William James and the

Beginnings of Psychology
 First Bridges from Physics to the
Mental: Psychophysics

• Psychophysics emerged in the mid-19th century as the

scientific study of relationships between physical
stimuli and perceptual phenomena

• Its strategy was to quantify the relationship between

physical intensity of a stimulus and its perceived
intensity
 Ernst Heinrich Weber (1795-1878)—
anatomist, then physiologist at Leipzig
How sensitive is our ability to sense differences in weight
when we lift weights versus have them laid on our skin?

• introduced jnd’s—just noticeable differences

• observed that jnd’s were a ratio of absolute magnitude:

could detect increase of 1/40 in lifting, but only of
1/30 when placed on skin

• also interested in ability to discriminate points of touch

on fingers: could distinguish 1 millimeter
on back of fingers, only 40-60 millimeters
Gustav Fechner (1801-1887)—physicist,
then philosopher at Leipzig

• Formalized Weber’s law:

ÎR/R = K

• Established a relation between stimulus intensity

and sensation intensity
S (intensity of sensation) = k log R (stimulus)
 Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850-1909)
Inspired by Fechner to find mathematical order in higher
cognitive processes—learning and memory

Examined number of repetitions of reading lists in time

with metronome that were required before perfect recall

To avoid bias of prelearned associations, used nonesense

syllables: zok, vam, etc.
• longer lists—more trials required (plotted curve)

Studied forgetting by counting number of repetitions

required to relearn list
• logarithmic forgetting curve
 Frans Cornelis Donders (1818-1889) MD,
University of Utrecht

Reaction times to differentiate individual

mental activities

subtractive method—if two tasks

differ in that one requires one
additional operation, subtract the time
of the shorter task from the longer to
determine the time of the component
operation
Establishment of the Discipline

Wilhelm Wundt William James

Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920), Professor of
Philosophy at Leipzig after 1875
Research assistant for Hermann Helmholtz
• unconscious inference in perception

Beiträge zur Theorie der Sinneswahrnehmung (1862)

book on perception, but offered a plan for psychology

• a science of psychology based on experiment,

observation of behavior, and self-observation
• includes Völkerpsychologie—the study of linguistic,
moral, and religious differences between ethnic groups
 Wundt’s Vision
Laboratory: Institute of Experimental Psychology (1879)—
expanded over 20 years to occupy a floor of a building

Journal: Philosophische Studien (mostly by students and affiliates)

186 Ph.D.s, many international students

James McKeen Cattell—word associations
G. Stanley Hall
Edward Titchner—introspection of elements

One example—program in psycholinguistics: emphasis on mental

representation as constructed prior to speech—the grammar used
would emphasize one or another part of the representation
 Status of Introspection
Became associated with Wundt as the method of
psychology largely as a result of his American
student—Titchner

Involves reporting on the contents of one’s own

conscious states

Status of introspection—not just asking what goes on

in one’s mind, but reporting on the contents of one’s
mind—press a button when you recognize a word

A major target of the behaviorists

 William James (1842-1910); MD—
physiology, then philosophy at Harvard

1875: Teaching laboratory at Harvard

James was not an experimentalist

Method was rather to reflect on mental life, drawing upon
the findings of others

1890: Principles of Psychology “the empirical correlation of the

various sorts of thought or feeling [as known in consciousness] with
definite conditions of the brain.”

For the most part James was a naturalist in his treatment of

the mind
Peircean pragmatism and Darwinism
Truth often characterized as correspond, but
how can we establish correspondence?

Peirce’s pragmatic attitude about truth: "The true

is the name of whatever proves itself to be good
in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite,
assignable reasons”

Darwin: natural selection focuses on the

contribution of traits to survival. James
focused on the contribution of aspects of
mental life.

With James the combination of pragmatism

and Darwinism developed into functionalism
 James’ Functionalism
James' role in psychology can be compared to Darwin's role in
biology.
• Whereas Darwin collected biological specimens and
then tried to account for them in terms of natural
selection, James first collected mental phenomena,
particularly experienced mental phenomena, and then
tried to subject them to explanation.
• Mode of explanation-- functionalism and pragmatism.
That is, James tried to explain what goals our mental life
serves. Less interested in giving a structural description
of it.
• Assumption of such a phenomenological approach--that
mental life is something that is or can be made
conscious.
James’ Characterization of Mental
Life
Mental life:

1. Is purposeful and willful. "The pursuance of future ends

and the choice of means of their attainment are thus the mark
and criterion of the presence of mentality in a phenomenon.“

2. Exhibits intentionality. "The psychologist's attitude towards

cognition . . . is a thoroughgoing dualism. It supposes two
elements, mind knowing and thing known, and treats them as
irreducible.“

3. Is something of which we are aware. Not something

hidden
 Mental life continued
4. is private, personal, and uniquely one's own. "In this room--
this lecture room, say--there are a multitude of thoughts, yours
and mine, some of which cohere mutually, and some not. . . . My
thought belongs with my other thoughts, and your thought with
your other thoughts. Whether anywhere in this room there be a
mere thought, which is nobody's thought, we have no means of
ascertaining, for we have no experience of its like. The only
states of consciousness that we naturally deal with are found in
particular consciousness, minds, selves, concrete particular I's
and you's.“

5. is always changing, in flux. There is no single constant feature

of our mental states and each occurrence of a mental state is
different (although we may experience the same thing more than
once)
 Mental life continued

6. is sensibly continuous, if flows like a stream.

