Chapter 1
Understanding Science
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Psychology means psyche-logos – the study of the soul, the nature of the
soul or mind
•
Defined psychology not as the study of the mind but as the study of
behaviour have different answers to these questions
•
Philosophers have inquired how human beings know the world during the
time of ancient Greeks
o
Enterprise is called epistemology; episteme (knowledge) and logos
(discourse)
•
Cognitive psychology is asking how human beings know the world involves
questions about sensation, perception, memory and thinking
•
Ethics is centrally concerned with how people ought to act, practical
ethics depends on a conception of human nature
•
Scientific psychology find them in the studies of motivation and emotion,
social behaviour, and sexual behaviour
•
Applied psychology is deeply involved in human ethics
•
Francis Bacon said “Knowledge is power”
•
Inspiration for the creation of an independent science of psychology came
from biology
•
Wilhelm Wundt, the founding father of psychological science, said it was
the outcome of an “alliance” between philosophical psychology and the
new science of physiology
Positivism (Auguste Comet, 1798 – 1857)
•
A self-consciously modern movement
•
Positive in a philosophical way
•
Theological stage
o
People thought that gods caused events and the natural rulers of
society were thus priests, who supposedly understood the gods and
could entreat or control them to human advantage
•
Meta-physical stage
o
People no longer believed that gods controlled the world, but
believe in unseen essences and forces that did
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Scientific stage
o
Gods and metaphysics were jettisoned for Newtonian science,
which understood the genuine causes of events and which could
therefore really deliver the goods for human welfare in a way that
priests and aristocrats could only fake – to their own interest,
rather than humanity’s
Modes of Scientific Explanation
•
Philosophy of science tries to understand how science works
•
Modern style of scientific explanation began with Isaac Newton and
Scientific Revolution
•
The Nomological Approach: Explanation by Laws of Nature
o
Newton defined his scientific enterprise as the search for a small
number of mathematical laws from which one could deduce
observed regularities in nature
o
Domain was physics of motion to explain the 3 laws of motion and
a law of gravity
o
Newton was criticized by his contemporaries for failing to provide
any mechanism to explain how gravity worked
o
•
Hypotheses non fingo – I do not feign hypotheses
Knowledge is power and control was the ultimate rationale for science in
the positivist’s philosophy
•
Hempel and Oppenheim prosed that scientific explanations could be
regarded as logical arguments, the explanandum could be deduced from
the explanans – relevant scientific laws and the observed initial
conditions
o
Deductive-nomological model of explanation; also called the
covering-law model of explanation, since an explanation shows how
an event is subsumed, or covered, under some set of scientific laws
▪
It sees PREDICTION and EXPLANATION as the same thing
o
Iron Law of Explanation: The explanandum may not be contained
explicitly or implicitly in the explanans
o
Explanation of an event consists of showing that it could have been
predicted
The Causal Approach: Laws are not enough
•
Covering-law model avoids questions about the real causal structure of
nature, prefers to focus on how we can predict and control nature
•
Usable knowledge need not pretend to be profound or true
•
Difficult of identifying explanation with prediction
•
Mere existence of a predictive regularity is not the same as a law of
nature, no matter how reliable and useful the regularity may be
•
Embraces metaphysics arguing that the goal of science is to penetrate the
causal structure of reality and discover the laws of nature
•
Science is more or less right about how nature works, and gains
predictive power and control from being true, not from being logically
organized
•
Science protects itself from the positivists’ bugaboo – superstition by
rigorously testing every hypothesis and challenging every theory
•
Weakness – cannot directly verify our hunches about real causes, they
might be a metaphysical luxury that ought not be indulged
Are Explanations True or merely Useful?
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Nomological theorists believe that all we can hope to do is describe the
world as we find it (antirealist view)
•
Causal theorists believe we can go deeper, penetrating the hidden causal
structure of the universe (realist view)
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Ernst Mach (1838-1916)
o
Argued that because atoms could not be seen, belief in their
existence was faith, not science
o
Atoms should be regarded at best as hypothetical fictions whose
postulation made sense of data but whose existence could not be
confirmed
o
Antirealist view regarding observations themselves as the only
things science need explain
•
Antirealists come in agnostic and atheistic brands
o
Most common form is instrumentalism, which holds that scientific
theories are merely tools (instruments) by which human beings
come to grips with nature
o
Science should strive to give us conceptual tools that enable us to
deal with the universe
o
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Wants usefulness
Realist view of inferred entities and processes
o
Behind observations lies a realm of unseen but real things about
which science theorizes
o
Observations are regarded as evidence for the underlying causal
structure of the universe
o
Science should strive to give us a true picture of the causal
structure of the universe
o
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Wants truth
Savage (1990) 3 broad approaches to theories
o
The syntactic view
▪
Holding that theories are axiomatized collections of sentences
▪
Logical positivism – advances in logic and maths, dominated
the philosophy of science (Comte and Mach)
▪
Became known as the Received View on Theories
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Theories are sentences (axioms) whose terms are
explicitly defined by reference to observation terms
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Observations do not provide evidence for the existence
and properties of inferred entities, but they define
those entities the way a dictionary defines a word
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Deepest difficulty is its rigid separation of theory and
date
▪
Observation terms
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Referred to directly observable properties of nature
and were taken to be unproblematically true
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Protocol sentences – descriptions of nature that
contained only observation terms
▪
Theoretical terms
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Axioms – putative generalizations from the data –
candidate laws of nature, contained only theoretical
terms connected by logico-mathematical terms
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Were said to be given meaning and epistemological
significance via explicit or operational definitions
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Operational definitions – mixed sentences containing
a theoretical term and an observational term to which
it was linked
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Force = mass x acceleration (F = m x a)
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Do not observe them directly, define them in terms of
something we do observe
▪
o
Mathematical terms
The semantic view
▪
Holding that theories are counterfactual models of the world
▪
Builds on some highly technical developments in modern
logic
▪
Important for the central role it assigns to models in science,
the resulting indirect relationship between scientific theories
and the world they purport to explain
▪
Regards theories as abstract mathematical structures that
apply not to the world as it is but to an idealized world
purged of irrelevant considerations
▪
Models allow scientists to focus on and think clearly about
the aspects of nature in which they are interested
▪
To a learning theorists, while stress is a factor that surely
influences learning, it is a factor to be controlled or
statistically washed away
▪
To a stress theorist, stress in the main concern and may use
paired-associate learning as a way to study it
o
Rationality: Why and When do Scientists change their Theories?
