1. The establishment of the academic discipline of Psychology

In 1879 Wilhelm Wundt, at the University of Leipzig, was given some space to conduct psychological experiments. This event is significant not because Wundt at Leipzig won out over others at other universities. Nor was it significant because that year Wundt somehow decided it might be nice to have a psychology laboratory and asked, and was given one. Psychology did not become an academic (autonomous) discipline “out of the blue”; Wundt did not just one day invent psychology’sconcepts or formulate psychological problems; rather, he borrowed these from already existing disciplines like philosophy and physiology.

Similarly, the activities that become known as the methods of psychological research were hardly Wundt’s invention. Rather, Wundt adapted existing methods/practices to a different conceptual context. That is, Wundt and others who became “psychologists” borrowed existing concepts, problems, and methods from elsewhere and adapted these to suit their new “psychological” goals.

Wundt gave shape to his new program of psychological research by borrowing from two explicit investigative practices and one implicit practice.

  1. He based himself, as a physiologist, on a specific form of experimental practice that only recently (one generation earlier) had been formulated in physiology. This provided him with certain material techniques of experimentation and, importantly, a certain way of asking psychological questions.
  2. He then proposed to apply these material techniques to a different “object” than experimental physiologists had done who had applied these techniques to organs and organ systems. The object to which Wundt addressed these techniques was the “inner world” of “individual, private, consciousness”. From where did Wundt get this “object” of psychology? For we should remember that after all, not long after Wundt constituted inner experience as the object of psychological investigation, psychologists quickly rejected this as the proper object of psychological investigation. In any case, Wundt along with his selection of this “object” (of “inner experience”) also imported the formulation of a method that was historical (philosophically) tied to this object, namely introspection, although he carefully reformulated introspection to suit his view of the object (inner experience) and to meet the demands of the material techniques of experimentation as well as the kinds of questions he asked of the object which he borrowed from physiology.
  3. Introspection and experimentation usually receive all the attention by those who write of the history of the founding of psychology as an autonomous discipline. But there was also a third element that profoundly affected the founding of the new discipline, namely the “social organization of psychological experimentation”.In fact it is this social organization of experimentation that provides the most convincing grounds on which to credit Wundt with having founded psychology. That is, Wundt’s laboratory was where “scientific (physiological = experimental) psychology” was first practiced as an organized and self-conscious activity by a community of investigators. This community in turn spawned other communities at other universities. That is, the founding of psychology as a distinct academic discipline of psychological inquiry was identified with a research community (i.e., a social organization). Wundt did this by adopting the prevailing university link between teaching and research that only recently originated in Germany. That is, Wundt’s laboratory was a place where students pursued experimental research. This resulted in a particular pattern of psychological experimentation which quickly became “traditional” in the discipline and in some way remains so to the present.

1. Introspection

Contra contemporary psychology, introspection was a major topic of discussion at the time of the founding of psychology and for several decades after that, well into the 20th c. Yet, contra the claims of the later behaviorists (circa 1915) who maintained that introspection was the hallowed method of pre-scientific psychology, introspection was at the time of Wundt a relatively recent invention. [The behaviorists were eager to distance themselves from Wundt’s “introspection method” in order that they might count Wundt as a full-fledge member their behaviorist vision of the “science” of psychology.]

It is generally acknowledged (see C. Taylor) that introspection finds it roots in the protestant theology of the Reformation which encouragedthe careful self-examination of one’s conscience (which partially took the place of the Roman Catholic confessional). Yet the use of the word ‘introspection’ as a systematic and ethically neutral practiceof self-observation does not appear in English until the second half the 19th c.

Of course, philosophy had long appealed to self-awareness (just as they appealed to the observation of others, their actions, beliefs, feelings and motives). But philosophers never thought of this self-awareness as amethodor methodology (theory of methods), and self-awareness not considered a method in philosophy any more than observation of the world was deemed to be method. That is, we must distinguish between our everyday commonsense “experience” (of either or both the outer world or the inner world) and the systematic arrangement for the methodological production of certain kinds of experiences that we might call an effort at a scientific method. In the latter sense there certainly was no introspection before the 19th c., that is, before Fechner, Weber, and Wundt.

We recall that John Locke had distinguished between two sources of knowledge: sensation and reflection. Sensation gave us knowledge of the external world whereas reflection gave us knowledge of the inner world (of our own minds). Thus we get a philosophy of nature (external world) and a philosophy of mind (inner world). Yet Locke and the empiricist tradition more generally did not distinguish between the awareness of the mind (mental states) and the deliberate observation of mind (mental states).

It was the continental tradition, specifically Immanuel Kant, which in trying to overcome the conflict between the rationalist and empiricist traditions, distinguished between awareness and deliberate observation of mental states. Thus, while Kant accepted Locke’s distinction between inner sense and outer sense, he raised the crucial question which Locke did not do, namely “can the experience of inner sense (inner world) be a basis for a “mental science” just like the experience of outer sense was the basis for physical science?”Kant answered “no”! The reason Kant gave is that science always involves the systematic ordering of sensory information in terms of a synthesis expressed in mathematical terms. But the information provided by inner sense was resistant to mathematization (or measurement) and hence there could be no science of the inner sense; that is, there not be a science of psychology. Thus, while Kant acknowledged that Locke was correct in that there was an empirical basis for psychology (inner sense), this was insufficient to establish it as a “science”. [One can readily appreciate that Kant’s standard of science was far “higher” than the empiricist standard – it is one reason why even today many natural scientists do not consider psychology to be a science – perhaps because it is not possible to mathematize (measure) psychological (inner sense) phenomena.]

