The History and Evolution of Psychology

A Philosophical and Biological Perspective

Brian D. Cox

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781315462271
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book discusses key figures in history in the context of their time, takes students on a carefully-formulated, chronological journey through the build-up of psychology from ancient times to the present, and seeks to draw students into the way science is done, rather than merely presenting them with historical fact. Students will learn not only the 'what', but the 'why' of the history of psychology and will acquire the necessary background historical material to fully understand those concepts. Organized around a series of paradigms—a shift from scholasticism to rationalism or empiricism, and a shift from idealism to materialism—the book seeks to portray psychology as an on-going, evolving process, rather than a theory.

1 The Study of Science and Psychology from a Historical Perspective

Why Study the History of Psychology? A Preface You Shouldn’t Skip

Science sometimes sees itself as impersonal, as “pure thought,” independent of its historical and human origins. It is often taught as if this were the case. But science is a human enterprise through and through, an organic, evolving, human growth, with sudden spurts and arrests and strange deviations, too. It grows out of its past, but never outgrows it, anymore than we outgrow our own childhood.

—Oliver Sacks (2003, p. i)

Although speculations on the human soul and mind go as far back as written history, the made-up word “psychology” is reported to have appeared around 1520 and first appeared in a book title in 1590 (Murray, 1988).

Psychology as a science, however, is less than 150 years old. Depending on which historian you believe, the first psychology laboratory was either a small equipment room at Harvard University in 1875 under the direction of William James or a room in an old building of the University of Leipzig, opened for business by Wilhelm Wundt in 1879. Die-hard experimental behaviorists might say it only became a science in 1913, when John B. Watson put forth the idea that psychology is a purely objective branch of natural science. Statisticians and methodologists might say that psychology only became a science sometime in the 1920s, when Ronald A. Fisher worked out the logic of hypothesis testing, the method that most psychology studies use today. Finally, some physicists and biologists, who have a head start on us, might deny that psychology is a science even yet! This course is the story of what took us so long.

The fact that it took us so long is the first best reason to study the history of psychology. As a science, we are still trying to determine the rules of the game. No self-respecting astronomer will question the Copernican theory of planets, but if someone comes up with a new theory of intelligence tomorrow, some psychologists will listen. Although many of us use statistical inference as our rules of evidence, radical Skinnerians insist upon single subject design and Freudian-influenced therapists swear by the case study methods. In short, the men and women may be dead, but the intellectual battles they fought are still going on.

There are other reasons to study the history of psychology. First, it is nearly a truism that you only find what you are looking for, so it is important to take into account the worldview of our predecessors to understand why they believed the often, to us, strange things they did and not other, to us, more important things. Remember, a future generation might find our obsessions trivial or naive as well; examination of work in the context of its time is important. Second, it is important to study history as a meditation on what science is, why good theories are so practical and why methodology is so hotly debated. Third, as the above quote by the insightful neurologist Oliver Sacks suggests, history shows that a lot of science was and is not very scientific to its practitioners but an emotional, political, artistic, stubborn, lucky task. Fourth, as a student, the study of history helps you to organize a lot of the information you’ve been getting from other courses into a whole body of knowledge for the first time and to develop a healthy distrust for your textbooks. Fifth, in studying the lives and ideas of psychologists, you may get some inspiration as to how to be a great psychologist yourself. Finally, it is an intrinsically interesting and fun topic, with sex (Which famous psychologist lost his job for fooling around, adulterously, with his graduate student?), violence (How did Pavlov react when there was violence in the streets?), money (Who made a mint in advertising? What psychologist came from the second-richest family in New York?) and heroics (Who stood up to the Nazis?).

