History of Psychology 2007

Lecture 2

Professor Gerald C. Cupchik

Office: S634

Email: cupchik@utsc.utoronto.ca

Office Hours: Wednesdays 1-2 pm

Thursdays 12-1 pm

T.A: Michelle Hilscher

Office: S150

Email: hilscher@utsc.utoronto.ca

Office Hours: Thursdays 11-12; 3-4 pm

Course Website: www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~cupchik

Textbook:

Benjafield, J. History of Psychology.

Oxford University Press

Midterm:

October 25, 2007

Origin of the term psychology:

psyche - psykhe (anc. Greek) - stuff you breathe or blow

pneuma - to breathe or blow

Jeremy Bentham called psychology pneumatology:

- Connection between being alive and breathing

- Air/gas & breathing and mind - relates to the concept of animus

(1) Wind or air can move things: body remains while possibility of action is gone - led to the idea that life continues in another sphere… raises issue of life after death.

(2) Last gasp at death - so breath and soul are related - In Genesis, G-d breathes into man’s nostrils the “breath of life”.

In all early Greek physiology, the vital processes are associated with air or something like it that circulates through the arteries or nerves.

Wolff, a student of Leibniz, established the term psychology in titles of his two volumes:

Psychologia Rationalis (1732)

Psychologia Empirica (1734)

Leibniz still used the term pneumatology.

The Early Development of Psychology

Psychology emerged from folk customs, interests and beliefs of a pre-scientific age.

Small Scale Societies:

(1) Established routine behaviour learning relations of sight, sound, plants or animals and sensation of heat, taste, pain, and so on.

(2) They had to deal with incalculable events - disease, death, tornados, etc.

The Black Plague

They used three kinds of actions to handle these situations.

(1) Magical actions that result from fortuitous association (e.g., spit and “cause” a landslide)

Superstitious behaviour: Human sexual relations in the fields are necessary to ensure good food crops.

Principle of association: Anything in contact with a person or some source of power has thereby acquired some potency. So operations on extracted teeth and so on may inflict injury upon the person.

Principle of similarity: Things resembling one another are related (e.g., yellow flowers may cure jaundice)

(2) Animism: A person reacts to an emotion arousing situation as though in or behind it and “causing” it were a being with some human properties.

Animus: mind or soul

Stars & plants treated as though spirit or will controls their actions.

Animism serves as a general theory of nature which provides attitudes and patterns of behaviour for all things and events.

Origins of Animism:

(1) Humans and animals have a capacity for self movement.

(2) Other things are set in motion by humans.

(3) There are exceptions like clouds or the sun.

(4) Think that animation applies to these exceptions.

(5) So clouds are inanimate objects pushed by beings like humans or animals.

In polytheism the cloud itself is alive.

In Greek mythology, Apollo (i) pushes the sun or (ii) is the sun.

Issue of Spirit (anemos = wind)

(1) Connection between being alive and breathing

(2) Wind or air can move things around

(3) You can’t see air but it moves things

So: Air makes people move about.

So: Air or gas related to breathing and mind

(1) Something inside you keeps you going

(2) Later identified with air

(3) Believe that air was not material until the 17th Century

Not quite between material and non-material.

Aristotle: Air has no weight and is suitable to mediate between mind and body.

Animism also permits analysis of situations: terrible sounds are hidden man’s voice.

(3) Religion. Greek gods represent, on the one hand, an analysis of external structure (sky, ocean, winds) and also forces of human personality. So both external and internal forces, by being embodied in familiar human forms, become more tolerable because they can be verbalized, anticipated, and propitiated in human terms.

Propitiatory behaviour: praying and so on permits tension reducing form of adjustment.

Adaptive value of magical and religious behaviour:

(1) Alternative to intolerable conflict and completely disorganized emotional behaviour.

(2) Develop into socialized traditional forms which provide group coherence, moral sanctions, and mental defense and therapy.

(3) Under exceptional circumstances promote a keenness of observation and an accumulation of knowledge from which a scientific attitude can emerge.

EMERGENCE OF THE TWO BASIC PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES

Religion of the Olympian Gods

- Based on Homeric poems - written for the nobility.

- Heroic age of wealth and colonial expansion.

- Privileged classes enjoyed pleasure and leisured life with intellectual and artistic pursuits.

- Relative freedom from anxiety was reflected in their religious beliefs.

- They had gentlemanly, amoral and sometimes irascible gods living lives like the nobility.

- No life after death, except for a few heroes (Elysian Fields)

- All humans enter into a gloomy underworld of Hades as pale shadows without consciousness or personality.

The Olympians

EMERGENCE OF THE TWO BASIC PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES

Religion of the Olympian Gods

- The essential part of personality is the will and mental powers in the breast (heart or diaphragm) which are annihilated at death.

