And more on the physiologists--Vvedensky, Bekhterev and Pavlov, including excerpts from Vygotsky's take on them (which brings me to the conclusion that Vygotsky actually agrees some with Husserl on the 'crisis'). I think Pavlov had the largest impact on American behaviourists (and remember it was the Americans who helped to get the Russians going on behaviourism in the first place) probably because of a couple very good translations and the 'generalizability' of his methods to experimentation in the US. Bekhterev appears to be the more expansive thinker. I don't know much about Vvedensky at all.
V, B and P were all physiologists first, but Vygotsky was a 'semiotician'. CJ Bekhterev http://books.google.com/books?id=IqVeqasmsSAC&dq=reflexology+soviet+union&source=gbs_navlinks_s http://books.google.com/books?id=IqVeqasmsSAC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_navlinks_s#v=onepage&q=&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=IqVeqasmsSAC&pg=PA45&dq=reflexology+soviet+union&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=8#v=onepage&q=reflexology%20soviet%20union&f=false http://www.amazon.com/Collective-Reflexology-Complete-V-M-Bekhterev/dp/0765800098 Product Description Vladimir Mikhailovitch Bekhterev was a pioneering Russian neurologist, psychiatrist, and psychologist. A highly esteemed rival of Ivan Pavlov, his achievements in the areas of personality, clinical psychology, and political and social psychology were recognized and acclaimed throughout the world. Publication of the complete text of Collective Reflexology brings to the English-speaking world this brilliant scientist's final theoretical statements on how reflexological principles, which he had been developing over a quarter century, can be extended far beyond analysis of the individual personality. Bekhterev's work grows out of his interest in group psychology and suggestion. This concept of the reflex is much broader than Pavlov's. It is applicable to every variety of life. Bekhterev compared his own analyses to those of other European thinkers such as Comte, LeBon, and Sorokin. Such analyses strained against the official Marxist-Leninist doctrines of the era. Bekhterev died in 1927, allegedly of poisoning by Stalin's henchman. As with many scientists during the Soviet era, his legacy was suppressed. In the normal course of events his name would have been as well known as that of Freud, Pavlov or, more lately, B.F. Skinner. This first publication of Bekhterev's great work in English fills a void in the fields of psychology, sociology, and the history of science. About the Author V.M. Bekhterev was director of the Military Medical Academy in St. Petersburg and founded there its Psychoneurological Institute. Among his many books are Suggestion: Its Role in Social Life (available from Transaction) and The Subject Matter and Goals of Social Psychology. Lloyd H. Strickland is professor of psychology at Carleton University. He is the author of numerous journal articles and editor of Directions in Soviet Social Psychology and Soviet and Western Perspectives in Social Psychology. http://lchc.ucsd.edu/mca/Paper/crisis/6_dir/6_s4.htm It is this feeling of a system, the sense of a [common] style, the understanding that each particular statement is linked with and dependent upon the central idea of the whole system of which it forms a part, which is absent in the essentially eclectic attempts at combining the parts of two or more systems that are hetero- geneous and diverse in scientific origin and composition. Such are, for instance, the synthesis of behaviorism and Freudian theory in the American literature; Freu- dian theory without Freud in the systems of Adler and Jung; the reflexological Freu- dian theory of Bekhterev and Zalkind; finally, the attempts to combine Freudian theory and Marxism (Luria, 1925; Fridman, 1925). So many examples from the area of the problem of the subconscious alone! In all these attempts the tail of one system is taken and placed against the head of another and the space between them is filled with the trunk of a third. It isn’t that they are incorrect, these mon- strous combinations, they are correct to the last decimal point, but the question they wish to answer is stated incorrectly. We can multiply the number of citizens of Paraguay with the number of kilometers from the earth to the sun and divide the product by the average life span of the elephant and carry out the whole op- eration irreproachably, without a mistake in any number, and nevertheless the final outcome might mislead someone who is interested in the national income of this country. What the eclectics do, is to reply to a question raised by Marxist philosophy with an answer prompted by Freudian metapsychology. In order to show the methodological illegitimacy of such attempts, we will first dwell upon three types of combining incompatible questions and answers, without 2 thinking for one moment that these three types exhaust the variety of such attempts. The first way in which any school assimilates the scientific products of another area consists of the direct transposition of all laws, facts, theories, ideas etc., the usurpation of a more or less broad area occupied by other investigators, the an- nexation of foreign territory. Such a politics of direct usurpation is common for each new scientific system which spreads its influence to adjacent disciplines and lays claim to the leading role of a general science. Its own material is insufficient and after just a little critical work such a system absorbs foreign bodies, submits • them, filling the emptiness of its inflated boundaries. Usually one gets a conglom- crate of scientific theories, facts, etc. which have been squeezed into the framework of the unifying idea with horrible arbitrariness. Such is the system of Bekhterev’s reflexology. He can use anything: even• Vvedensky’s