Perception of continuity without anything being constant.

7. is selective, attentive, and interested; it is excited by

some features of the world, not by others. The
ability to select is learned. As a result of being selective,
mental life is active, not passive.
 Functionalism applied to consciousness
Rejects the view that consciousness is a thing—a
separate mind, a parallel entity, or a brain state

Rather it is a function: there are conscious activities that

are the activities of a brain working in an environment. "I
mean . . . to deny that the word stands for an entity, but
to insist most emphatically that it stands for a function."

Focus on how the functions of consciousness might have

been selected, not on what consciousness is.

How does being conscious benefit us? Could we do the

same things as we do without consciousness?
 James on Emotions
“Our natural way of thinking about these standard emotions is that the
mental perception of some fact excites the mental affection called the
emotion, and that this latter state of mind gives rise to the bodily
expression. My thesis on the contrary is that the bodily changes follow
directly the PERCEPTION of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the
same changes as they occur IS the emotion. Common sense says, we lose
our fortune, are sorry and weep; we meet a bear, are frightened and run;
we are insulted by a rival, are angry and strike. The hypothesis here to be
defended says that this order of sequence is incorrect, that the one mental
state is not immediately induced by the other, that the bodily manifestations
must first be interposed between, and that the more rational statement is
that we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid
because we tremble, and not that we cry, strike, or tremble, because we
are sorry, angry, or fearful, as the case may be. Without the bodily states
following on the perception, the latter would be purely cognitive in form,
pale, colourless, destitute of emotional warmth. We might then see the
bear, and judge it best to run, receive the insult and deem it right to strike,
but we could not actually feel afraid or angry.“
 Changing one’s emotions
“Whistling to keep up courage is no mere figure of speech. On the other
hand, sit all day in a moping posture, sigh, and reply to everything with a
dismal voice, and your melancholy lingers. There is no more valuable
precept in moral education than this, as all who have experience know: if
we wish to conquer undesirable emotional tendencies in ourselves, we
must assiduously, and in the first instance cold-bloodedly, go through the
outward motions of those contrary dispositions we prefer to cultivate. The
reward of persistency will infallibly come, in the fading out of the
sullenness or depression, and the advent of real cheerfulness and
kindliness in their stead. Smooth the brow, brighten the eye, contract the
dorsal rather than the ventral aspect of the frame, and speak in a major
key, pass the genial compliment, and your heart must be frigid indeed if it
do not gradually thaw!”
 James on Habit
“Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious
conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of
ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious
uprisings of the poor. It alone prevents the hardest and most
repulsive walks of life from being deserted by those brought up to
tread therein. It keeps the fisherman and the deck-hand at sea
through the winter; it holds the miner in his darkness, and nails the
countryman to his log-cabin and his lonely farm through all the
months of snow; it protects us from invasion by the natives of the
desert and the frozen zone. It dooms us all to fight out the battle of
life upon the lines of our nurture or our early choice, and to make the
best of a pursuit that disagrees, because there is no other for which
we are fitted, and it is too late to begin again. It keeps different social
strata from mixing.
 James on habit (continued)

Already at the age of twenty-five you see the professional

mannerism settling down on the young commercial traveller,
on the young doctor, on the young minister, on the young
counsellor-at-law. You see the little lines of cleavage running
through the character, the tricks of thought, the prejudices,
the ways of the 'shop,' in a word, from which the man can by-
and-by no more escape than his coat-sleeve can suddenly fall
into a new set of folds. On the whole, it is best he should not
escape. It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of
thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften
again.”
 James on Free Will

"Let psychology frankly admit that for her scientific

purposes determinism can be claimed, and no one can
find fault. If, then, it turn out later that the claim has only
a relative purpose, and may be crossed by counter-
claims, the readjustment can be made. Now ethics
makes a counter-claim; and the present writer, for one,
has no hesitation in regarding her claim as the stronger,
and in assuming that our wills are "free." For him, then,
the deterministic assumption of psychology is merely
provisional and methodological."
 More on Free Will

"the most that any argument can do for determinism is to

make it a clear and seductive conception, which a man
is foolish not to espouse, so long as he stands by the
great scientific postulate that the world must be an
unbroken fact, and that prediction of all things without
exception must be ideally, even if not actually, possible.
It is a moral postulate about the Universe, the postulate
that what ought to be can be, and that bad acts cannot
be fated, but that good ones must be possible in their
place, which would lead to the contrary view."