A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, Emotion, Consciousness, and Action: “Does Psychology exist?”

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If someone had asked Aristotle whether Psychology, as we know it, was a Science, he would have claimed that it was three sciences. He would have maintained, that is, that Psychology, was the concern of three sciences, namely, theoretical science(which includes metaphysics, physics, and biology), practical science(Ethics, Politics and Economics), and productive science(Rhetoric, arts and crafts). All three domains of science presuppose the laws of logic. Kant in his “Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view” claims that Philosophy is concerned with four questions: What can I know? What ought I to do? What can I hope for? and What is a human being?, and just as metaphysics and logic permeate the answers to all 4 questions, the fourth question will be relevant in all three of his Critiques in which theoretical, practical, technological and aesthetic matters are discussed. It is important to emphasise, however, that what Aristotle and Kant would have regarded as science would not be what we moderns mean by the term. Modern Science, uses logic but does not acknowledge the implications of doing so, namely, that logic is a “normative” science that is concerned with how we ought to think in accordance with the principles of non-contradiction and sufficient reason. Modern science is also “metaphysical” in that it makes metaphysical assumptions, whether they be materialistic or dualistic or hylomorphic. It is doubtful, however, if this modern form of scientific activity is fully cognisant of the operative effect of such assumptions. In systematically detaching itself from both logic and metaphysics, science has been forced to abandon certain kinds of explanation for the phenomena it investigates, preferring instead to focus on the instrumental means by which it brings its largely descriptive results about. For Aristotle and Kant it was clear that the methodology of observation and experimentation are very useful in the investigation of inorganic phenomena but they would have refused to universalise this method with respect to the study of human beings because of its obvious inadequacies: for fear that is, of obscuring the ontological structure of the being that is the object of its study.

Kant, in his work “Anthropology”, makes his position very clear in the preface to that work when he claims categorically that Anthropology studies man as a cosmopolitan citizen of the world. He also lists a number of obstacles to using the methodologies of observation and experimentation in such a study, Firstly,:

“If a human being notices that someone is observing him and trying to study him, he will either appear embarrassed(self-conscious) and cannot show himself as he really is: or he dissembles, and does not want to be known as he is”(P.5)

This I am inclined to say is just a point in accordance with both common sense and a tenet of philosophical explanation. Curiously it is a point that is acknowledged even amongst scientists themselves when the “results” of their observations and experiments fly in the face of both common sense and philosophy. Technical terms such as “expectancy effects” and “demand characteristics” are used as excuses or apologies for the absurd results that are observed and these are then included in the list of “confounding variables”. Secondly Kant also points out that:

“Even if he only wants to study himself, he will reach a critical point, particularly as concerns his condition in affect, which normally does not allow dissimulation:that is to say, when the incentives are active, he does not observe himself, and when he does observe himself, the incentives are at rest,”(P.5)

Kant is here making the philosophical point that relates to the kind of awareness that a subject has when he is engaged in an emotional or instinctive reaction which precludes reflective observation. The point might also apply to simple motor tasks such as reaching for the incentive of an orange. My attention is involuted onto the orange and were it to be disengaged for the purposes of observing what my arm is doing, the whole structure of the experience would dissolve and all the subject would be able to say would be “my arm is moving” which is a true observational statement but wholly inadequate as an answer to the question “What am I doing?” The answer to that question does not require knowledge acquired through observation. Thirdly, Kant claims:

“Circumstances of place and time, when they are constant, produce habits which, as is said, are second nature, and make it difficult for the human being to judge how to consider himself, but even more difficult to judge how he should form an idea of others with whom he is in contact: for the variation of conditions in which the human being is placed by his fate, or, if he is an adventurer, places himself, make it very difficult for anthropology to rise to the rank of a formal science.”(P.5)

The problem being alluded to here is that formal science understands the world in terms of the law of causation and when the causes are in the past(when the habits were being formed) they are not observable and this raises the question therefore whether, in fact, different causes could produce the same effect and therefore invalidate a search for “the cause” of the habit we are witnessing. In fact, if Anthropology teaches us anything at all it is that the “causes” or conditions involved in human experience are multiple and as Kant points out we might be better off searching for these “conditions” in history, biographies, plays or novels.