In addition to making a fundamental distinction between “science” and psychology, Kant made an even more important distinction (which was to be the fate of psychology in the 19th c.) namely between the very different domains of psychology and philosophy. The empiricists in the Lockean tradition of the “philosophy of mind” did not make this distinction between psychology and philosophy – which meant of course that psychology lacked any special domain of study (it had no objects or methods that could distinguish it from philosophy – think of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume). The empiricists were primarily concerned to provide an empirical theory of knowledge and in doing so they formulated a theory of mental functioning (a “psychological” theory) but they saw this effort not as “psychology” but a properly belonging to philosophy.

This point is important (even and perhaps especially so today). The empiricists did not distinguish between the following two questions: “how mental contents were caused by the natural (inner or outer) world?” (which was the empiricist focus) and “in what sense mental contents could be said to constitute knowledge?” As long as these two questions were not distinguished psychology (presumably answering the first question) and philosophy (presumable answering the second question) were indissolubly fused. Hence it follows that the empiricists were simply not concerned to formulate a special method for psychology, and could merely appeal to everyday commonsense awareness of experience.

However, Kant did make the distinction between mental as it is present to experience (the “how” of mental content) and the principles in terms of which that mental life was organized (the “what” of mental content). That is, Kant held that the inner world was part of the empirical world just like our perceptions of the outer world, but that the empirical world (both inner and outer) points beyond itself to the empirical to the transcendental ego as the source of the categories of understanding that characterize human experience in general.

To give an example of what difference this distinction between the two questions makes consider that there is a huge difference between examining the factors involved in particular spatial perceptions (presumably the “how” or the psychological question) and examining the implications of the fact that our perceptions are always characterized by spatiality (the “what” philosophical question). In any case, in making the distinction between these two kinds of questions (which the empiricist philosophers collapsed), Kant (the rationalist) separated philosophy from psychology and thereby raised the question of “psychology as a non-philosophical but empirical discipline”. Such a discipline would be empirical (based on the evidence of inner sense in the same way that the natural sciences based themselves on the evidence of outer sense). But being empirical was not sufficient to be a science (e.g. Botany was empirical in it formulated a system of classification based on the different features that characterized plants, but it was not a science since it was unable to demonstrate why a plant took on the features it does rather than say take on other features). In contrast Newtonian science (Physics) was able to demonstrate mathematically why a system of moving physical bodies, like the planets, maintained, given certain assumptions, the particular arrangement of its parts.

It is interesting then that Kant provided us with a clear cut distinction between psychology and philosophy but he also had a strong view of what constituted a science and, importantly, that psychology could not meet those standards in principle. At best psychology would be a kind of “natural history of mind”, a catalogue or classification of empirical mental contents lacking both the fundamental importance of philosophy and the rational (mathematical) consistency of science.

We might just examine this change from Locke’s empiricism to Kant’s critical realism/idealism (philosophy) more closely because the change involved a set of interconnected distinctions that profoundly affected the sphere of intellectual work. Kant’s writings were “critical” precisely in that he raised the standards of and the interest in the organization of intellectual work. Of course, Kant as a follower of the Enlightenment’s “new science” was interested in the acquisition of knowledge but he also recognized that there are different kinds of knowledge based on different kinds of scientific practices. It became accepted that intellectual work was divided into different disciplines (fields) each of which was constituted by a trio of independent factors:

(1) a certain object of investigation,

(2) certain questions/problems that were characteristic of the field and asked of the object, and

(3) a specific methodology (method) whereby these questions/problems are answered.

Although the conception of the object of investigation limits the problems that can be formulated with respect to the object and suggests certain methods appropriate in order to answer the problems posed with respect to the object, the adoption of these methods will continually re-create the object presupposed and constrain the questions that can be legitimately posed with respect to the object. Thus, the advance of introspection from the everyday commonsense awarenessto the use of a self-conscious method of investigation (as Wundt formulated it) would not have been possible without having first established that inner experience (object) was as legitimate a part of experience as was outer experience, and of course, in turn, the development of the systematic practice of introspection served to confirm just such an inner world of experience.

Be careful here. It is often simply asserted that psychology as an academic discipline owes it existence to Descartes’ rationalist distinction between the “extended” and mechanical world of matter and the totally different (non-extended) world of mind. This is partially correct for this was also the starting point of Locke’s empiricist philosophy (the inner, individual mind). However for both Descartes and Locke (and here the rationalist and the empiricist both come under Kant’s critique), the mind remained apotential object of technical scrutiny. Both empiricism and rationalism made distinctions and divisions in our experience of life but these were but a first step. To talk about inner experience (just as outer experience) makes it a potential object of specialized study but it required a lot more (further development) to make inner experience an “object” of systematic scientific study.