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Normative concept
▪
Being moral and rational is something people ought to be
▪
Content-free – positivists assumed that they is a single,
logical structure to science whatever the historical period
and whatever the science
o
Naturalism view
▪
Holding that theories are amorphous collections of ideas,
values, practices and exemplars
▪
Incorporates philosophers, historians, sociologists and
psychologists of science
▪
Weltanschauung theorists led by Thomas S. Kuhn
•
▪
Exerted direct influence on psychology
Theorists who regard science as a matter of intellectual
evolution along Darwinian lines
o
Reduction and Replacement
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Reduction
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2 theories explain the same facts at different levels
o
Higher levels deal with large objects and forces
o
Lower levels deal with more basic objects and
forces
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Scientists try to reduce larger theories to more
elementary theories, showing that the truth of the
hight theory is a consequence of the truth of more
basic theory
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Reduced theory is still considered valid and useful at
its level of explanation
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Ideal gas law: p = V x T (high level theory)
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Older theory is recognized as still scientific and
usefully valid within its sphere of application
▪
Replacement / Elimination
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1 theory is right, the other is wrong and is discarded
Science as a Worldview
Particular And Universal Knowledge
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Everyday concerns and knowledge focus on particular people, places,
things and events
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Goal of psychological research is to carefully study human behaviour
across such a wide range of circumstances that the circumstances fall
away, revealing the universal mechanisms of the human mind and
behaviour.
Science as the View from Nowhere
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Science searches for purely objective knowledge
•
Thomas Nagel
o
Our perceptions are caused by the actions of things on us, through
their effects on our bodies, which are themselves part of the
physical world
o
Since the same physical properties that cause perceptions in us
through our bodies also produce different effects on other physical
things and can exist without causing any perceptions at all, their
true nature must be detachable from their physical appearance
and need not resemble it
o
Form a conception of that true nature independent of its
appearance either to us or to other types or perceivers
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Important historical source was Cartesian conception of consciousness and
its relation to the world
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Consciousness is subjective
o
The perspective from which each of us observes the world
o
How the world appears to me, to each of us in his or her private,
subjective consciousness
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Science describes the natural world as it is from no perspective, as if
there were no people in it at all
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Critical to the success of natural science
Understanding History
Reasons and Causes
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Where there is no reason, there can be no guilt
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A person with a diseased brain cannot choose what to do and so deserves
no blame
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Tension between reasons and causes is perennial
Presentism
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Whig history
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Sees history as a series of progressive steps leading up to our
current state of enlightenment
o
Assumes that present-day science is essentially correct or at least
superior to that of the past
o
Tells the story of science in terms of how brilliant scientists
discovered the truth known to us today
o
Error is condemned as an aberration of reason, and scientists
whose ideas do not conform to present wisdom are either ignored
or dismissed as fools
Internalism – Externalism
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Whig histories are typically internal
o
Seeing science as a self-contained discipline solving well-defined
problems by the rational use of the scientific method
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Externalist in orientation, considering science within the larger social
context of which it is a part and within which it acts
Ideas or People?
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Zeitgeist (German for “spirit of the times”) view of history is that people
are sometimes depicted as little more than puppets
o
Tends to ignore the actions of human beings, because people are
believed to be living preordained lives controlled by hidden forces
working themselves out through historical process
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Great Man history is the story of the research and theorizing of brilliant
scientists unlocking the secrets of nature
Karl Popper (1902 – 1994)
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Define science without metaphysics (discussion of unobserved concepts) or
psychology (positivism’s empiricism)
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Instead of asking how science worked, he asked what made a theory a
scientific theory rather than a theory in politics, aesthetics, ethics or any
other field of human thought
•
Fruitful to look for a criterion that defined a theory as worthy of
scientific scrutiny instead of truth
•
Looked at theories that claimed to be scientific but were unproven, such
as psychoanalysis and relativity
•
Pseudosciences – theories that claim to be scientific but have become
outside the pale of acceptable science, such as astrology
•
If the theory was testable, it was scientific; whether it was true or not
did not matter
•
Popper was wrong; a theory’s scientific standing depends on how it
changes over time, specifically, how it responds to apparent falsifications
Thomas S. Kuhn
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Paradigm → A scientific theory that is embedded in a larger intellectual
and social structure
o
Some elements are consciously held by scientists, deep background
assumptions about the world that scientists are only dimly aware
of, or are just taken for granted as true
o
Some elements have to do with acceptable methods in the sciences,
and the ways in which specific hypotheses must be cast to be taken
seriously
o
Poses research puzzles to be solved by its practitioners
o
How a paradigm or theory deals with its puzzles over time
determines its success or failure as a science
•
Paradigm shift
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Most important thesis is the centrality of history to the philosophy of
science
•
Step-by-step progress such as Ivan Pavlov’s classical conditioning is called
puzzle solving style of normal science
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Anomalies – troubling findings can be reconciled with a reigning
paradigm
Scientists may resist revolutions, but will accept them if a new paradigm can
explain the world better than the old one.
Too much conservatism create rigid dogma, while too little undermines
skepticism and would render science unstable
David Hume
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Proposed that learning was a matter of associating one idea with
another, following certain laws of association
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Main law was similarity
o
If one idea resembles another idea, then if we experience one, we
automatically think of the other
o
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E.g. seeing a portrait makes us think of the person it resembles
Another main law was contiguity
o
If 2 ideas have been presented to the mind together, they get
associated, so experiencing one of the two ideas brings the other to
mind
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These laws create puzzles for psychological scientists to solve
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Reason is and can only be a slave to the passions (emotions), capable of
steering them but not of initiating action on its own
Psychology in History - Was Mind Discovered, Invented or Constructed?