theory about the unknowabiity of the external ego, i.e., an extreme expression of solipsism and idealism in psychology, provided that this theory clearly confirms his particular claim about the need for an objective method. [13] That it breaches the general sense of the whole system, that it undermines the foundations of the realistic approach to personality does not matter to this author (we observe that Vvedensky, too, fortifies himself and his theory with a reference to the work of.. . Pavlov, without understanding that by turning for help to a system of objective psychology he extends a hand to his grave-digger). But for the methodologist it is highly significant that such antipodes as Vvedensky-Pavlov and Bekhterev—Vveden- I: sky do not merely contradict each other, but necessarily presuppose each other’s existence and view the coincidence of theft conclusions as evidence for “the rei- ability of these conclusions.” For this third person [the methodologist, Russian eds.] it is clear that we are not dealing here with a coincidence of conclusions which were reached fully independently by representatives of different specialties, for cx- http://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/crisis/psycri08.htm This dogma – of immediate experience as the single source and natural boundary of scientific knowledge – in principle makes or breaks the whole theory of subjective and objective methods. Vvedensky and Bekhterev grow from a single root: both hold that science can only study what is given in self-observation, i.e., in the immediate perception of the psychological. Some rely on the mental eye and build a whole science in conformity with its properties and the boundaries of its action. Others do not rely on it and only wish to study what can be seen with the real eye. This is why I say that reflexology, methodologically speaking, is built entirely according to the principle that history should be defined as the science of the documents of the past. Due to the many fruitful principles of the natural sciences, reflexology proved to be a highly progressive current in psychology, but as a theory of method it is deeply reactionary, because it leads us back to the naive sensualistic prejudice that we can only study what can be perceived and to the extent we perceive it. Just as physics is liberating itself from anthropomorphic elements, i.e., from specific sensory sensations and is proceeding with the eye fully excluded, so psychology must work with the concept of the mental: direct self-observation must be excluded like muscular sensation in mechanics and visual sensation in optics. The subjectivists believe that they refuted the objective method when they showed that genetically speaking the concepts of behavior contain a grain of self-observation – c.f. Chelpanov (1925), Kravkov (1922), Portugalov (1925).[22] But the genetic origin of a concept says nothing about its logical nature: genetically, the concept of force in mechanics also goes back to muscular sensation. The problem of self-observation is a problem of technique and not of principle. It is an instrument amidst a number of other instruments, as the eye is for physicists. We must use it to the extent that it is useful, but there is no need to pronounce judgments of principle about it – e.g., about the limitations of the knowledge obtained with it, its reliability, or the nature of the knowledge determined by it. Engels demonstrated how little the natural construction of the eye determines the boundaries of our knowledge of the phenomena of light. Planck says the same on behalf of contemporary physics. To separate the fundamental psychological concept from the specific sensory perception is psychology’s next task. This sensation itself, self-observation itself, must be explained (like the eye) from the postulates, methods, and universal principles of psychology. It must become one of psychology’s particular problems. ..... The following is extremely important: the reaction is an answer. An answer can only be studied according to the quality of its relation with the question, for this is the sense of answer which is not found in perception but in interpretation. This is the way everybody proceeds. Bekhterev distinguishes the creative reflex. A problem is the stimulus, and creativity is the response reaction or a symbolic reflex. But the concepts of creativity and symbol are semantic concepts, not experiential ones: a reflex is creative when it stands in such a relation to a stimulus that it creates something new; it is symbolic when it replaces another reflex. But we cannot see the symbolic or creative nature of a reflex. Pavlov distinguishes the reflexes of freedom and purpose, the food reflex and the defense reflex. But neither freedom nor purpose can be seen, nor do they have an organ like, for example, the organs for nutrition; nor are they functions. They consist of the same movements as the other ones. Defense, freedom, and purpose – they are the meanings of these reflexes. Kornilov distinguishes emotional reactions, selective, associative reactions, the reaction of recognition, etc. It is again a classification according to their meaning, i.e., on the basis of the interpretation of the relation between stimulus and response. Watson, accepting similar distinctions based on meaning, openly says that nowadays the psychologist of behavior arrives by sheer logic at the conclusion that there is a hidden process of thinking. By this he is becoming conscious of his method and brilliantly refutes Titchener, who defended the thesis that the psychologist of behavior, exactly because of being a psychologist of behavior, cannot accept the existence of a process of thinking when he is not in the situation to observe it immediately and must use introspection to reveal thinking. Watson demonstrated that he in principle isolates the concept