- The immortal soul-breath (psyche), a pale phantom issues from mouth of the dying (without memory, will or personality).

- This “second self” was active when the body was unconscious, in sleep or death, and played no role in waking life.

Orphic Mystery Religious view based on legend of Dionysus

- In the 5th & 6th centuries BC - transition from the age of kings and nobles to commercial and colonial expansion.

- Easy life and intellectual freedom rested on a large class of peasants and slaves, many of foreign origins living in a state of political and economic uncertainty.

- The mystery religion offered (through fasting and dramatic ritual) an ecstatic freeing of the soul from the body (viewed as a prison).

- This approach believed in the transmigration of souls: the immortal soul had committed a sin during its divine existence for which it was doomed to enter a succession of plant, animal and human bodies.

- People could be freed from the “cycle of births” by living a “pure” life.

- So: in the “poor man’s religion” the notion of soul, the bearer of all mental faculties degraded by temporary association with an unclean body, but were separable from it. Immortality became an issue in subsequent Greek philosophy. Led to idea of organic development.

The Origins of Naturalism

Among Greeks of the coastal cities of Asia Minor (now Turkey) in the 6th century BC there were favorable conditions for intellectual activity.

(1) Contact with different civilizations (Egypt, Persia).

(2) Commercial prosperity and colonial expansion.

(3) A need for the practical application of science.

(4) Absence of religious dogmatism and a resulting freedom of thought.

The ideas derive from an Olympian approach to religion.

The goal of philosophers was to describe the “ultimate nature of the universe” in terms of first principles but they had no scientific knowledge of matter and only their religious tradition.

Philosophers began the study of metaphysics in Western thought. (Metaphysics is concerned with the ultimate nature of reality.)

They assumed that by using whatever data were available to them - data derived from unaided and uncontrolled sense organs and from introspection, they could, by the powers of human thought work out the “ultimate” nature, composition and plan of the universe.

(1) They drew no line between objective facts & subjective opinion.

(2) No idea of what a hypothesis is.

Pre-science: An early idea was that the movement of heavenlybodies was the work of capricious demons. So the discovery in Babylonia that eclipses of the sun and moon recur in definite cycles led them to assume a rational “plan” of the universe. If the universe had a rational plan then wise men should be able to puzzle out its structure and relations.

Development of Science:

We need to recognize the futility of questions such as: “What is the nature of reality?” or “What is the ultimate principle of the universe?”

We need to:

(1) Learn to set limited problems which can be empirically investigated.

(2) Learn to formulate propositions which can be empirically tested.

(3) Regard hypotheses as tentative and instrumental.

(4) Regard knowledge as limited and relative.

The origins of naturalism emphasize the material aspects of the universe.

Ionian Physicists (from Miletus in Asia Minor) sought to determine the physis - the basic nature and constitution of things.

These scholars were the first to offer a non-mythological description of the universe as an orderly system of which human beings are an infinitesimal component.

They formulated postulates which reduce heterogeneity of the sensible world into “ultimate stuff”.

- This material or “matter” was living rather than dead.

- The physis was a soul substance pervading the universe, also humans and animals, and constituted the principle of life and motion.

- The physis was earth, air (Anaximenes), water (Thales) or fire (Heraclitus).

- Empedocles combined and recognized all four elements.

Later thinkers related them to four qualities:

Earth - cold

Air - dry

Fire - warm

Water - moist

Hylozoism - all nature is animate - matter & life are inseparable

Anaximander

- animal life rose from sun-baked mud and man from a fish- like form (Darwin)

- the emergence of qualities of opposites from the boundless.

Religious Origins of Laws

The earlier idea of moral order which governs the distribution of things in life - human and nature.

For anything to trespass was an “injustice”. They had a concept of proper balance: an excess of earth, air, fire or water needed a penalty to restore an equilibrium.

These religious constructions were projections of human social arrangements (orderly society).

The Olympic schema that each god was allotted his sphere (heaven, earth, ocean) was extended by the philosophers as a principle governing the proportion of things in the universe; proportion of fire, air, earth and water. An excess of any was an injustice.

They retained the concept of moral order but eliminated the gods.

So the moral law Moira of the Greeks became the “natural law” of modern thought.

In the transition from the Ionian Physicists to the Atomists, the concept of god, soul and life became attenuated and the universe was conceived as a material continuum whose activity consisted of mechanical motion or change of position in space.

School of Atomists

* Early materialist thinkers.

* Only change since then has been in new kinds of matter that mind is made up from.

