The Evolution of Psychological Theory

A Critical History of Concepts and Presuppositions

Richard Lowry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780202251356
• eBook ISBN: 9781351483216
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

First published in 1982. Is there any point to studying the historical development of psychological theory, apart from the antiquarian interest of finding out who said what, when? This book is offered in the belief that there is. It is that such a study can provide valuable background for a critical, analytical, and—in the healthy, liberating sense of the term—skeptical understanding of the psychological conceptions and presuppositions of the present. This has been the author's aim throughout, and it has determined both the selection of materials and the manner in which they are presented. Although the book is not a textbook in the conventional sense of the term (i.e., a comprehensive summary of everything a student needs to know), it was written with students in mind, and could be read with profit by students in a number of areas of psychological study.

Part I

The New Beginnings: 1650-1800

Some historical periods look back upon the past with a sense of kinship, respect, and sometimes even veneration. The period comprised by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was not one of these. On the whole, the intellectuals of these centuries saw the past—at least, the long medieval past— as benighted, superstitious, alien, and contemptible. This was especially true of the philosophers and philosopher-scientists of the period. They saw the medieval past as being so very wrong, so hopelessly muddled and misguided, that there was no alternative but to tear it all down and begin anew. One finds this sense of new beginnings in every sphere of Western intellectual life during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including those where the questions asked were of a nature that we would nowadays call psychological. Rene Descartes, for example, began his major psychological treatise on “The Passions of the Soul” by saying that there was nothing so defective as what “the ancients” had delivered on this subject, and that he would therefore write as though he were “treating of a matter which no one had ever touched on before me.” David Hume wrote that all previous writings might just as well be cast into the flames, as they contain nothing but “sophistry and illusion.”

Although the psychological thinkers of this period were not always so free of “the ancients” as they supposed, they did labor mightily, and with some success, to pull down the theoretical structures of the past and raise new ones in their place. With subsequent enlargements and modifications, these new structures proved serviceable well into the nineteenth century; and, indeed, much of the theoretical structure that we inhabit today is built on their surviving foundations.

A large part of these foundations had to do with the fact that the psychological thought of this period, along with just about every other realm of inquiry, was heavily under the influence of the broad philosophical movement known as mechanism. This was the view that the universe as a whole is one vast machine, a kind of cosmic clockwork, and that all its parts and processes are likewise governed by the inexorable laws of mechanical causation. The psychological extrapolation was that these parts and processes include those of mind and body. By the eighteenth century this extrapolation had spawned two distinct though often interwoven traditions, which we will be describing in Chapters 2 and 3 as “mental mechanism” and “physiological mechanism.” Both, however, had their origins in the seventeenth century, mainly at the hands of Descartes, Hobbes, and Locke, with some indirect help from Galileo and Newton; and that is what we will examine first, in Chapter 1. These first three chapters will contain a fairly heavy dose of piecemeal theorizings about such things as perception, association, cognition, bodily movement, and the processes of the nervous system. In Chapter 4 we will stand back and take a large view, by examining the new image of human nature in which these and other theorizings culminated by the end of the eighteenth century.

Chapter 1

The Seventeenth Century

There is nothing in which the defective nature of the sciences which we have received from the ancients appears more clearly than in what they have written on the passions. . . . [What they} have taught regarding them is both so slight, and for the most part so far from credible, that I am unable to entertain any hope of approximating to the truth excepting by shunning the paths which they have followed. This is why I shall be here obliged to write just as though I were treating of a matter which no one had ever touched on before me.

René Descartes, Les passions de l’âme (1649)

Harm I can do none, though I err no less than they [which have written heretofore thereof]; for I shall leave men but as they are, in doubt and dispute: but, intending not to take any principle on trust, but only to put men in mind of what they know already, or may know by their own experience, I hope to err the less; and when I do, it must proceed from too hasty concluding, which I will endeavour as much as I can to avoid.”

Thomas Hobbes, Human Nature (1650)

Throughout the long period of the Middle Ages (ca. 400-1400) it was scarcely considered that there remained anything further to be learned about human nature. There was, of course, still very much which was admitted to be unknown—for of all the mysteries of creation, man was surely the greatest! But the limits of mere mortal understanding on this important subject had, so it was thought, already been reached; accordingly, what was unknown was considered destined forever to remain so. This attitude endured well into the renaissance period of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; and then, with seeming abruptness, we find human nature beginning to be investigated with an optimism and systematic thoroughness unrivaled even by the ancient Greeks. Indeed, there was even talk that human nature might properly fall within the purview of “natural philosophy”—the ancestor of what we now call science— just as surely as might any other “natural” phenomenon.

