Abstract
The year 1879 is generally regarded as seminal in the history of psychology; it is widely agreed that this marks the official beginning of modern psychology.
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Notes
- 1.
Despite widespread agreement on this point, the marking of this date as the beginning of modern psychology is not met with universal assent. Hatfield has argued that it “obscures the disciplinary and theoretical continuity of the new experimental psychology with a previous, natural philosophical psychology. And it goes together with a story of rapid antagonism between philosophy and psychology at century’s turn, which itself seriously misrepresents the state of play between philosophers and psychologists at the time” (Hatfield 2002, p. 209). The classic discussion of this issue is Boring’s (1965) paper “On the subjectivity of important historical dates: Leipzig 1879,” where he concludes that there is “a very considerable element of subjectivity in the establishment of this date” (Boring 1965, p. 6). For our present purposes, we shall not take a position on this matter. However, it is worthwhile to note that one purpose of the present chapter is to make salient the profound philosophical continuity that exists between the associationistic thought of Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Hartley, and the Mills on the one hand, and the subsequent introspectionist body of thought in experimental psychology on the other hand.
- 2.
On the role of the German academic science culture in the development of scientific psychology, see Dobson and Bruce (1972).
- 3.
From time to time, the traditional account also slips into the writings of other twentieth century historians of psychology. Robert Watson, for example, claimed that Titchener had an “unshakable allegiance” to Wundt (Watson 1965, p. 131). We also see it in Hatfield’s claim that Titchener was “pursuing the Wundtian project of resolving mental life into its elements” (2003, pp. 103).
- 4.
This was also how Titchener himself viewed it. He saw himself as extending the domain of experimental methodology beyond the self-limiting boundaries that Wundt had placed upon his own investigations (see Titchener 1920, p. 502).
- 5.
Already in 1887, however, we see a growing recognition on the part of Bain, of Wundt’s distinctive position regarding the “insufficiency or shortcoming of the principles of Association” (Bain 1887, p. 174).
- 6.
And in whose shadow he walked as a graduate student (Boring 1967, p. 315).
- 7.
The inscription simply reads “To Edward Bradford Titchener.”
- 8.
The problem is acute because “Titchener and Boring were key figures in carrying the burden of explanation of Wundt’s work” (Anderson 1975, p. 385).
- 9.
Watson was, in fact, casting an extremely wide net in finding opponents to his own position. In Behaviorism, he takes exponents of “the older psychology … called introspective psychology” to include not only Wundt, Külpe, and Titchener—but also James, Angell, Judd and McDougall (Watson 1966, p. 3, italics removed). What unifies these very different thinkers, in Watson’s mind, is that they all claim that consciousness “is the subject matter of psychology” (Watson 1966, p. 3, italics removed).
- 10.
In The Disappearance of Introspection, William Lyons characterizes the period from the seventeenth century to the first decade of the twentieth century as “the golden age of introspection” (Lyons 1986, p. 2). As Lyons further states, “[i]ntrospection in its classical form (or forms) may be said to have reached its zenith and nadir at the same time in the school of Titchener in the United States” (Lyons 1986, p. 21). The zenith also represented, in a different sense, the nadir because the (purported) practice of introspection had “become highly elaborated by the time and, to the growing number of outsiders, bizarre” (Lyons 1986, p. 21). We shall uncover the cause of this as we proceed. As we shall also see, this period was more of a gilded than a golden age of introspection.
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Beenfeldt, C. (2013). Wundt and Titchener. In: The Philosophical Background and Scientific Legacy of E. B. Titchener's Psychology. SpringerBriefs in Philosophy. Springer, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-00242-2_3
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