Basic Ideas:

1. The universe is composed of atoms of different shapes and sizes that are otherwise alike.

2. Atoms are in constant motion in empty space.

3. Atoms cannot be destroyed.

Implications for modern thought:

1. Indestructibility of matter.

2. Conservation of matter.

3. Determinism - Nothing happens by chance but for some reason and of necessity.

Pre-Socratic Thinkers

Leukippus

1. Atoms at first are distributed evenly and moving irregularly, driven by no known force.

2. In the course of chance movements they gravitate together to form masses known as bodies.

3. The mechanical process of impact and pressure is the only way to affect other things.

These ideas were extended to the mind:

1. The body consists of large and slow moving atoms.

2. The mind/soul consists of extremely small and mobile atoms able to penetrate the space between larger body atoms.

3. Atoms also mediate between objects & senses in consciousness.

Pre-Socratic Thinkers

Leukippus continued...

4. The quality of sensation is determined by the shape of atoms.

Taste: Sourness is caused by sharp angular atoms.

Sight/Hearing: Particles emanate from objects and enter sense organs and then the soul within.

Colour: Depends on the shape of the atoms.

Democritus (ca. 460-370 BC) - Student of Leukippus

He assigned different mental powers to different parts of the body.

Brain = Thought Heart = Anger Liver = Desire

He appears to have performed dissections on animals and arrived at his ideas on this basis.

Aristotle rejected his ideas and was wrong.

* Thought is superior to sensory perception.

Cheerfulness - Calm of the body and health of the soul.

- The aim of right action is happiness.

- Knowledge of the Good and tranquility of the spirit are superior to sensual pleasure.

- Apply test of judgment to pleasure.

Moral autonomy of reason - avoid action of which you will be ashamed in your own eyes.

Aristotle

Materialist Doctrine and Democritus

1. Everything can be reduced to one primary substance.

2. There is no underlying unity to nature.

3. There are no laws other than the laws of physical science.

Materialism is:

1. Monistic

- Rejects mind/matter distinction

- Matter is fundamental

- Explain all by physical laws

2. Atomistic

- Reduce complex to simple

- Reduce matter to small parts which are accepted as fundamental

3. Reduces quality to quantity

- Qualities such as red & blue, sweet & sour, warm & cold are reduced to wavelengths of light, chemical reactions in receptors and transmission of molecular motion.

- Qualities are secondary, to be restated eventually as quantitative differences in the behaviour of a single primary substance.

4. Reduces function to structure

- Organisms behave as if trying to maintain themselves, seeking appropriate food, defending against danger, selecting mates.

- These are organismic functions with purpose.

- From a materialist viewpoint, purpose cannot exist in nature. Purposive functions must be explained in terms of structures which have evolved (through natural selection) in such a way that the species is preserved.

- The structure is inherited or built up through learning (e.g., structure of the eye).

- The fine distinctions of logicians refer to structural relations among cortical elements.

5. Explains psychology in terms of non-psychology

- Perceiving, remembering, thinking and choosing are useful descriptively.

- Proper explanation must use constructs from a more basic science (neurophysiology).

- Thus memory is explained as the persistence of changes in synaptic resistance.

- Choice reflects the domination of one efferent pathway over another.

- Can seek even more fundamental sciences.

- But no complete reduction is yet possible.

Modern Materialism

- Newtonian revolution in physics

- Darwin closes the animal-human gap

Summary:

Intellectual atmosphere behind naturalism has its theological origins in the Olympian gods.

It favoured a spatial scheme which analyzed the universe in terms of material substances occupying space and changing position in space through contact.

Origins of Anti-Naturalism

Opposing naturalism was a mystical tradition associated with Dionysus. According to this view, the group was bound together in a common life which transcended every individual and was immortal.

There was an emphasis on cycles of birth, death and rebirth from:

1. A model of seasons with vegetative growth and decay

2. Cycle of heavenly bodies.

This led to a vitalistic perspective according to which evolving life defies mechanical analysis.

Vitalism versus Naturalism-Mechanism

Origins of Idealism

Pythagoras (582-500 BC) combined religious mysticism, music, mathematics, medicine, cosmology.

Basic religious ideas:

1. Transmigration of souls - universal kinship, admit women to order, humane treatment of slaves.

2. Release from “cycle of births”

- ritual taboos (abstain from eating meat)

- purification of soul by mental work and music

- bodily purification by gymnastics and medicine

Related to a search for true constants:

1. Psychophysics - sensory threshold

2. Weber-Fechner constant

3. Equation of the learning curve

4. IQ

SOPHISTS: taught rhetoric, oratory and legalistic reasoning.

Science: All things are numbers! Particular numbers correspond to ultimate realities in the universe. (Pythagoras discovered that tonal pitch was a function of the length of a string.)