Let us turn to a Textbook in Psychology published over one hundred years after the “separation” of the “Science of Psychology” from Philosophy and consider the following words in the Introduction to the work:

“One of the major difficulties encountered when starting to study psychology is to find out what it is. It is tempting to take the easy way out by looking up the word”Psychology” in a dictionary and satisfying oneself with some neat definition, such as the “science of behaviour and experience”. But this way will not provide you with any adequate picture of the subject, because “psychology” has meant(and does mean) quite different things to people, depending on when they lived, where they worked, and. also, what sort of person they were.”(Textbook of Psychology Radford, J., and Govier, E.,(London, Routledge, 1980, P.3-4)

The first thing to say about this is that its failure to specify what Psychology is, whilst drawing attention to general lack of agreement and ambiguity of the dictionary definition, is a scientific failure. Scientists may disagree about many things but disagreements about the nature of the subject create both logical and conceptual difficulties. One can then ask whether, if this description of what Psychology is, is a correct description of reality, this state of affairs is an indication of the non-existence of Psychology as a Science. As we have indicated above, both Aristotle and Kant would have denied the status of a “Special science” to the study of Psychology. It is also doubtful that they would have found the dictionary definition of “the science of behaviour and experience” as particularly illuminating given the fact that in a certain sense epistemology and metaphysics are sciences of behaviour and experience and both of these areas of study were rejected by the Psychology-separatists of the 19th century. In spite of this rejection, however, given the comprehensiveness of the philosophical reasoning of Kant and Aristotle, epistemological and metaphysical assumptions are inescapable. Given the denial of the Aristotelian and Kantian significance of these forms of knowledge and reasoning it is then inevitable that unreflective forms of dualistic and materialistic epistemology and metaphysics will be so-called “confounding variables” in any scientific activity. The dialectical opposition of dualism have been resolved only twice in the history of Philosophy, once by Aristotle(Plato and the Ancient materialists) and once by Kant(Cartesianism and empiricism), and as a consequence, no discipline of Psychology emerged but an area of study called “Philosophical Psychology” did emerge with the Philosophy of Kant.

According to the “Textbook of Psychology” we are referred to not one “condition” or “cause”, but two, which constitutes the “historical event” of the separation of Psychology and Philosophy. Not one “school” of Psychology, but two claim the title of “the initiator”: Wundt’s structuralist school in Leipzig and William James’s functionalist school from Harvard. Schools, the authors of the Textbook argue, arose once Psychology committed itself to being an empirical science. Schools proliferated from this point forward and multiplied with widely varying agendas and with no agreement on either subject matter or method. Wundt’s experimental method and theoretical agenda were symptomatic of the absence of conceptual and principled guidance. The science Wundt used as the model for the construction of his theories and experiments was the science of chemistry which “analyses” a complex into its elements. The Textbook characterised Wundt’s “Psychology” in the following way:

“He defined psychology as the science of consciousness and believed that its subject matter should be an immediate experience rather than that experience which has been subject to conceptualisation.”(P.6)

Both Aristotle and Kant would claim that information can only be communicated if it is conceptualised, so the following is a naturally arising question: “How did Wundt imagine his subjects would communicate their experiences to the experimenter?” It came as no surprise to the philosophical bystanders that Wundt’s experiments could not be repeated by experimenters from other laboratories. The “elements” or “atoms” of experience were deemed by Wundt to be “sensations”(external) “feelings”(inner) and “images” which presumably were also inner. The mind, Wundt argued, was the medium of the synthesis of these elements of experience. The “method” of Wundtian “experimentation” was “introspection” or inner “observation”. It required specialist training if the “correct” results were to be obtained. So, when Kulpe who ran another structuralist laboratory, produced problem-solving experiments that required no “mental images” a quarrel over introspective training occurred. Noticeable in this theoretical approach is two things: firstly the theorising resembled empirical theorising prior to the conceptual refutation of this reasoning by Kant, secondly, the absence of principles to organise the elements. Another Structuralist “laboratory” run by Titchener illustrated the logical consequences of the absence of organising principles when he published that his “method” had discovered 44,000 sensations! The image of Typhon, the thousand-headed Greek monster, arises in this context. The allegory falters here of course because on the Structuralist position there would be no “owner” of all these sensations.

The American “school” of Functionalism claimed to be inspired by Darwin but there are also considerable traces of empirical thinking in both the theorising and methodology of this school. The functionalists also accepted the Wundtian definition of Psychology as the “science of consciousness” but the agreement ended there. The “Textbook of psychology” claimed, simplistically in our view, that the structuralist school were mostly influenced by Philosophy whereas functionalists were mostly influenced by Biology. Structuralism, we have maintained was influenced neither by Aristotelian nor Kantian Philosophy. Indeed perusal of William James’s functionalism will reveal a reliance on empirical philosophising which resembled some forms of structuralism. James’s functionalism would not, of course, tolerate the idea of “ownerless sensations” but it generates an image of a multi-headed monster of its own when it suggests that there is more than one self in the stream of consciousness which is mine. For both Aristotle and Kant, there is one enduring self with an enduring unity that may or may not possess a “stream of consciousness”. Functionalism, however, of the kind we encounter in William James, was a project of much wider scope than structuralism, incorporating as it did, reference to a considerable amount of philosophical knowledge and practical reasoning that extended widely into social and religious contexts. The “Textbook” ignores the wider scope of the functionalist movement, focuses instead on the Darwinian influence, and notes the observational body of evidence(ignoring the fact that the survival of the fittest and the links between species of different kinds, were inferences and not pure observations):