As my first step in both gaining your trust as a reader and helping you gain the critical skills to evaluate your textbooks, let me remind you that every author of a text has a point of view and I am no exception. In fact, I have two points of view. The first point of view concerns what I believe a student needs to know to evaluate the historical evidence presented in this book: A student needs to know that, in science, as in scholarship in general, all knowledge is provisional and based on certain principles of selection and organization. In other words, a textbook is not truth, but an argument. This is not the same as saying that all arguments are equally good or that I have not been diligent in tracking down facts in support of my argument. It is to say, however, that you as a reader should do more than simply memorize the contents of this book for the tests your instructor may give you, but think to yourself, “How does the author know that?” Above, for example, you might have noticed that I gave two dates for the founding of the first psychology laboratory. Although the “traditional” date, man and place (i.e. the one celebrated by the American Psychological Association (APA)) was 1879, Wundt and Leipzig, part of the reason that it is traditional is that the man who wrote the first classic history of psychology textbook was a student of a student of Wundt. Wundt also did much more laboratory work than did James, so though he may not have been the first, he did concentrate more on laboratory work. For brevity’s sake, I will not always clue you in on my reasoning, but you as a reader must recognize that every historical “fact” carries such judgments.

My second point of view concerns the actual contents of the text. I believe that the existence of psychology in its present form is dependent on two important shifts in the way we see the world. The first of these was a shift from basing our knowledge solely upon texts written by accepted authorities, such as the works of Aristotle or Galen or religious texts, to basing our knowledge on what we can find out for ourselves through observation, experimentation and logical argument. The second shift involves a change around the time of Darwin to explaining the world solely in terms of natural causes instead of such constructs as a spiritual “life force” or an intentionally designed universe. Let me make clear that I am not making a statement here about the existence of God or God’s plan for the universe. I am only stating that such claims are beyond the scope of science and that it is a matter of historical fact that we customarily define science in this way today.

So, in view of the preceding paragraphs, it seems natural that before we embark upon the subject matter of the history of psychology as a science, we first need to know what science is (or what philosophers have argued that science is) and what history is (or what philosophers have argued that history is). That is discussed in the next two sections. Some of the examples in the following sections will be taken from other sciences or from areas of history not pertaining to science, to make more general points.

How Science Is Different From Other Human Pursuits: A Primer on the Philosophy of Science

Objectivity is not the result of disinterested and unprejudiced observation. Objectivity and also unbiased observation are the result of criticism, including the criticism of observational reports. For we cannot avoid or suppress our theories or prevent them from influencing our observations; yet we can try to recognize them as hypotheses and to formulate them explicitly, so that they may be criticised.

—Sir Karl Popper (1983, p. 48)

Consider for a moment the variety of disciplines that may be studied: The humanities include the plastic and material arts, such as painting and sculpture, the performing arts, such as music, drama and dance, and literature, philosophy and theology. The sciences include the physical sciences such as physics, geology and chemistry, the biological sciences of anatomy, zoology and medicine and the social sciences such as psychology and sociology. This is only a partial list, of course, but the question arises, what makes science different from the humanities? From a philosophical perspective, it is not that science claims to say something about “the truth” or “facts”; religions claim a kind of revealed truth and the arts seek a kind of emotional truth or identification. The methods of arriving at that truth are different. Consider, in regards to art or literature, the old saying, “There’s no accounting for taste.” This statement actually comes from a quotation in Latin: De gustibus non disputandum est, which can be more accurately translated as “there’s no disputing taste.” The grounds of taste are so individual, so based on personal response, that there’s no way to say who’s right, even though we might argue about it or write critical commentary about it. Of course, an artist hopes that his or her work will appeal to many people, but its worth (aside from its monetary worth) is not open to majority vote.

Similarly, if you say that you have had a revelation from God, there is no way that another person may dispute it—it is an internal experience. In any case, the majority of religion deals with interpretations about internal emotional experiences rather than explanations of the world. Science can tell you how a child died, but not why a child died. The intuition that there is a grand plan in the universe that includes even such tragedies is a comforting thought to many, but the methods of science cannot decide the truth of such things. Science, in this sense, is “a-theistic” in that it follows the naturalistic hypothesis, which is concerned with how far we can get in explaining the universe without resorting to supernatural causes. Much of this book will track the modern trajectory that moves from the Universe as a Grand Plan to the Universe as a Mechanism.