Bruno Snell
3 alternatives raised by Snell
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If the mind was truly discovered, then psychology might be a natural
science in the unsual sense of the term, and its history will be similar to
the histories of physics and chemistry
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Mind is a tool, an artifact, suggesting that while mind exist as do
hammers and modems, psychological science must be reconceived as a
science of the artificial
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The mind as a social construction
o
If the mind is socially constructed, then it is uncertain whether
there can be any science of mind
Modernity and Modernism
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Modernity → 2 uses
o
Intellectual – referring to the ideas that helped create the second
use
o
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The way of life that we live today
Modernism → the modern way of life gets noticed and intellectuals begin
to think about how to respond to it
o
Can be regarded as the ideology of modernity, a reflection by
intellectuals on the modern condition; to praise it, reject it,
criticize it, improve it
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French revolution was the dawning of the modern
Postmodernism
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Began as a ovement in the arts, specifically architecture
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The collapse of the Soviet Union and communist countries of eastern
Europe was the dawning of postmodern
Metatheory
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Meta is usually used with the name of a discipline to designate a new but
related discipline designed to deal critically with the original one
•
Metatheory – a discipline designed to deal critically with theory
•
Metatheory of psychology – the discipline which deals critically with
theories within psychology
o
Includes studying the logic of psychological theories
•
o
Studies the assumptions we make about the mind
o
Studies the ways that psychology tries to be scientific
Logic
o
Psychologists use theories to explain data
o
Must make logical arguments about the relationship between data
and theory
•
Mind
o
Psychology’s methods are by nature indirect – we cannot simply
measure the mind with a rule
o
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Must make assumptions about the mind
Science
o
Psychology’s core claim is that it is a science of the mind
o
Must make assumptions about the best way to be scientific
Chapter 2
The Legacy of Ancient Greece
The Era of Evolutionary Adaptation (EEA)
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Wilhelm Wundt said history is an expression of human nature and
historians therefore need to attend to what evolutionary psychologists call
the EEA
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Folk psychology appears to be an innate feature of the human mind
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The capacity to think about other people’s mental states then naturally
became an object of reflective thought – of philosophy and science –
giving rise to the discipline of psychology
The Past is Another Country
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Secret doctrines – esoteric
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Public words – exoteric
•
Development of social science, including psychology was a form of elitism
o
Social thinkers like Plato believed that few people are capable of
handling the truth about the world, human nature and how
societies ought to be organized and run
o
Led to fear of persecution
▪
Ordinary people might be outraged when their settled ideas
are challenged and lash out dangerously at their critics
o
A philosopher might worry that if his ideas became generally
known, they might destabilize existing society
o
When social science began to become a basis for public policy
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If we take them literally, we may misunderstand them
•
If we try to penetrate public words to secret belief, we may misread
them
•
If we arrive at the correct interpretation, we have no sure way to
confirm it
•
A thinker’s historical influence might derive more from what he
exoterically said than what he secretly meant
The Bronze (3000 – 1200 BCE) and Dark Ages (1200 – 700 BCE)
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Intellectual life of the West is deeply rooted in ancient Greece
•
Greek ideas were adopted by the Romans
•
History of ancient Greece began in the Bronze Age, a royal culture that
collapsed suddenly around 1200 BCE, leaving a Dark Age in history
•
Polis – the unique centre of Greek political and cultural order
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Greek Classical era was followed by Hellenistic Age, which blended into
the Roman Era
The Social Context: Warriors and Kings
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Ancient Greek men were warriors
•
Warrior ethos is the key to understanding Greek concepts of mind and
behaviour
•
Bronze Age heroic conception of virtue – the good life – meant living
honourably by the warriors’ code and achieving immortality through
prowess in battle
•
Homeric concept of cirtue is radically unlike ours in 2 important respects
o
Virtue (arête) was an achievement, not a state of being
o
As a consequence, virtue could be achieved by only a lucky few
•
Today, we think of virtue as a psychological state of mind, or of the soul,
not as a prize to be won by action
•
Conception of virtue was developed by the philosophy of Stoicism
Psychology of the Bronze Age
•
Bronze Age Greek concepts of the soul are distinctive and to a modern
eye, rather odd
•
Psuche (soul) is the breath of life, or life-spirit, because its departure
from a wounded warrior means his death
o
More than the breath of life but less than the complete individual
mind or soul
•
Behaviour is attributed to several independently operating, soul-like
entities residing in different parts of the body
o
Function of phrenes, located in the diaphragm, was rationally
planning action
o
Thumos, in the heart, governed action driven by emotions
o
Noos was responsible for accurate perception and clear cognition of
the world
The Archaic Period (700 – 500 BCE)
•
End of Dark Ages was marked by the appearance of a new form of social
and political organization unique to the Greeks, the city-state or polis
•
Metics – noncitizens who could never become citizens
o
Tended to be the economically productive backbone of the poleis
o
Aristotle was a metic
The Social Context: The Rise of the Polis
The Phalanx and the Polis
•
The Phalanx
o
A racidally new form of warfare, composed of lightly armored
soldiers called hoplites wielding long pikes
o
Democratized warfare
o
Had important effects on the values and psychology of Achaic and
Classical Greece
o
Fought almost as a single man; the key to its success was complete
coordination of the motions of the hoplites
o
Ethos of the phalanx – ‘you are going to move like one man and
think like one man’
•
Egalitarian ethos of the phalanz created an intense emphasis on economic
equality in the poleis
o
Goal was hominoia – a state in which every citizen thought the
same thoughts and served only the interests of the polis instead of
their self-interest
•
Greeks valued the virtue they called sophrosyne
o
Self-control, but it’s a self-control that springs from wisdom and
honors the Greek maxims “know thyself” and “nothing in excess”
o
Self-control of a person who accepts and enjoys the pleasures of
the world, but is not captured by them
•
Phalanx demanded the active participation of all hoplites, the polis
demanded the active participation of all citizens
The Polis at the Extreme: Sparta
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Ethos of the polis was carried to its extreme by the Spartans
•
Helots - slaves
•
Hoi hominoid – “The Equals”
•
Important aspect of Spartan life that illuminates Greek values more
generally was the tension between the demands of the polis and the
attractions of home, the oikos
•
Spartan way of life was much admired by subsequent thinkers as an
apparently successful exercise in social engineering
•
Jean-Jacques Rousseau – Sparta was a Republic of demigods rather than
of men
Politics, Argument, Law and Nature: Philosophy and Psychology Begin
Greek Democracy and the Critical Tradition
•
Difficult for people to accept criticism of their ideas or to reflect critically
on them
•
Adherents of a closed system of thought believe that they possess truths
beyond criticism and improvement
•
If criticism is offered, the system is defended not with reason or evidence,
but by attacking the character of the critic as somehow defective
•
Psychoanalysis sometimes showed tendencies to intolerance, attacking
criticisms as neuroses rather than as potentially legitimate objects
•
Thales of Miletus – a tradition of systematic criticism arose whose aim
was the improvement of ideas about the natural world
o
Did not teach his ideas as received Truths to be conserved, but as a
set of hypotheses to be improved
o
Critical approach to philosophy is called an open system of thought
by Popper
•
In an open system of thought, ideas are considered on their own, apart
from the personality, character, ethnic background, or faith of the person
who advances them
The First Natural Philosophers
Understanding the Universe: The Physicists
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Thales proposed that water was the underlying constituent of all things
•
Thales asserted that humans could understand the world because it is
made of ordinary matter and is not affected by the capricious whims of
gods
•
Naturalism is the essential commitment of science because science seeks to
explain things and events without reference to supernatural powers or
entities of any kind
o
Poses a profound challenge to dualistic conceptions of life and
human personality
•
Pythagoras of Samos – an enigmatic figure, a great mathematician, a
philosopher
o
Coined the term, meaning “lover of wisdom”, founder of a cult
o
Formulated the first mathematical law of physics, expressing the
harmonic ratios of vibrating strings of different lengths
o
The notion of proof – one could argue logically step-by-step to a
conclusion that must be accepted by all who followed the argument
o
Introduced dualism into Western thought
▪
Drawing a sharp distinction between soul and body and
believing that souls could migrate from one body to another
Being and Becoming; Appearance and Reality: Parmenides and Heraclitus
•
Debate between Being and Becoming was metaphysical, but it created an
important epistemological difficulty that led to the first theory in psych
•
Both parties imply a sharp difference between Appearance and Reality
•
Parmenides concluded that because the senses deceive, they should not be
trusted and one should rely on logi instead - Rationalism
Parmenides of Elea
•
Suggested that the line between science and religion, philosopher and
shaman, was not yet clear and sharp
•
Basic thesis was simply stated “It is.”