“If the function of other abilities were to be discussed, why not the function of consciousness? Thus Darwin raised the issue of the utility of consciousness. The importance of individual differences between the members of species was also made clear by Darwin, and this lead was taken up by a group of statisticians and psycho-metricians who form a tradition of psychology in themselves.”(P.9)

There is something of interest in the above quote. Darwin speaks of characteristics of animals in functional terms. These “physical” characteristics have both “evolved” in the evolutionary process and are playing a functional role in the survival of the animal. Consciousness, however, according to James is characterised by James in his essay “Does Consciousness exist?” in the following words:

“For twenty years past I have mistrusted “consciousness” as an entity: for seven or eight years past I have suggested its non-existence to my students, and tried to give them its pragmatic equivalent in realities of experience.”(Essays in Radical Empiricism( Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1996)

James then goes on to claim that there is a so-called substance of pure experience which has the function of knowing is best divided up into “the subject or bearer of the knowledge and the object known”

This claim, juxtaposed with his claim that the brain is one of the important constituents of what one is aware of and what is known, gives us a clue insofar as characterizing the metaphysical assumptions of James is concerned. His views are dualistic and like Cartesian dualism, he is eventually forced to rest his case on a materialistic commitment to the black box of the brain. There is scientific description of physiological mechanisms and processes and reference to introspection or inner observation complementing each other against the background of an ambiguous idea of “interaction”. James’s earlier definition of Psychology from his work “Principles” is :

“The Science of Mental Life, its phenomena, and conditions”(P.1)

His characterization of what he calls “intelligent” action is indeed functional and utilitarian:

“no action but such as are done for an end show a choice of means can be called indubitable expressions of Mind.”(Principles P.11)

In the arena of practical willing, however, it is clear that James’s contribution to Psychology is more significant but it is so because of its conceptual and philosophical orientation. There is, in certain discussions, an interesting Kantian “atmosphere”. The short quote below,for example, indicates a more Philosophical approach to the integration rather than an association of thought and practical reality:

“In action as in reasoning, then, the great thing is the quest of the right conception”

The question, however, is whether the above is being assumed to occur in a context of discovery rather than a context of explanation/justification. For some commentators, James suggests that consciousness has not just an adaptive function but also an “inclusive” or “assimilative” function which will be important in the later developmental cognitive Psychology of Piaget: a Psychology that has both Darwinian and Philosophical commitments to one form of hylomorphism. Given the fact that James in his later work disowned the idea of consciousness, functionalism had only two non-philosophical routes to travel: brain research and behaviourism. His work on the importance of Habit and his suggestion that voluntary action was a secondary process coupled with his failure to comprehend the limitations of (the context of discovery orientation) of modern science contributed to the next major revolution in Psychology, namely, the abandonment of Consciousness and the mental, in favour of the brain and its relation to behaviour. In this revolution, introspection was abandoned in favour of external observation and animal experimentation. The “analytical” theoretical commitment shifted from sensations, feelings, and images to stimulus and response but not before one attempt to question the assumption that the whole is the sum of the parts was made by the brain researchers from the Gestalt school of Psychology.

Whether or not this movement was an attempt to head off the flight of Psychology into atomism as a consequence of the commitment to the experimental method is a question that can legitimately be posed. Köhler’s experiments with the way in which apes learn via holistic perceptual insight into the solution of a problem suggested an organising principle that unfortunately ended in the activity of the brain .The brain, for Gestalt Psychology, is the final answer to the question of the nature of the relation between the isomorphic elements of the physiological and the mental. There is also an interesting phenomenological moment in Köhlers own difficulties in correctly characterising (conceptualising?) the behaviour of the apes he was studying. The interesting question to ask is why Psychologists choose to conduct experiments with animals. We suspect the answer resides in the Kantian objection that human beings would not behave naturally in conditions in which they are being studied. In more modern language one can say that once people know that they are being studied their responses change because of expectancy effects and the consequences of this, in turn, may make people behave in accordance with what they perceive is demanded or expected by the experimenter. Some subjects may react to these effects by deliberately trying to frustrate the demands or the expectations of the experimenter. Animals in that respect at least could not be said to understand that they are being studied or observed. The problem, however, is that any results obtained from animal experiments could not then automatically be generalised to humans without further theorisation. “The whole” considered by apes that do not possess language powers might not be “the whole” involved in human problem-solving. The behaviourist animal experiments attempted to neutralise this problematic aspect of experimentation by studying either simple biological reactions such as salivation or simpler behavioural responses relating to lower levels of perception and desire. Some Gestalt psychologists realised these limitations and in fact constructed human experiments. Lewin, for example, constructed experiments based on the idea of the mind as a “tension-system” and its relation to what he called “life-space”. “Homeostasis”, the telos of the energy regulation principle and the pleasure-pain principle were all involved in the construction of these experiments. The quantitative bias of the experiments was indicated by the mathematisation of the motivational “life-space” of the subjects involved. Mathematics is concerned with one of Aristotle’s kinds of change, namely quantitative change. The life-space of an individual is composed of all 4 kinds of change and the quantification of reality is primarily concerned with measuring a continuum or the discrete elements of a continuum. This poses a question in relation to the slogan of the Gestalt Psychologists, namely, “The Whole is greater than the sum of the parts” . If this were true it would quite simply be an example of poor quantification or poor exercise of mathematical skills.