None of the above examples is science, for the simple fact that the experiences of truth of art or religion are private and cannot be verified or criticized effectively. Consider some of the terms that have been commonly associated with science, such as observation, test, experiment, objective and fact. Each of these terms implies experiences that more than one person can have, that are not completely subjective. They concern observations that have been tested through controlled experiment to exclude alternative explanations. Science deals with statements about the natural world that have been evaluated critically. In this sense, objectivity in science is not a synonym for truth but for proof.

Let us say that I have observed something, such as a radio signal from space. I then ask other astronomers to confirm that they have received the signals at other observatories. We then vary the conditions under which the observation is made, by refining our measurements or defining more carefully what an observation would mean. For example, we entertain the hypothesis that this could be a radio transmission from somewhere on earth or a radio emission from natural sources, such as a quasar, or from deliberate transmissions from other beings. Then we describe exactly how those observations are done and invite others to do the same. If the others, having followed our instructions, repeat the instructions and get the same results, then our observation is said to have been replicated. Replication is not just that things can be repeated, but that when they are repeated, the same results are obtained. A scientific fact is one that can be replicated, and objectivity is the process of observing, excluding alternative explanations and replicating under conditions that have been precisely set down and described as completely as is practicable. Observations or experiments that have not been replicated are considered to be less trustworthy by the scientific community.

Another interesting difference between science and art is the different role of creativity. In the modern West, originality is a strong and important point in the arts. If you attempt to become an artist by explicitly attempting to “replicate” the paintings of Picasso, to come up with the same results, you would probably be labeled a forger or a copyist, not a “true” artist. If you wish to make new paintings in the style of Picasso under your own name, you may be described as “derivative” unless your artistic statement is itself about style. Suppose (taking an example from psychology this time) you decided to repeat the famous experiment by Solomon Asch, on conformity. In this experiment, seven people in a room claim that the longer of two lines is really the shorter one, in order to induce another subject who is not in on the joke to conform to their judgment. You might repeat the experiment under different conditions: with higher or lower status persons or more or fewer confederates, at a university or a shopping mall, etc. The fact that you repeated the experiment under these conditions—and got similar results—is a plus for science, although it might be a minus if it were considered art. Such copying in this case increases the likelihood that the phenomenon in question is “real” and criticizes the results of the first experiment in a useful way. It is still a creative act, though.

It is not that the insights of science are more valid than the insights of the humanities or religion, only that the insights are discussed and criticized publicly, with a strong set of rules of evidence. Referring to the quote at the top of this section, it is not that scientists are somehow a different species of human, impervious to bias, only that the process of criticism by peers and further experiments protects the results of science from that bias.

The Traditional View of Science

How are discoveries made in science and how are those discoveries placed into the context of a theory of how the world works? Philosophers of science have examined the logic of how evidence is gathered, how theories are proposed and how and why scientists accept new theories to come up with several theories of how scientific progress is made. These theories are accepted by scientists who fall into three different groups: inductivists, falsificationists and social revolutionists.

The first of these, the inductivists, believe that science begins with facts (Agassi, 1963). The name of this school comes from these historians’ belief in inductive logic as the way science is done. In this view, general laws are discovered by collecting many specific facts and then generalizing all those specific facts into general rules or scientific laws. To inductivists, each new instance adds corroborative evidence that a theory is true. In this view, a scientist discovers a particular puzzling fact and sets about to try to explain it by developing a new theory. Examples of these outside of psychology are numerous. For example, Alexander Fleming supposedly discovered penicillin because he was growing some bacteria. In 1928, he was straightening up some Petri dishes in which he had been growing the bacteria, which had been piled in the sink. He opened each one and examined it before...