•
Asserted that the underlying permanent reality of the universe was an
unchanging substance, a simple and immutable It: pure Being
o
Became a moral doctrine asserting that beyond the flux of
changing human opnions there eternal Truths and Values that exist
apart from humanity, truths we should seek and use to guide our
lives
o
These Truths exist in a realm of pure Being; they exist changelessly
apart from the changing physical world
•
Change – Becoming, was an illusion of the human mind, because It
simply is, beyond change or alteration
o
Deny that any such eternal, immutable Truths, or realm of pure
Being, exist
o
•
Things never simply are, but are always becoming something else
Appearance was Change, Reality was Being
Heraclitus of Ephesus
•
Spoke in metaphorical aphorisms → the Obscure
•
Asserted that the phusis was fire
•
Led to the conclusion that there is even less permanence in the world
than there seems to be
•
Most famous aphorism was that no one ever steps in the same river twice
•
Nothing in the universe is ever the same twice
•
Believed that, although change is the only constant, it is lawful rather
than capricious
•
Appearance was Being, Reality was Change
The First Protopsychologists: Alcmaeon and Empedocles
Alcmaeon of Croton
•
Interested in philosophy and directed his attention to understanding
perception
•
Correctly believed that sensation and thought occur in the brain
•
Proposed a view of perception that was developed into the first theory in
psychology by another physician-philosopher who opposed Parmenides’
rejection of the validity of experience
Empedocles of Acragas
•
Ideas of his may be regarded as the forerunner of empiricism, the
orientation to philosophy that finds truth in appearances and rejects
reason as tending to fantasy
•
Believed that the senses are ‘ducts of understanding” through which
information about the world travels to the brain and upon that basis,
developed a theory of perception that would justfy our common-sense
reliance on our senses
•
Proposed that objects emit “effluences”, sense-modality-specific copies of
themselves that enter the body through the ducts of the senses
•
Effluences get in the bloodstream where they meet and mix in the heart
•
theory was an important step for naturalism in psychology because it
proposed a purely physical basis for mental activity, which was usually
attributed to a soul
The Last Physicists: Atomism
•
Atomists proposed an idea that has proven immensely fruitful in physics:
that all objects are composed of infinitesimally small atoms
•
Materialism and determinism
•
Democritus of Abdera’s motto was that only “atoms and the Void exist in
reality”
o
Became known as the “Laughing Philosopher” for the moral
conclusions he drew from his naturalism
o
Every object gives off special kinds of atoms called eidola – copies
of the object
•
Leucippus of Miletus said “Nothing happens at random; everything
happens out of reason and by necessity’ providing a naturalistic
explanation of Tyche
•
Atomism deepened the divide between Appearance and Reality
•
Hedonism – the pursuit if pleasure and the avoidance of pain
o
Reduces moral values to our natural bodily experiences of pleasure
and pain
The Classical Period (500 – 323 BCE)
The Social Context: Empire and War
•
Sparta – most potent, land-based military power
•
Athens – the largest and wealthiest of the poleis
•
Athenians fell victim to the Greek sin of hubris – excessive pride
Teaching the Polis
Humanism: The Sophists
•
Because it was a democracy, the key to success in the Athenian polis was
rhetoric: the art of persuasion
•
The new teachers of rhetoric were called Sophists (expert), the source of
our word “sophisticated”, arrived from Syracuse in 427 BCE
•
Sophists represent the beginnings of higher education
•
Mark an important turn in philosophy from concern with physics to
concern with human life and how it ought to be lived
•
Protagoras’ motto contains a range of meanings from the personal
through the cultural to the metaphysical
o
“Of all things the measure if man, of things that are that they are,
and of things that are not that they are not”
•
Humanism – a concern with human nature and human living
•
“Man is the measure of all things”
o
Endorses a relativistic empiricism, a humanistic preference for
Appearance over Reality (truth is relative to each perceiver)
•
o
Carries a cultural or a multicultural meaning (language)
o
Metaphysical meaning (no divine truth or God-given law)
Phusis – nature, Nomos – human law
Enlightement and Eudaemonia: Socrates
•
First moral philosopher, unconcerned with physics
•
On a self-defined quest for the nature of true virtue and goodness
•
Mental state of aporia or enlightened ignorance
•
Mission was to deflate imperial arrogance and restore traditional Greek
self-control
•
Search for general nature of the virtues and of virtue itself
•
Began to try to understand the meaning and nature of abstract human
concepts such as justice and beauty
•
Elenchus – believed that everyone possesses moral truth, even if they are
unaware of it
•
Called himself a “midwife” to knowledge of virtue by questioning people
•
Psychotherapists maintain that we have learned false beliefs that make us
ill, yet we possess hidden and liberating truths that can be found through
dialogue with a personal guide
•
He demanded a theory of virtue - Theoria – contemplation
•
Eudaemonia – happiness, meant more than the attainment of pleasure,
meant living well or flourishing
•
Socrates believed that virtuous living would being eudaemonia
•
Knowledge of the good was all that was needed to effect good behaviour
•
Wants to know what justice or beauty is and knowledge of justice or
beauty itself would therefore be true of all just acts and beautiful things
in the past, now and forever
The Great Classical Philosophies
Plato: The Quest for Perfect Knowledge
•
Became disenchanted with politics as he knew it
•
Questions conventional ideas of virtue
•
Dedicated his philosophy above all to the pursuit of justice both in the
state and in the individual
•
Justice (dikaiosune) – getting out of life what one fairly deserved, no
more and no less, reflecting the Greek goal of hominoia
•
New understanding of virtue would later make its way into Christianity
Cognition: What is Knowledge?