This prejudice in favour of quantification and measurement which one of the above quotes attributed to Darwin establishes itself as an emblem of “objectivity” first in Gestalt Psychology and second in Behavioral Psychology (which the “Textbook” attributes to the British Psychologist William McDougal). Yet there is more than a trace of James in this notion of the objective which appears initially to be defined in terms of the negation of the “subjective”, that for James was the entire field of mental life. This together with the quantification bias set the stage for the work of the American behaviourists beginning with the controversial figure of John Watson who specifically denied the existence of consciousness on the grounds that it cannot be observed. Watson rejected the Gestalt call for holistic perceptual insight and embraced the atomism of stimuli and response.

In connection with this debate over the question of objectivity the “Textbook” controversially claims the following:

“The problem becomes clear when one considers that all of the knowledge we have of the world is essentially private. We do not, in the last analysis know if we see an object in the room: we simply know we have a sense impression, a perception of the object. This knowledge is subjective. Even if the object is clear and plain to see, an armchair, for example, we only know of it subjectively….the statement “there is an armchair in the room” is a subjective one.”(P22)

It is only, the “Textbook” argues, if observers meet to agree that there is an armchair in the room that this statement becomes knowledge and thereby, objective. This is recognizably a view of Karl Popper. The view is also understandably a consequence of the historical development of Psychology and Science. We can see a shift has gradually and incrementally occurred toward a concern for un-conceptualised data which can be quantified but should remain un-conceptualised, until that is, a group of scientists meet to agree upon the concepts they are to use. This is a view that implies that the knowledge we have of armchairs and their relation to the rest of the world is subjective and can only be made objective if a group(how many?) of observers meet to agree how to conceptualise the data differently. The obvious question to ask here is “Where is the theory that would provide the grounds for conceptualising the data differently?” What is at issue is the perception of a particular armchair in particular relation to the rest of the world. The subjective grounds for the above judgment “Because I see it” is obviously not “objective” because it goes beyond the information given, but what other grounds can there be for the perception of particular objects and would the grounds be the same or different for each individual object and each individual subject? These are clearly unanswerable questions and arise from a prejudicial and partial view of a process of “pure experience” to use an expression used in James’s later view. This view is one in which the stream of “pure experience” is divided into two events, one subjective and one objective. So although James was not concerned with atomising our experience he was concerned with dividing a whole into two parts. Aristotle’s theory of change would have refused to conceptualise an experience such as building a house into two events, namely, a builder building a house and the house being built. For Aristotle, this is one experience, one event. Causal thinking only functions effectively, according to Aristotle if experience is not arbitrarily divided up into subjective and objective “events”.

Wittgenstein, in relation to this discussion, would have pointed out the difficulties involved in a group of people meeting to name the private “experience” of being affected by sensory impressions and he would also have argued against the possibility of any individual constructing a “Private” language. These arguments might even apply to a group of people “meeting” to construct a language from scratch. One can also wonder if it would be possible to regard the knowledge of one’s own language as “subjective”. If not, how is it possible for a group to “meet” to agree upon rules for the use of a language to describe and explain the nature of these sense impressions? Built into our language are also, for example, the categories of substance, causality, and community, and Kant claims that these are not derived from experience but are rather a priori notions that assist us in organising our experience, i.e. the concepts and the intuitions that constitute our experience. Kant’s view of science, however, in spite of its solution of the problems involved in relation to his objections to dualism and materialism, had by this time, been eclipsed by an atomistic materialistic view of an impression that Aristotle too would have viewed with scepticism.

The question, then, whether Psychology exists would be answered in the negative by both Aristotle and Kant. Wittgenstein, too, is on record in saying that the theorising in Psychology suffers from what he calls “conceptual confusion”. To the extent that consciousness and our mental life is no longer the cause of concern, and these are important aspects of “theoretical” psychological study, the answer to this question must be that theoretical, scientific psychology does not “exist” in the sense that concepts “exist”. Psychology however clearly has an institutional technological existence in relation to an imperative connected with mental health. It also has significance in explaining the practical reasoning connected with both instrumental and ethical action.