Early Psychology

Early Psychology

1. Epistomology

   • Epistomology is the branch of philosophy that is concerned with knowledge

2. Rationalism

   • Knowledge is innate and derived from reasoning, some ideas come from god
   • Plato
   • Descartes
     • Reasoned we know we must exist, but evil daemons or god may deceive us

3. Empiricism

   • Knowledge is derived from experiences and the senses
     • Aristotle
   • Locke
     • The mind isn't born empty, machinery for appetites and imagination
     • The mind is a tabula rasa, aka a blank slate
     • Combination, relation, and generalisation make more complex ideas
   • Hume
     • Distinguished two sense experiences: impressions and ideas - together these make more complex ideas
     • Our mind is a bundle of sensations: bundle theory
     • Two kinds of intellectual inquiry: relations of ideas, and matter of fact
       • We trace each simple idea down to its impressions. If no idea attaches to a term, the term has no meaning

4. Rationalism versus empiricism

   • Descartes vs Hume
   • Leibniz
     • Critical of the tabula rasa, doesn't believe the mind is passive, instead it works on and transforms sensory experiences and we have innate ideas
       • He criticised Descartes and disagreed that all mental states are conscious. He believed animals had feelings and souls
     • Rationalist
   • Kant
     • Aimed to synthesise rationalism and empiricism, the mind can have innate knowledge AND have experience from the senses
     • Distinguished noumena and phenomena
     • Analytic and synthetic statements
       • Analytic = tautological, thing being said in the statement is contained in the subject, rational knowledge
       • Synthetic = no tautological, giving you new information, empirical knowledge
       • We assume a synthetic a priori (rational) knowledge, the mind constructs a priori to structure our experience and knowledge
         • Space, time, and causality

5. Natural philosophophy

   • A philosophical approach to the natural world, e.g., physics and chemistry.

6. Phrenology

   • A belief that a person's character can be read from their skull
   • Broca and Wernickes area
   • Example of faculty psychology - the mind is comprised of distinct mental components

7. Physiognomy

   • A belief that a person's character can be read in their face, idea is tainted with scientific racism, biased judgements
   • Francis Galton

8. Psychophysics

   • Aim is to find the mathematical laws that relate psychic quantities to physical qualities.
     • Weber
       • Hobby was to lift two weights which revealed a consistent threshold for each person and condition
         • He also derived the two-point threshold - minimum separation that people could report as "two points"
           • It relies on subjective feeling.
       • Discovered the Just Noticable Difference, the Weber fraction, relationships between bodily senses, the double-sensation of pain, the temp-weight illusion, individual differences in perception, and receptive fields.
     • Fechner
       • Main experiment was psychophysical scaling - larger increases in physical intensity are needed to give the same increase in perceived intensity

9. Wundt

   • Preferred an active, creative mind.
     • Voluntarism - we voluntarily decide what our mind attends
       • Titchener developed this view and broke the consciousness into its elements

10. Richards, 2002 - historical context of psychology