•
Plato was the first thinker to inquire into how knowledge is possible and
how it may be justified
•
He created the field of epistemology – the study of knowledge
•
Truth had to be permanent and knowable with certainty
Wrestling with Skepticism
•
A belief is True, is Knowledge, if and only if it is true in all times and all
placed absolutely
•
Knowledge had to be rationally justifiable
•
Accepted that sense perception was not the path to knowledge
•
Took the belief that the phusis was fire, and thus the conclusion that the
physical world was always in a state ofbecoming
•
The truth Plato sought lay in the realm of Being, knowledge of it could
not derive from material senses reflecting the changing material world
•
Rejected psychology for an idealistic metaphysics
Mathematics and the Theory of the Forms
•
Plato was convinced that transcendental Truth exists and that perception
was not the path to knowledge
•
The Way of Truth was the inward path of logical reasoning about ideas
rathe than the outward path of Seeming about physical objects
•
Geometry supported rationalism’s claim that logic was the Way of Truth
•
Forms (idea) were emphatically not just private thoughts, but existed
outside human minds as fixed, universal, objects of thought
o
Plato’s Forms were perfect Objects in the realm of Being
o
Metaphors for the Forms, description of the “child of goodness”
▪
The Simile of the Sun: Illumination by the Good (Republic)
▪
The Metaphor of the Line: The Hierarchy of Opinion and
Knowledge (Republic)
•
▪
The Allegory of the Cave: The Prison of Culture (Republic)
▪
The Ladder of Love: Being Drawn to the Good (Symposium)
Plato is the first great exponent of nativism, holding that our character
and knowledge are innate
•
Learning is a process of recollecting to consciousness what we already
know but of which we have become ignorant
Motivation: Why do we act as we do?
•
Elite Guardians constitute the ruling class
o
Guardian should rule because their elite, educated reason and
virtuous character places them beyond self-interest
•
Auxiliaries, which aid the Guardians by acting as soldiers, magistrates and
other functionaries of the Republic
•
Mass of the citizens makes up the least inherently virtuous productive
class
•
Rational Soul
o
Highest soul and only immortal one
o
Located in the head because being perfect, must be round and thus
be located in the roundest and highest part of the body
o
•
Rules each Guardian, who are thus the most fit to rule the Republic
Spirited Soul
o
Located in the chest and dominant in the Auxiliaries
o
Represents the old Homeric virtues, being motivated by glory and
fame
o
•
As it can feel shame and guilt, it is superior to the third soul
Desiring Soul
o
Located in the belly and genitals
o
A disparate grab bag of irrational wants
o
Bodily desires such as hunger or lust, and desire for money
o
Pursuit of self-interest
o
Dominates in the productive classes, who are described as unfit to
rule precisely because they seek their own interests, not the general
interest of the polis.
•
•
Hindu Rig Veda’s society
o
Brahmans – theologians and ultimate rulers
o
Kshatriya – warriors and day-to-day rulers
o
Vaisa – professionals and artisans
o
Sudra - laborers
Homunculus (little man) problem – violates the Iron Law of Explanation
Aristotle: The Quest for Nature (384 – 322 BCE)
•
Biologist as well as the first truly systematic philosopher
•
Founded Lyceum
•
Difference between Plato and Aristotle began with temperament
•
An empirically inclined observer of nature
•
Concerned with discovering what is natural
•
Believes that the human way of life should be built on what was best for
human nature
•
Perceptual realist
Philosophy of Science
The Four Fashion Explanation
•
Tended to focus on the former more than the latter, on understanding
what a thing is, rather than on the dynamics of change, the focus of
modern science
•
Conceptual division was between form and matter
•
For matter to be knowable – to be an object of perception and scienceit has to be joined to form
•
Form – is what makes a thing that which it is, defining it and making it
intelligible to us
•
Matter of a statue is what it is made of
•
Form makes the statue what it is
•
The mind receives the form of an object but not its matter
•
Form comprises 3 causes
o
Defines what something is in its essence: the essential cause
o
Includes how things come into existence or are made: the efficient
cause
o
•
Includes the purpose for which a thing exists: the final cause
Aristotle’s form does not exist without being physically embodied in
matter of some type
•
Wanted to understand how nature untouched by human interference
naturally developed
Potentiality and Actuality
•
If there is pure potentiality, there must logically be pure actuality
•
Unmoved mover moves by being desired, not through activity of its own
•
Natural scale (Great Chain of Being) – striving for actualization creates a
grand hierarchy among all things
•
Aristotle’s forms are dynamic, directing development and constituting
and controlling the life processes of living things
Psychology
Soul and Body
•
Aristotle defines the soul as “the form of a natural body having life
potentially within it”
•
Soul is the actuality and the actualizing, directing force of any living
organism, fulfilling the body’s potential having of life
•
Soul is the essential, efficient and final cause of an organism
o
Essential cause – soul is what defines an animal or plant
o
Soul is the efficient cause of bodily growth and movement and of
life processes generally
o
Without soul, the body is not actualized and is dead, mere matter
o
Soul is the final cause of an organism, for the body serves the soul
and the soul guides its purposive development and activity
•
•
Nutritive soul (lowest level)
o
Possessed by plants
o
Maintaining the individual plant through nutrition
o
Maintaining the species through reproduction
o
Directing growth
Sensitive soul
o
Subsumes the nutritive soul’s functions while adding others
o
Animals are aware of their surroundings hence, having sensations
o
Consequences: Imagination and memory, movement as a
consequence of desire
•
Human soul
o
Rational, soul, mind
o
Power to think and have general knowledge
Structure and Functions of the Rational, Human Soul
Sense Perception
•
Perception has to do with form, not matter
•
The Special Senses
•
Reception of aspects of an object’s form
•
Each sense is dedicated to reception of a particular kind of information
about objects
•
Aristotle regarded them as passive, simply conforming themselves to the
forms of objects, therefore reliable and unerring
•
Common sensible - conscious object of perception, identifying it required
an act of judgment
•
Aristotle’s perceptual theory allows for cognitive error, but connects the