This development involved the growth of thesciences in the 18th c. As knowledge of the natural world accumulated it gradually became more differentiated and more self-conscious (e.g., the movement from anatomy to physiology). The question of the relationship between science (or natural philosophy) and the more traditional concerns of philosophy came under scrutiny particularly in Germany where science was likely to occupy members of the university philosophy departments (after all Kant taught the natural sciences). The result was a sharpened focus on the methodological requirement of the various sciences (witness Kant’s effort, in his “First Critique” to “ground” Newton’s physics). Kant was clearly concerned with the role of the philosopher in a situation that was rapidly being changed by the prestige of the newly emerging sciences (natural knowledge). What Kant did so brilliantly was to give philosophy the major role in adjudicating divergent kinds of knowledge as a result of the newly emerging sciences. Consequently, philosophy over the course of the 19th c. assigned intellectual limits to the new empirical fields of study based on methodological criteria. In turn, the newly emerging sciences were eager to justify themselves as “sciences” before this court of appeal.

Hence, in 19th c. German universities the question of psychology as a field of study became a question of its methodology. Three issues dominated this debate:

  1. introspection
  2. mathematization
  3. experimentation

The first two found their source in Kant and, especially the second, in Friedrich Herbart who was Kant’s successor at Konigsberg and who tried to demonstrate (in what was a monumental exercise) that the mathematization of psychology was possible and this remained an important influence until the end of the 19th c. Experimentation was to be supplied by physiology.

Introspection remained a contentious issue. For Kant description of inner experience like that of outer experience was limited to the phenomenal world of appearances (the only world we can possibly know) and hence introspection was also limited to the phenomenal self (as I appear to myself). The true basis of mental life, the true subject of pure apperception (transcendental ego – noumenal self) cannot be grasped in experience (either inner or outer) but remains a presupposition of all inquiry.

Hegel confirmed this low evaluation of individual self-observation. Since Spirit was for Hegel the all-embracing objective category embodied in (historical) social and cultural manifestations, as abstractions of philosophical reflection (speculation), the role of observing the inner mind had little role to play.

In general the 19th c. was split into two camps with regard to introspection depending on which aspect of Kant’ ambiguous legacy it chose to emphasize. There were those like Hegel and Kant himself (“critical realists” or “idealists”) who devalued the evidence of inner experience (that is, the knowledge claims derived from inner experience), while there were others who sought to develop a new empirical discipline on the basis of evidence from inner experience (e.g., Fries, Beneke, and Fortlage, none of whom received much recognition in Germany however). The critical factor that distinguished these two camps was the degree of individualismthat characterized each camp. Those in the British empiricist tradition grounded philosophical speculation in the experience of individual minds, those in the German idealist tradition grounded philosophical speculation on supra-individual principles. [In a historically strange twist, it is interesting to note that in France the positivism of August Comte also distrusted introspection and affirms supra-individual principles of what Comte called “order”/nature. This point is important for it shows that Comte’s positivism was not the positivism of British empiricism as propounded, for example, by in J. S. Mill. The 19th c. is marked by different “positivisms”.] The German idealist tradition rejected introspection as unreliable and superficial, whereas the empiricist tradition held that introspection was the necessary basis of philosophy/psychology – remember the latter did not really distinguish psychology from philosophy. Thus, where individualism (the self-conscious individual) held sway it became the center piece of around which the world was arranged and introspection was held in high regard as a method or else, in contrast, where the order of the world (Spirit) held precedence over the individual as in idealism (and notably Comte’s positivism) introspection was regarded with suspicion and condescension.

[A note here is in order. For it would seem from the preceding paragraph that the British empiricist tradition are more inclined to emphasize the importance of “inner experience” whereas I suggested in class that the empiricist tradition’s conception of “consciousness” (and this was also true for the rationalist influence of Descartes) was very thin indeed. That is, inner experience was either a purelylogical starting point as in Descartes (where the “I think” is not a substantial “self” or habitus) or else the focal role of experience was divided between “subjective”, secondary properties, which were deemed to be epiphenomenal and “objective”, primary properties, which were deemed to be real (e.g., Locke’s “scientific materialism”). Whether in empiricism, the ScottishSchool of philosophy, or early American psychology introspection was deemed important and stands in stark contrast to the later rise of behaviorism on American psychology which also signaled a break with Anglo-Saxon mental philosophy. Strangely enough there was more “consciousness” in idealism (from Kant’s critical realism/idealism to Hegel’s Spirit) than there was in Anglo-Saxon “mental philosophy” and this because the latter were constrained in their effort to accommodate mind to their over-riding adherence to scientific materialism (which Kant tried to limit and Hegel absorbed in his idealism). We might also note that August Comte’s French positivism was really an effort to eliminate the Anglo-Saxon empiricist’s primary/secondary properties distinction altogether (and with it the distinction between inner and outer experience). Comte held to a kind of naïve realism (the world is as it appears), precluding any philosophical metaphysics, in favor a “realism” of a direct access to the world as given in experience.]