Of course, it was not only in psychology that this vitalizing transformation occurred. Throughout the several centuries preceding the seventeenth, a quiet but momentous revolution had been taking place within the intellectual life of the West. The seventeenth century inherited the ferment of this revolution, added to it the catalyst of its own genius, and passed the result on to succeeding generations. Alfred North Whitehead has given what is perhaps the best brief characterization of the spirit and greatness of this important century. “It is the one century,” he wrote,

which consistently and throughout the whole range of human activities, provided intellectual genius adequate for the greatness of its occasions. The crowded stage of this hundred years is indicated by the coincidences which mark its literary annals. At its dawn Bacon’s Advancement of Learning and Cervantes’ Don Quixote were published in the same year (1605), as though the epoch would introduce itself with a forward and backward glance. The first quarto edition of Hamlet appeared in the preceding year, and a slightly variant edition in the same year. Finally Shakespeare and Cervantes died on the same day, April 23, 1616. In the spring of this same year Harvey is believed to have first expounded his theory of the circulation of the blood in a course of lectures before the College of Physicians in London. Newton was born in the year that Galileo died (1642), exactly one hundred years after the publication of Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus. One year earlier Descartes published his Meditationes and two years later his Principia Philosophiae. There simply was not time for the century to space out nicely its notable events concerning men of genius.¹

We cannot pause here to pursue the matter at length, so let it suffice to say just this: In all spheres of intellectual endeavor, from poetry and philosophy to physics and physiology, the historical importance of the seventeenth century can scarcely be exaggerated. For it was in this century that Western intellectual life first became recognizably modern in mood, temper, purpose, and presupposition.

Our task in this first chapter will be to space out, as “nicely” as may be possible, the seventeenth century’s “notable events concerning men of genius” in the realm of psychology—specifically, of psychological theory.

RENÉ DESCARTES

Rene Descartes’ (1596—1650) niche in the history of psychology was secured chiefly through his treatment of that most ancient of psychological quandaries, the mind-body problem. For as far back into human history as we can penetrate, humankind seems to have drawn the distinction between body on the one hand, and mind, soul, or spirit on the other. And the mind-body problem, stripped down to its bare essentials, was simply this: What is the nature (or natures) of these two distinguishable components of a person, and what is the relationship between them? Are body and mind actually two different things, as they seem to be; or are they perhaps simply the same thing as seen from two different perspectives? To deny the first of these in favor of the second constitutes the position of psychophysical monism. Conversely, to deny the second and accept the first commits one to the position of psychophysical dualism.

Descartes’ position on this issue is nowadays often misunderstood—in part, no doubt, because the issue itself has fallen into such undeserved disrepute and neglect. For this reason, we shall do well to begin by putting this misapprehension to rest. Descartes is often spoken of, rather contemptuously, as the father of mind-body dualism. In truth he was no such thing. Descartes did accept the doctrine of mind-body dualism; his psychology could scarcely have been the same without it. But to charge him with its paternity is both inaccurate and misleading. Mind-body dualism had long been a recognized doctrine, explicitly since Plato and implicitly far earlier even than that. Indeed, the whole structure of medieval theology had as one of its cornerstones the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, which was simply mind-body dualism in religious dress.

Hence, whatever else may be said about Descartes, it is by no means true that he invented the doctrine of mind-body dualism. What he did do was to take this long-extant doctrine and rework it into a form far better fitted to the times. And, in so doing, he unknowingly laid the foundations for much of what was to follow in psychology for at least the next few centuries. Specifically, what he did was to put forward the theory of mind-body interactionism. In its simplest form, the old dualism held only that man is composed of two distinct parts: a body and a soul or mind. Descartes’ interactionism accepted this distinction, but it insisted on much else besides.

In pre-Cartesian dualism, the supposed relationship between body and mind always tended to be a little one-sided; for while the mind could easily affect the body, the body could exert only minimal effects upon the mind. During the Middle Ages especially, the body was considered to be a kind of husk, or vessel, which the soul entered at conception, inhabited during mortal life, and departed from at death. The body, indeed, was little more than an instrument (an organon) for the earthly pilgrimage of the soul. At times it was held (following the Aristotelian division of things) that there are three distinct souls in men (“nutritive,” “sensitive,” and “rational”), or at least three distinguishable aspects of a single soul; but in any case it was generally considered that the relationship between body and soul is rather like that between puppet and puppeteer.

As we have said, Descartes accepted the dualistic distinction between body and mind (in the seventeenth century there were really no compelling reasons not to); where he differed was in his understanding of the relationship between them. “It is not sufficient,” he observed, “that the soul be lodged in the human body like a pilot in his ship, unless perhaps for the movement of its members.” Rather, “it needs to be joined and united with it more closely, in order that, in addition to any such mo tor-function, it may have sensations and appetites and thus constitute a true man.”² In short, Descartes was suggesting that the old dualism simply did not do justice to the observable facts of human nature. For it is quite clear, he argued, that the body is not merely’ a puppet of the mind. True, the mind pulls the body’s strings; but the body pulls the strings of the mind at times, too. Descartes’ interactionism, then, was not an attempt to separate body and mind, as is so often claimed, but rather to bring them more closely and intimately together.

This bringing together of body and mind was the major concern of Descartes’ principal psychological work, The Passions of the Soul (1649).³ His main argument in this work—that the causal relationship between mind and body is a mutual one—seems almost simple when stated outright. This, however, is only because we are by this time so accustomed to the idea. In the seven...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I. The New Beginnings: 1650-1800
• Part II. The Nineteenth Century
• Part III. The Threshold of the Present
• Index