mind directly with the world
The Interior Senses
•
Though not connected with the outside world, are still dealing with
experienced sensations
•
First interior is common sense
o
Answer to great mysteries of perception, the problem of sensory
integration, or as it is known in cognitive neuroscience, the binding
problem
o
Inputs from the special senses are brought together and
coordinated into a single, integrated picture of the world, where
the sensations are held together in common
•
Imagination, together with common sense are involved in judging what
an object is
o
Coherent images of objects assembled by common sense are passed
on in 2 directions:
o
▪
To imagination and memory in animals and human beings
▪
In human beings alone, to mind
Basic function is the ability to represent the form of an object in
its absence after retrieval from memory
o
Involved in judging what an object is in inferring from sensation
what object is affecting our senses
o
Involved in feeling pleasure and pain and in judging whether a
perceived object is good or bad for an organism, causing a
behavioural response
•
Memory
o
Storehouse of the images created by common sense and
imagination
o
A modern way of recall of previous experiences in our earthly lives
o
Episodic or personal memory – the ability to recall specific events
or episodes in one’s life
o
Based on 3 associations – similarity, contiguity and contrast
▪
Similar images are associatively linked, images of contiguous
experiences are linked, and opposite images are linked
▪
Law of causality – causally linked experiences remind us of
one another
o
Semantic memory – the ability to recall the definitions of words
Mind
•
Rational part of the human soul
•
Function is acquiring knowledge of abstract universals
•
Passive mind is potentiality
o
No character of its own, can take on the form of experienced
objects
o
Knowledge of universals is actualized, or made manifest, by the
operations of the active mind
•
Active mind is pure thought
o
Acting on the contents of the passive mind to achieve rational
knowledge of universals
Motivation
•
All action is motivated by some form of desire which involved imagination
•
Appetite – motivation is directed by an image of what is pleasurable, and
the animal seeks only present pleasure or the avoidance of pain
•
Wish – motivated by desire for what is good or for long-term, future
benefits
Ethis
•
Ethical focus was on character, virtues such as wisdom and courage,
rather than on conduct
•
Aristotle emphasizes that becoming virtuous requires learning and
practice
Chapter 3
Antiquity (323 BCE – 1000 CE)
Hellenism and Empire
•
Hellenistic period, dated from Alexander the Great’s death to the final
conquest of Egypt by Octavian, the future Emperor Augustus (31 BCE)
Therapeutic Philosophies of Happiness
•
Ataraxia – a form of happiness by the Greeks, a happiness that was
within their own control
•
Eudaemonia was placed out of reach
o
What lay within reach was the ability to quite one’s own soul, to
achieve self-mastery and thus personal freedom from disturbance
•
Hellenistic philosophies downplayed the role of cult worship, helping pave
the way for a religion of personal redemption, Christianity
•
Epicureanism
o
Founded by Epicurus (341 – 270 BCE)
o
One of the most influential of the Hellenistic therapeutic
philosophies
o
Defined pleasure, ataraxia as “the absence of pain in the body and
of trouble in the soul”
o
Known as the “philosophy of the garden”
o
Recipe for ataraxia is withdrawal from the world to live a quite life
of philosophy and friendship
o
‘the greatest good is prudence’
o
Accepted atomism, teaching that there was no soul and thus no
possibility of suffering in the afterlife
o
•
Part philosophy and part lifestyle
Cynicism
o
All lifestyle
o
Believed that one should live as naturally as possible, utterly
rejecting worldly conventions, contemptuous of whatever opinions
people might have: all phusis and no nomos
o
Diogenes (400-325 BCE) → The Dog, lived as dogs live, outside
convention
▪
o
The greatest good was free speech
Therapeutic philosophy resembled Epicurus’ advice to reject society,
control the emotions and avoid too much pleasure
•
Skepticism
o
Founded by Pyrrho of Elis (360 – 270 BCE)
o
Based on attitude each held toward the ability of humans to know
the truth
o
Dogmatists
▪
o
Claimed to know what truth was
Academics
▪
Heirs to Plato’s Academy
▪
Claimed that humans could not know the truth at all
▪
Should modestly aim at Socrates’ aporia
o
Skeptics
▪
•
‘keep on searching’ for truth
o
Hope of attaining quietude
o
Suggested that one should never believe one has the Truth
Stoicism
o
Founded by Zeno of Citium (333-262 BCE)
o
A general and genuine philosophy
o
Development of the concepts of the proposition and of
propositional logic
o
Define representations linguistically as propositions
▪
o
A proposition is a statement that is either true or false
Logical reasoning then became a matter of properly combining
sets of propositions according to logical rules, thus generating new
propositions
o
Absolute Determinism and Complete extirpation of the emotions
o
Stoics believed that whatever happens in one’s life was
foreordained to happen
o
Virtue was a state of mind – inner mastery of emotion
o
Syneidesis – idea of personal conscience
o
Right and wrong involved more than knowing and obeying the
laws (nomos) of one’s society
o
An inwardly felt sense of sin connected with one’s inner voice of
reason, or logos, which was in turn connected to the divine logos of
the universe
o
Thought of the universe as a living and divinve being, ruled by
reason, or logos and permeated by spirit or pneuma
o
Masters of logic
The Greek Miracle in Reverse
Gnosticism and Hermeticism
•
Gnosis means knowledge of secret teachings or secret interpretations of
sacred texts
o
Gnostic Gospels were said to contain deeper truths
o
•
Unknown and dangerous to ordinary believers
Hermeticism
o
Believed that the ancient Egyptians had unraveled all the secrets of
the universe
o
Hellenistic people were no longer boldly exploring nature through
reason and observation
Neoplatonism
•
Plotinus describe the universe as a hierarchy, beginning with a supreme
and unknowable God called the One
•
The One “emanates” a knowable God called Intelligence, which rules over
Plato’s realm of the Forms
•
Helped pave the way for and shaped Christian thought
Mystery Cults
•
Myster – a special rite, often held in secret and never revealed to
outsiders, through which initiates had to pass in order to become full
members (mystai) of the cult
•
•
Magna Mater
o
Based on the myth that inflamed by jealousy
o
Involved a daily, weekly, and yearly cycle of rituals, including
Isis
baptism in holy water, lighting of candles and incense, stately
