Early Psychology

Early Psychology

Epistomology
1. Epistomology is the branch of philosophy that is concerned with knowledge
Rationalism
1. Knowledge is innate and derived from reasoning, some ideas come from god
2. Plato
3. Descartes
  1. Reasoned we know we must exist, but evil daemons or god may deceive us
    1. God does not allow us to have clear and distinct thoughts (perfection), he places innate ideas into us
  2. He only accepted beliefs of which there could be no doubt
    1. Examined our empirical beliefs as our senses fail us all the time. We have local doubts which are doubts about a particular sense experience
      1. He argued that if he was doubting, then he knew that he existed - "I think, therefore I am"
Empiricism
1. Knowledge is derived from experiences and the senses
  1. Aristotle
2. Locke
  1. The mind isn't born empty, machinery for appetites and imagination
  2. The mind is a tabula rasa, aka a blank slate
  3. Combination, relation, and generalisation make more complex ideas
3. Hume
  1. Distinguished two sense experiences: impressions and ideas - together these make more complex ideas
  2. Our mind is a bundle of sensations: bundle theory
  3. Two kinds of intellectual inquiry: relations of ideas, and matter of fact
    1. We trace each simple idea down to its impressions. If no idea attaches to a term, the term has no meaning
Rationalism versus empiricism
1. Descartes vs Hume
2. Leibniz
  1. Critical of the tabula rasa, doesn't believe the mind is passive, instead it works on and transforms sensory experiences and we have innate ideas
    1. He criticised Descartes and disagreed that all mental states are conscious. He believed animals had feelings and souls
  2. Rationalist
3. Kant
  1. Aimed to synthesise rationalism and empiricism, the mind can have innate knowledge AND have experience from the senses
  2. Distinguished noumena and phenomena
  3. Analytic and synthetic statements
    1. Analytic = tautological, thing being said in the statement is contained in the subject, rational knowledge
    2. Synthetic = no tautological, giving you new information, empirical knowledge
    3. We assume a synthetic a priori (rational) knowledge, the mind constructs a priori to structure our experience and knowledge
      1. Space, time, and causality
Natural philosophophy
1. A philosophical approach to the natural world, e.g., physics and chemistry.
Phrenology
1. A belief that a person's character can be read from their skull
2. Broca and Wernickes area
3. Example of faculty psychology - the mind is comprised of distinct mental components
Physiognomy
1. A belief that a person's character can be read in their face, idea is tainted with scientific racism, biased judgements
2. Francis Galton
Psychophysics
1. Aim is to find the mathematical laws that relate psychic quantities to physical qualities.
  1. Weber
    1. Hobby was to lift two weights which revealed a consistent threshold for each person and condition
      1. He also derived the two-point threshold - minimum separation that people could report as "two points"
        It relies on subjective feeling.
    2. Discovered the Just Noticable Difference, the Weber fraction, relationships between bodily senses, the double-sensation of pain, the temp-weight illusion, individual differences in perception, and receptive fields.
  2. Fechner
    1. Main experiment was psychophysical scaling - larger increases in physical intensity are needed to give the same increase in perceived intensity
Wundt
1. Preferred an active, creative mind.
  1. Voluntarism - we voluntarily decide what our mind attends
    1. Titchener developed this view and broke the consciousness into its elements
Richards, 2002 - historical context of psychology

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