1. The first “Schools” of Psychology School = community of researchers sharing common assumptions about what Psychology is, what it should study, and what methods should be used for research. Equivalent to Kuhn’s notion of ‘paradigm.’ School also denotes functioning lab where students are trained in the paradigm. School 1: William Wundt’s (1832-1920) voluntarism: the study of the willful direction of attention in immediate consciousness. Wundt distinguished between immediate consciousness or experience (direct sensory encoding); mediate experience (reading of instruments such as spectrometers); and higher mental processes (reasoning, language, creativity, etc.). Experimental psychology, according to Wundt, could only address immediate consciousness. Higher mental process required historical, naturalistic, and anthropological study. Elements of thoughts: Immediate conscious experience cold be reduced to (1) modality (the sense being stimulated – vision, audition, etc.) and (2) intensity (how strongly was the sense organ responding). Modality could be further reduced to modal qualities: for vision – hue, saturation, brightness; for audition – pitch, loudness, timbre. Sensations accompanies by feelings along three dimensions: pleasant-unpleasant, excitement-calm, and strain-relaxation. The goal of experimental psychology was twofold: (1) uncover the elements of thought (basic building block of immediate consciousness), and (2) combinatory laws by which basic building blocks are combined to create complex mental experiences.

2. Wundt’s Voluntarism Methodology for studying elements of thought: experimental introspection, i.e. tightly controlled simple report studies modeled on psychophysical methods of Weber and Fechner. Wundt used reaction-time studies modeled on the work of Cornelius Donders (1818-1889). Measure RT to simple task, such as identifying a letter, increase complexity of task to assess how long each additional component takes. How long to various mental processes take? Identification, discrimination, choice, pattern recognition, naming, etc. Elements of sensation combined (passively) to create perception, which was the experience of a ‘whole’ integrated signal (an apple rather than the hue, brightness, size, pleasant feeling etc. that constituted the sensory elements). Apperception referred to the conscious direction of attention to particular sensory elements rather than others. Apperception determines perception. Apperception can also involve the voluntary re-arranging or combining of sensory elements in novel ways called creative synthesis. In was the ability to control attention and construct meaning that was lost in mental disorders according to Wudnt.

3. Wundt’s Voluntarism The uniqueness of psychological science Physical causality predicted from antecedent events (ex: increased molecular movement causes higher water temperature). Psychological causality not predictable from antecedent events. Why not? – Willful direction of attention and creative synthesis – Principle of heterogony of ends – successful completion of one goal can create opportunity for pursuing a different, unplanned goal. (Ex: going to party to please a friend can lead to unexpected business opportunity). Principle of contrasts in experience – opposite experiences intensify one another (being hot makes cold even colder). This applies both in immediate experience and in longer-term (having been alone for extended period of time makes one crave companionship) and more broadly socially (after long period of liberal government people want conservative and vice-versa). Note that latter two examples involve willful direction of attention, first one is more passive (perceptual).

4. School 2: Titchener’s Structuralism Edward Bradford Titchener (1867-1927). Studied with Wundt and brought his version of Wundt’s philosophy to American which he called Structuralism. Titchener’s structuralism: understanding the what, how, and why of mental life: Mental life = Consciousness (sum total of momentary mental experience); Mind (accumulated conscious experiences of a lifetime). What = mental elements of conscious experience uncovered by introspection; How = mechanism used to combine elements of conscious experience; Why = neural correlates that underpin the elements and their combination. Titchener’s introspection: Observer must be trained to report only objective aspects of an experience: Size, shape, hue, duration etc. of an experience. Nothing subjective or meaningful could be reported – this was termed stimulus error. Objective elements were to be cataloged, to create a ‘periodic table’ of psychological elements. Ultimately the catalog grew to over 40,000 elements.

5. School 2: Titchener’s Structuralism Elements of experience consisted of both sensations and affections (pleasant or unpleasant emotions associated with elements). These were combined using the law of contiguity (elements and emotions occurring together in time tended to be combined together). For Titchener, attention was not volitional (as it had been for Wundt) but simply the clarity with which elements were experienced. Decline of structuralism: Why? (1) Unreliability of introspective accounts leading to an unwieldy catalog of elements (too many notes!). (2) Completely disconnected from other developments in psychology in areas of abnormal, personality, developmental, etc. (3) Absence of any practical value of catalog of elements (insisted by Titchener who demanded psychology be only concerned with “pure” knowledge.

6. School 3: Act Psychology Franz Brentano (1838-1917). Criticized the search for mental elements as assuming a static mind. Mind was active. Process of mind over structure. Mental processes are intentional, functional activities (judging, reasoning, expecting, inferring, doubting, loving, etc.). This is what needed to be studied. Intentionality: mental processes are directed at something outside of themselves. To judge is to judge something. To doubt is to doubt something. Argued for phenomenalogical methods: study of whole meaningful experiences, not analytic introspection. Yeah for the stimulus error! Carl Stumpf (1848-1936). Another important figure in Act School. Work was later inspirational to the Gestalt Psychologists. Also played important role in Clever Hans incident.

7. School 4: The Wurzburg School Inspired by Husserl’s Phenomenology. Edmund Husserl (1859-1938). Argued that Brentano’s intentionality pointed outward, away from the mind. Psychology should also look inward at mental phenomena. For example, the process of seeing apart from seeing something. Pure phenomenology: the study of the essence of the mental process apart from its interaction with the environment. We can’t understanding seeing an apple, until we understand seeing! Oswald Kulpe (1862-1915). Criticized introspective techniques of Wundt and Titchener for lack of non-referential condition, i.e. observer was always introspecting about something. Some thoughts are non-referential, imageless thought. These processes, he believed, included searching, doubting, hesitating, confidence, and judging (later added by Marbe). Mental set: perseverance of a particular mental strategy. Subjects asked to solve a problem get into a “problem solving” mental state that persists even later when no longer solving the problem. Unconscious problem solving. Example of a pure mental processes ‘looking’ for a referent. Important contribution of WS: Distinction between thought and thinking, mind and mental contents

8. Memory Studies Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850-1909). Some of the earlies experimental work on memory and two influential textbooks that helped to expand Psychology’s legitimacy as a science. Using himself as subject: learned a list of “non-sense” syllables. Studied until mastery, meaning 100% recall all of the syllabus. Relearning task: learn list and then learn same list later after various time intervals. Savings score: % reduction in learning trials necessary to reach original performance criterion. Ex. If perfect immediate recall required 10 trials and an hour later only 6 trials were needed, then the 1 hour savings score would be 40% (4/10; 40% fewer trials needed to reach criterion). Overlearning and increased meaningfulness of inputs increased the savings rate. For meaningfulness 10x fewer trials might be needed for retention.

9. Psychology as ‘useful fiction’ Hans Vaihinger (1852-1933). Agreed with Machian positivists that we can only know immediate sensations with certainty. Meaningful perceptions constructed from these sensations may or may not actually reflect external reality. Thus, all constructed meaning is fiction (meaning that it cannot be reliably connected with reality), however, humans cannot function without these fictions – we must treat them ‘as if’ they were real. Ex: we must treat others ‘as if’ they are responsible for the actions. We must treat the concept ‘zero’ as if it truly existed (otherwise mathematics and science would be impossible) and so forth. Connection to later Pragmatist philosophy. But also important difference. For Pragmatists, usefulness and truthfulness were inseparable. Not so for Vaihinger.