processions, and temples left open so adherents could come in and
pray
•
Mithrasim
o
Represented as riding and slaying a bull, which symbolized
unrestrained natural power needing to be controlled by people
Early Christian Thought
•
Important problem was how to deal with classical philosophy
•
Some wanted to suppress pagan philosophy as dangerous to Christian
faith
•
A key to the open systems approach to thought characteristic of the
Greek world and of modern science, politics and philosophy is
abandonment of the certitude of closed system thinking and a consequent
openness to criticism, research and belief in progress
Fall of the Roman Empire
•
Economic key to the Greek and Roman was slavery
•
Mental key was attitudes to mind and work
•
Ideas about soul and body can have great consequences for the nature of
society
•
Distinction was between soul (the exercise of thought on one hand) and
material production on the other
•
Consequences from Greek antagonism to material production
o
Whole productive sphere of life (economics) was a black hole, dead
zone
o
•
Neglected technology
Rise of slavery deepened Classical disdain for work
o
Slaves were unfree, and their debasement further defiled
economically productive work
o
•
•
As slaves were producers, productivity became akin to slavery
Classified instruments (slaves) into 3 types
o
Mute (a cart)
o
Semivocal (an ox)
o
Vocal (the slave)
Developed technology and innovation in ways consistent with the mindset
•
Perfected a particular way of life, built upon Greek values and the labor
of slaves
Late Antiquity (476 – 1000)
Picking Up the Pieces
•
Control of Rome loosened, local autonomous leadership grew, leading to
feudalism
•
Plato implied that the world is rationally orderd and therefore knowable
by human reason without revelation from God
Psychology and Theology of Late Antiquity
Islamic Medical Psychology
•
He who knows his soul, knows his creator
•
Motto of early and high medieval psychology
•
Augustine believed that by turning inward and inspecting the soul, one
could come to know God, who is present in every soul
o
o
Concept of the unity of Creator and Creation (3 mental powers)
▪
Memory
▪
Understanding
▪
Will
Looked inward to their own soul as a way to know God to find an
external order, God’s order to guide one’s life
•
A naturalistic, faculty psychology developed based on a combination of
Neoplatonism, Aristotle’s philosophy and Greek and Roman medical ideas
•
Humans stand midway between God and matter (Neoplatonic)
•
A human being resembles God (Rational animal)
•
A human resembles animals and other purely physical creatures (Physical
being)
•
Human mind itself reflects the 5 corporeal sense that are tied to the
animal body while the active intellect, pure reason, is close to God
(Aristotle)
•
A person is a microcosm (a small cosmos) reflecting the universal
Neoplatonic macrocosm
•
Ibn Sīnā (980 – 1037)
o
Known as Avicenna, both a doctor and a philosopher
o
Works were influential in constructing high medieval philosophy
and psychology
o
Leader in the early flowering of Muslim secular, scientific thought
o
Produced a list of 7 faculties while Aristotle proposed 3, common
sense, imagination and memory
o
List was arranged in Neoplatonic hierarchy, faculty closest to
senses to closest to divine intellect
o
Vegetative soul – mind closest to the body
▪
Common to plants, humans and animals
▪
Responsible for the reproduction, growth and nourishment of
all living things
o
Sensitive soul
▪
Common to people and animals
▪
Lowest level comprises 5 exterior senses or corporeal sense
▪
2nd level comprises interior senses or mental faculties
•
At the border between animal and angelic natures
•
Common sense
o
Receives, unites and makes conscious the various
qualities of external objects perceived by the
senses
•
Retentive imagination for later recall
•
Compositive animal imagination & compositive human
imagination
o
Responsible for active, creative use of mental
images
o
Relate together the images retained by the
retentive imagination into imaginary objects
o
Simply associative for animals, creative for
humans
•
Estimation
o
A kind of natural instinct for making judgments
about the ‘intention’ of external objects
o
Estimates the value or harm of objects in the
animal’s world
•
Memory & recollection
o
Memory stores the intuitions of estimation
▪
Intuitions are simple ideas of the object’s
essence, not sensible attributes of the
object
o
Recollection is the ability to recall these
intuitions at a later time
o
Material stored by memory and retrieved by
recollection is thus not a copy of an object
o
Material is a set of simple but abstract ideas or
general conclusions, derived from experience
▪
Last aspect was motivation – appetite
•
Avoidance → animals sense pain or danger and flee
•
Approach → animals sense or anticipate pleasure and
move toward it
o
Rational Soul
▪
Practical Intellect
•
Concerns itself with everyday affairs
•
Regulates the body, maintains good behaviour
•
Protects the contemplative intellect so it may fulfil
itself in knowledge of universal Truths
▪
Contemplative Intellect
•
Entirely passive and has the potential for knowledge
•
Actualized by the active intellect or agent intellect
o
Agent intellect outside the human soul
o
Illuminates the contemplative mind and leads it
to knowledge of the Forms, as in Plato and
Augustine
•
Was a physician and tried to combine his explication of Aristotle’s
philosophical psychology with Roman medical tradition
•
Located the internal senses in different parts, specifically, in the
ventricles of the brain
Christian Problems of Mind and Body
•
Influenced by Platonism, believed in eternal life and the existence of a
personal soul
•
Earliest Christians believed that pagans and irredeemable sinners were
condemned to the eternal suffering of Hell
•
Refrigerium evolved into Purgatory, where sinners could work off their
sins or be bought a place in Heaven by wealthy heirs
•
Hell was always depicted as a place where sinners’ bodies were tortured
in inventive and unpleasant ways
The Individual, Mind, and Psychology in Popular Culture
•
Gestalt – whole or form
•
Growth of psychology has differed from culture to culture depending on
the treatment of the individual
•
Changing Conceptions of the Individual
o
Rational mind of each person thus knows another person only as
an essence, not as an individual defined by the characteristics that
make each person unique
•
The Mind Without
o
Morality plays (psychomachia) are plays of mental machinery
▪
Externalize what would be considered personal and private
operations of the mind
o
Allegories externalized the workings of the human mind
o
Psychology of the Iliad, in which the gods manipulate human
beings, and seem distant to modern people, who have internalized
both temptation and conscience
