicts our viewpoint: it cannot be true that consciousness exists outside our consciousness. But, as Plekhanov has correctly established, self-consciousness is the consciousness of consciousness. And consciousness can exist without self-consciousness: we become convinced of this by the unconscious and the relatively unconscious. I can see not knowing that I see. That is why Pavlov [1928] is right when he says that we can live according to subjective states, but that we cannot analyse them. ------------------ http://lchc.ucsd.edu/MCA/Paper/crisis/psycri01.htm#p100 In the latter, this leading role of psychopathology is no longer connected with the central concept of the unconscious, as in Freud and Adler, i.e., not with the actual priority of the given discipline in the elaboration of the basic idea, but with a fundamental methodological view according to which the essence and nature of the phenomena studied by psychology can be revealed in their purest form in the extreme, pathological forms. We should, consequently, proceed from pathology to the norm and explain and understand the normal person from pathology, and not the other way around, as has been done until now. The key to psychology is in pathology, not only because it discovered and studied the root of the mind earlier than other branches, but because this is the internal nature of things, and the nature of the scientific knowledge of these things is conditioned by it. Whereas for traditional psychology every psychopath as a subject for study is more or less — to a different degree — a normal person and must be defined in relation to the latter, for the new systems each normal person is more or less insane and must be psychologically understood precisely as a variant of some pathological type. To put it in more straightforward terms, in certain systems the normal person is considered as a type and the pathological personality as a variety or variant of this main type; in others, on the contrary, the pathological phenomenon is taken as a type and the normal as one of its varieties. And who can predict how the future general psychology will decide this debate? On the basis of such dual motives (based half on facts, half on principle) still other systems assign the leading role to zoopsychology. Of this kind are, for example, the majority of the American courses in the psychology of behaviour and the Russian courses in reflexology, which develop their whole system from the concept of the conditional reflex and organise all-their material around it. A number of authors propose that animal psychology, apart from being given the actual priority in the elaboration of the basic concepts of behaviour, should become the general discipline with which the other disciplines should be correlated. As the logical beginning of a science of behaviour, the starting point for every genetic examination and explanation of the mind, and a purely biological science, it is precisely this science which is expected to elaborate the fundamental concepts of the science and to supply them to kindred disciplines. This, for example, is the view of Pavlov. What psychologists do can in his opinion have no influence upon animal psychology, but what zoopsychologists do determines the work of psychologists in a very essential way. The latter build the superstructure, but the former lay the foundation [Pavlov, 1928, Lectures on Conditioned Reflex]. And indeed, the source from which we derive all our basic categories for the investigation and description of behaviour, the standard we use to verify our results, the model according to which we align our methods, is zoopsychology. _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
