Midterm Flashcards
(117 cards)
Scholasticism
The philosophical systems and speculative tendencies of various medieval Christian thinkers, who, working against a background of fixed religious dogma, sought to solve philosophical problems with intellect, realism and nominalism. Merged classical thinking and Christian doctrine. Science still not applied to the mind.
Roger Bacon (1620)
Father of scientific method
Not focused in religion, goal was to improve life/humanity
Materialism
Belief that one type of “stuff” makes up the universe. Not liked by the Catholic Church, who thought it was anti-religious
Dualism
- Separation of the mind and body
- Offered some explanation of how cognition was not materialistic
Bell-Magendie Law (1811)
- Charles Bell
- Spine is the cause of all sensation and movement
- Per church: physical explanation for souls
Law of specific nerve energies
- Johannes Müller
- The mind has access to things that are only in the nerves (not real world)
- The contents of the mind have no qualities in common with environmental objects but serve only as arbitrary signs or markers of those objects.
Applying Materialism to Mental Life: 2 Interpretations
- Materialism + Evolution → the adaption of the brain over the lifetime of the individuals (Herbert Spencer, Herman Ebbinghaus)
- Materialism + Methods → Consciousness as a subject matter (William Wundt)
3 schools of Psychology in late 19th century
Structuralists, Wurtzberg School, Act psychology
Structuralists
- Wundt,
- Method: introspection
- Focused on breaking down mental processes into the most basic components
Wurtzberg School
- Kulpe
- Methods: mixed.
- Hypothesizes existence of special states of consciousness—“thoughts”—which cannot be reduced to the sensory content.
Act psychology
- Brentatno
- More philosophical than empirical
- The mind is a symbol system
William Wundt
- Recognized as the founder of psychology
- Voluntarism (Wundt’s experimental psychology
- Volkerpsychologie (Wundt’s non-experimental psychology)
Voluntarism
- Wundt’s experimental psychology
- Meant to indicate voluntary, active, and willful nature of the mind
- Key was Apperception
Apperception
- Active intentional process involving will
- Mechanism of creative synthesis by which psychical elements and compounds are synthesized into experience
- Key to Wundt’s Voluntarism theory
Volkerpsychologie
- Wundt’s non experimental psychology (cultural psychology)
- Precursor to social psychology cultural psychology, and personality
Wundt’s goal of psychology
To analyze experience in terms of component elements and compounds
Two types of experience
- Mediate experience: domain of natural science
- Immediate experience: domain of psychology
Experimental self-observation
- Wundt’s self described experimental methd
- Observer presented with stimulus condition and instructed to be in a state of readiness
Tridimensional theory of feeling
Wundt’s theory that all emotions take place on three separate continua: pleasant-unpleasant, tension-relaxation, excitement-depression
Ebbinghaus
- Forgetting curve
- Wanted to study associations as they were being formed
- Nonsense syllables method
Systematic experimental introspection
- Observers would experience what ever stimuli or events they were supposed to experience and then provide comprehensive account of mental processes
- Pioneered by Kulpe
Imageless Thought
- Pioneered by Kulpe
- Observers reported forming images of weights when lifted them but reported there was no sensory or imaginal content present when they made judgments
Gestalt Psychology
- Koffka, Wertheimer, and Kholer
- Sought to explain perceptions in terms of gestalts rather than by analyzing their constituents.
Behaviorism
- Goal to predict behavior or show how classical and operational conditions can account for behavior
- Methods cannot be subjective, introspection as a method in invalid
- Pioneered by Watson