The End of Antiquity
•
Romans conquered Greece, but were themselves conquered by Greek
culture
•
Catholic provided intellectual and social structures within which thought
about human nature could be proposed and debated
Chapter 4
The End of the Premodern World
The Middle Ages (1000 – 1350)
•
Key economic development was the appearance of the first cities and the
technological creativity they embraced
•
Cities were autonomous, controlled by neither feudal lords not the church
•
Citizens of the European cities were businessmen, thinking in terms of
trade and profit
•
Embrace of technology led to the development of great sailing ships, the
growth of trade and openness to the rest of the world as potential
trading partners
•
Machinethinking helps foster the idea that the world is a machine, an
idea central to the Scientific Revolution
Medieval Psychology in the Academy
Scholastic Psychology in the High Middle Ages
•
Experienced an intellectual renaissance
•
St. Bonaventure and St. Thomas Aquinas were known for 2 great
medieval approaches to knowledge, human nature and God
•
o
Platonic-Augustinian mystical way
o
Aristotelian-Thomistic way of natural reason constrained by faith
St. Bonaventure
o
The soul was much more than the Aristotelian form of the body
o
The soul and body were 2 completely distinct substances
o
Immortal soul was merely using the mortal body during its earthly
existence
o
Essence of a person was the soul
o
United with the body, it acquired knowledge of the external world
▪
Denied the existence of innate ideas and arguing that we
build up universal concepts by abstraction from experienced
individual objects
▪
Asserted that abstraction alone is insufficient and must be
joined to divine illumination from God to achieve true
knowledge
o
Knowledge belonged to the soul alone; knowledge of the spiritual
world including God
▪
Introspective mediation
▪
Discovers the image of God illuminated in the soul
▪
Apprehends God through interior reflection without recourse
to sensation
o
•
Distinguished 4 mental faculties:
▪
Vegetative faculties
▪
Sensitive faculties
▪
Intellect → higher and lower aspect to the intellect
▪
Will
St. Thomas Aquinas
o
Called Aristotle “The Philosopher”, the thinker who demonstrated
both the power and the limits of human reason practiced without
the word of God
o
Distinguished sharply between philosophy and theology, limiting a
person’s reason to knowledge of the world of nature
o
Concerned to distinguish humans, who have souls, from animals,
who do not
o
Conception of mind
▪
Estimation Proper
•
Characteristic of animals and not under voluntary
control
▪
Cogitava (2nd kind of estimation – rational control)
•
Found only in humans
•
One’s estimative power is under the control of one’s
free will, for one chooses and makes judgments
instead of simply responding blindly to animal instinct
▪
Sensitive
•
Animal appetite is a compelled, natural inclination to
pursue pleasurable objects and avoid harmful ones,
and to overcome obstacles to that pursuit
▪
Intellectual appetite
•
A human being has the power to seek higher, moral
goods under the guidance of reason
▪
Differences
•
Dropped compositive imagination as an unnecessary
addition to retentive imagination and rational
thinking
•
By making cogitava a rationally guided faculty
concerned with the outer world, the need for Ibn
Sina’s practical intellect vanished
•
Made the mind consistent with Christian theology by
returning the active intellect to the human soul
▪
Knowledge is an active product of human thinking, not a
gift of divine illumination via the agant intellect
o
Rejected the Platonic-Augustinian tradition’s radical dualism of
soul and body
Psychology in the Late Middle Ages: Rebirth of Empiricism
•
Medieval held that the only certain knowledge was what could be
deduced from universal propositions
•
Willian of Ockham (1287 – 1347)
o
Challenged centuries-old assumption by substituting psychology for
metaphysics
o
Asserted that knowledge begins with acts of “intuitive cognition” –
direct, infallible acquaintance with some object in the world
o
Intuitive cognition yields knowledge of what is true and false about
the world
o
While intuitive cognition is infallible, abstractive cognition is not
o
Mind notes similarities among objects, and based on the
similarities, it classifies objects
o
Denied the distinction of soul from its faculties
o
The soul does not have the faculty of will or intellect
o
▪
Will described the soul in the act of willing
▪
Intellect describes the soul in the act of thinking
No ground in experience, or intuitive cognition, for believing we
have an immaterial, immortal soul
o
•
Held some form of realism – a belief that universal human concepts
correspond to some enduring Form or essence, conceived by medieval as
an Idea in the mind of God
•
Nominalists maintained that universals were mere puffs of air emitted
when we speak names – nominalism
•
Christians believed that God is omnipotent, capable of doing anything
that is not self-contradictory
•
Nicholas of Autrecourt rejected the possibility of divine intervention to
maintain an illusion of perception: Whatever appears is true
•
He concluded that we cannot be certain of this assumption but can only
hold that it is probably true because it seems more likely than the
contrary assumption that whatever appears is false
Rise of the Concept of the Individual
The Individual in Popular Psychology
•
Theme of fin’amor, or courtly love, was developed by a number of
medieval authors
o
When not written by clerics with a moral in mind, were often
written by minstrels with immoral hopes
o
While it made men appreciate and even worship women, it did not
always work to their advantage and did nothing to change their
official status as chattels of their husbands
o
Adulterous hopes provided the basis of fin’amor literature
•
Limerence → romantic love
•
Spreading belief in romantic love tended to undermine the corporate
nature of medieval society by making the basis of relationships personal
feeling rather than appointed status
The Individual in Academic Psychology
•
Individualism did make its way into medieval academic culture – ethics
and mystic religion
•
Peter Abelard → sin was entirely a matter of intention, not of action
o
An act is not right or wrong, what is right or wrong is the
intention behind the act
•
Mysticism
o
Seeks a direct connection between self and God
o
Way to God is contemplation, not ritual
o
•
Rene Descartes
•
When he set out to doubt everything in order to find a fixed truth, he
resolved to not offend conventional beliefs in public
Kant
•
Restricted the use of reason to the private sphere, teaching that
professors and prelates had a duty to teach conventional beliefs in public,
even when they disagreed with them