of thinking from its perception in introspection, just like the thermometer emancipates us from sensation when we develop the concept of heat. That is why he [1926, p. 301] emphasizes: If we ever succeed in scientifically studying the intimate nature of thought. ... then we will owe this to a considerable extent to the scientific apparatus. However even now the psychologist is not in such a deplorable situation: physiologists as well are often satisfied with the observation of the end results and utilize logic. ... The adherent of the psychology of behavior feels that with respect to thinking he must keep to exactly the same position [ibid., p. 302]. Meaning as well is for Watson an experimental problem. We find it in what is given to us through thinking. Thorndike (1925) distinguishes the reactions of feeling, conclusion, mood, and cunning. Again [we are dealing with] interpretation. The whole matter is simply how to interpret – by analogy with one’s introspection, biological functions, etc. That is why Koffka [1925, pp. 10/13] is right when he states: There is no objective criterion for consciousness, we do not know whether an action has consciousness or not, but this does not make us unhappy at all. However, behavior is such that the consciousness belonging to it, if it exists at all, must have such and such a structure. Therefore behavior must be explained in the same way as consciousness. Or in other words, put paradoxically: if everybody had only those reactions which can be observed by all others, nobody could observe anything,i.e., scientific observation is based upon transcending the boundaries of the visible and upon a search for its meaning which cannot be observed. He is right. He was right [Koffka, 1924, pp. 152/160] when he claimed that behaviorism is bound to be fruitless when it will study only the observable, when its ideal is to know the direction and speed of the movements of each limb, the secretion of each gland, resulting from a fixed stimulation. Its area would then be restricted to the physiology of the muscles and the glands. The description “this animal is running away from some danger,” however insufficient it may be, is yet a thousand times more characteristic for the animal’s behavior than a formula giving us the movements of all its legs with their varying speeds, the curves of breath, pulse, and so forth. Köhler (1917) demonstrated in practice how we may prove the presence of thinking in apes without any introspection and even study the course and structure of this process through the method of the interpretation of objective reactions. Kornilov (1922) demonstrated how we may measure the energetic budget of different thought operations using the indirect method: the dynamoscope is used by him as a thermometer. Wundt’s mistake resided in the mechanical application of equipment and the mathematical method to check and correct. He did not use them to extend introspection, to liberate himself from it, but to tie himself to it. In most of Wundt’s investigations introspection was essentially superfluous. It was only necessary to single out the unsuccessful experiments. In principle it is totally unnecessary in Kornilov’s theory. But psychology must still create its thermometer. Korniov’s research indicates the path. We may summarize the conclusions from our investigation of the narrow sensualist dogma by again referring to Engels’ words about the activity of the eye which in combination with thinking helps us to discover that ants see what is invisible to us. Psychology has too long striven for experience instead of knowledge. In the present example it preferred to share with the ants their visual experience of the sensation of chemical beams rather than to understand their vision scientifically. As to the methodological spine that is supporting them there are two scientific systems. Methodology is always like the backbone, the skeleton in the animal’s organism. Very primitive animals, like the snail and the tortoise, carry their skeleton on the outside and they can, like an oyster, be separated from their skeleton. What is left is a poorly differentiated fleshy part. Higher animals carry their skeleton inside and make it into the internal support, the bone of each of their movements. In psychology as well we must distinguish lower and higher types of methodological organization. http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=buy.optionToBuy&id=1965-06184-001&CFID=4435233&CFTOKEN=44750531 Article Selected Buy Now Button $11.95 Russian physiologists' psychology and American experimental psychology: A historical and a systematic collation and a look into the future. By Razran, Gregory Psychological Bulletin. Vol 63(1), Jan 1965, 42-64. Abstract Sechenov was the originator of the basic theoretics of Russia's distinct physiologists' psychology. Pavlov and Bekhterev were its experimental verifiers and validators. Watson's Behaviorism arose as an independent development of American experimental psychology but interacted almost immediately with Russian-opened new experimental vistas. The vast influence of the English translations (1927 and 1928) of Pavlov's 2 conditioned reflex books on American psychological systematics is fully discussed, as is also the distinctness of the Pavlov system vis-à-vis specific American systems and American psychology in general. The language barrier is shown to be a unique factor in Russo-American experimental and theoretical parallels and divergencies. Brain behavior is the keynote of current Soviet physiologists' psychology and is increasingly dominating recent American experimental psychology. Significant Russo-American rapprochements in the basics of psychology seem imminent. (4-p. ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved) _______________________________________________ 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
