The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Psychology

Sarah Robins, John Symons, Paco Calvo, Sarah Robins, John Symons, Paco Calvo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429534829
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Psychology, Second Edition is an invaluable guide and major reference source to the key topics, problems, concepts, and debates in philosophy of psychology and is the first companion of its kind. A team of renowned international contributors provide forty-eight chapters, organized into six clear parts:

• Historical background to philosophy of psychology
• Psychological explanation
• Cognition and representation
• The biological basis of psychology
• Perceptual experience
• Personhood.

The Companion covers key topics, such as the origins of experimental psychology; folk psychology; behaviorism and functionalism; philosophy, psychology and neuroscience; the language of thought, modularity, nativism, and representational theories of mind; consciousness and the senses; dreams, emotion, and temporality; personal identity; and the philosophy of psychopathology.

For the second edition, six new chapters have been added to address the following important topics: belief and representation in nonhuman animals; prediction error minimization; contemporary neuroscience; plant neurobiology; epistemic judgment; and group cognition.

Essential reading for all students of philosophy of mind, science, and psychology, The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Psychology will also be of interest to anyone studying psychology and its related disciplines.

Part I
Historical background to the philosophy of psychology

1
Rationalist Roots of Modern Psychology

Gary Hatfield

The philosophers René Descartes (1596–1650), Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715), Benedict Spinoza (1632–77), and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) are grouped together as rationalists because they held that human beings possess a faculty of reason that produces knowledge independently of the senses. In this regard, they contrast with empiricist philosophers, such as John Locke and David Hume, who believed that all knowledge arises from the senses. The rationalists contended that proper use of reason would yield the first principles of metaphysics, the most basic science of all. Metaphysics was also called “first philosophy,” and it took as its subject matter nothing less than the basic properties and principles of everything. For our purposes, it is important to note that the rationalists believed that metaphysics could provide foundations for specialized disciplines, including ethics and physics, and also medicine and other applied subjects.

The rationalists and their followers developed theoretical positions of ambitious intellectual scope, ranging from metaphysical conclusions about the existence and nature of God to detailed theories of physical and physiological processes. Although they put great store in the faculty of reason for establishing overarching principles, they looked to observation and experience to provide data and evidence for their detailed theories. They took special interest in the metaphysics and physics of the human organism, and this led them to psychological topics concerning the characteristics and principles of animal behavior, the process of sense perception, the passions, emotions, and appetites, the cognitive operations of the mind (including attention and understanding), and the relation between mental phenomena and bodily processes in the brain and sense organs. The various rationalists, but especially Descartes, made original contributions to these topics. After considering the character of psychology as a discipline in the seventeenth century, we will examine these contributions in turn.

Psychology in the seventeenth century

The term “psychology” was first used in print in the sixteenth century (Lapointe 1972). The discipline is much older. As a subject taught in school (a root meaning of the word “discipline”), psychology was well-established in Aristotle’s Lyceum. He taught the subject matter under the Greek name Peri psyches (“On the Soul”), which is the title of one of his major written works. Although Aristotle was Greek and taught and wrote in Greek, through an historical oddity his works are known under their Latin names, so that today we refer to this work as De anima (“On the Soul”).

Aristotle understood the soul to be a vivifying and animating principle: it was an agent of life, sense, motion, and thought. To account for the range of living things and their capacities, Aristotelian thinkers ascribed various powers to the soul: nutritive, growth-directing, and reproductive (vegetative powers possessed by plants and all other living things); sensory and motor (sensitive powers possessed by nonhuman animals and human beings); and rational (possessed by human beings alone). In this scheme, the sensory capacities of animals include simple cognitive abilities to guide animal behavior, such as the ability to perceive danger or to recognize food by sight from afar; human beings share such abilities with other animals and additionally are endowed with the faculty of reason. Because Aristotle conceived of the soul as the animating force in all living things, the topics covered in Aristotelian psychology extended to subject areas that today are divided between biology, physiology, and sensory and cognitive psychology.

When the term “psychology” came into use in the sixteenth century, it named this Aristotelian discipline. Literally, the term means “rational discourse concerning the soul” (logon peri tes psyches). In the early seventeenth century, then, “psychology” as the science of the soul covered vivifying as well as sensory and cognitive processes. In European thought, the notion of the soul was also interpreted in a religious and theological context. The first book with the title Psychologia, by Goclenius (1590), focused on the theological question of whether the human soul is transferred to the fetus by the semen of the father (as in standard Aristotelian theory) or is directly infused by God (at an appropriate moment). The other standard topics concerning the sensory and cognitive powers of the soul were, however, also included. Moreover, in the wider De anima literature (leaving aside whether the Greek root psyche was used in the title), the larger part of discussion concerned the sensory and cognitive powers of the soul, with comparatively little space devoted to the nutritive, growth-directing, and reproductive powers. Discussion of these latter powers did not in fact follow a strictly Aristotelian line, but was strongly influenced by the medical tradition stemming from the second century Egyptian, Claudius Galen (whose work nonetheless showed the influence of Aristotelian physics, despite going beyond Aristotelian physiology).

Aristotle’s works provided the framework for university instruction in both Protestant and Catholic lands into the seventeenth century (and into the eighteenth in Spain, Italy, France, and Austria). The curricular structure reflected an Aristotelian division of knowledge. Accordingly, the study of the soul fell under the rubric of physics (or natural philosophy). “Physics” comes from the Greek physis, meaning nature; “physics” or “natural philosophy” is then the “science of nature.” It was not restricted to inorganic nature, but included all topics starting from the basic elements of things (earth, air, fire, and water) and working through the various kinds of natural bodies and their characteristic activities up to animals and human beings.

Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century physics books, then, contained discussions of the soul, including its sensory and cognitive functions. That these powers were classified as “physical” bore no connotation, in the Aristotelian scheme, that they were reducible to matter in a modern materialistic sense; rather, Aristotelians posited that all natural bodies possess an active principle, its “form,” that serves to explain the characteristic properties and motions of every type of substance, from elemental substances to complex bodies such as plants, animals, and the human body. The human soul was the form of the human body, animating everything from growth to intellectual thought. The rational power of the soul, or the “intellect” (nous) as it was known in technical discussions, was granted a special status. Some questions about the rational soul, such as its immortality or whether the human intellect directly communicates with a single world-intellect, were reserved for the discipline of metaphysics, or were treated in appendixes to the usual “physical” discussion of the soul’s powers. By contrast with the sensitive powers, which required material organs for their operation, the intellect was assigned no special organ. This point is somewhat tricky. Aristotelians believed that the intellect requires the assistance of a material organ (the brain, in late medieval Aristotelian anatomy) to provide it with objects of thought (as explained below); but they deemed the operations that the intellect performed in relation to such objects to be immaterial. This meant that these operations did not involve changes in a material organ.

Within the Aristotelian scheme, the rational power of the soul was studied in more than one disciplinary locus. It was studied as a natural power within physics. It was also studied as a knowing power within logic, which catalogued the proper operations of intellect and reason in obtaining and organizing knowledge. In the seventeenth century, this division between studying the sensory and cognitive powers as natural powers, in physics and physiology, and as knowing powers, in logic or methodology, was maintained and developed by rationalist writers (even as empiricists such as Thomas Hobbes chipped away at it, seeking to fully naturalize logic and reason). Modern philosophers showed disdain for the old Aristotelian logic, so they tended to discuss the scope and limits of knowledge under the title of “method.” The modern philosophical field of epistemology arose from the study of the mind’s powers as instruments for knowing. By contrast with study of the natural circumstances of the operations of the mind (in physics and physiology), methodology or epistemology examined the conditions for arriving at truth.

In this context, a word is needed about the notion of the intellect or reason as a faculty of knowing. Later psychologists, especially in the latter eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, reacted unfavorably to the “faculty psychology” of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Their criticisms were summarized in allusions to a play by the French playwright Molière, in which a doctor explains the ability of opiates to make a person sleepy, by saying that opium has a virtus dormitiva, or “dormitive power.” Clearly, the designation of such a power does not explain the operation of that power: it redescribes the phenomena with more abstraction and generality, by adding the notion of a “power” or “ability” that operates with regularity (opiates make this person sleepy because they generally are able to make people sleepy). In the Aristotelian and early-modern contexts, the assignment of “faculties” or “powers” to the mind, such as the sensitive and intellectual powers, was not an attempt to explain the ability to sense or to understand; it was part of an effort to catalogue and describe the general cognitive capacities of nonhuman animals and human beings. More specific factors were then introduced in explanatory contexts, including detailed analyses of the sensory processes that underlie the perception of distance, or the attribution of innate ideas to explain some cognitive abilities. Thus, the mere mention of “faculties” or “powers” is not inherently vacuous, but may be part of a taxonomic effort that catalogues and describes the variety of psychological abilities to be examined within psychology.

Over the course of the seventeenth century, the content and boundaries of Aristotelian psychology were challenged in various ways. Starting in the sixteenth century and continuing into the seventeenth, a debate raged about whether nonhuman animals possess sufficient cognitive ability to be deemed “rational” and to be described as possessing “knowledge,” characteristics that would place them in the same category as human beings. These debates raised questions about the empirically determined behavioral capacities of animals and about the theoretical resources needed to explain such capacities. Larger philosophical changes also had implications for psychological topics. The seventeenth century saw the pronouncement of a “new science” of nature, in which Aristotelian forms (as active principles) were banished from nature and matter was reconceived as passive, spatially extended stuff. If nonhuman animals are constituted of this matter and possess no souls, then even supposing that their cognitive capacities are quite simple, those capacities nonetheless must be explained through purely material mechanisms of the sort permitted by this new science.

The rationalists favored this new science of matter, but they were also committed to finding a place for human mentality within the new science. Starting with Descartes, they reconceived mind and matter as mutually distinct entities, or at least as mutually distinct conceptual and explanatory domains. This new way of thinking generated a revised problem of mind-body interaction and relation. These changes entailed a further question concerning whether all the psychological capacities of human beings and nonhuman animals must be assigned to the mental domain, or whether some psychological capacities can instead be explained through material processes alone. If psychology is the science of the soul, then the answer is clear: the psychological belongs with the mental, period. But if psychology is identified by the domain of phenomena covered in Aristotelian psychology – or perhaps by a subset of that domain, the sensory, motor, and cognitive phenomena – then the equation of the psychological with the mental is not so clear. Thus, one of our tasks is to consider the various conceptual loci of the discipline of psychology in the seventeenth and into the eighteenth centuries.

Descartes and psychology

Descartes started his intellectual career in 1618–19, working on problems in mathematics and in “mathematical physics” (hydrostatics and falling bodies, 1974–6: Vol. 11, 67–78). His early results included the mathematical techniques that later made analytic geometry possible, and that underlay the introduction of Cartesian coordinates in the nineteenth century. During the 1620s, he sought to create a general method – for solving all types of problems, including philosophical ones – based on the kind of thinking found in mathematics. In the late 1620s he abandoned this project and the book he was writing, the Rules for the Direction of the Mind, to begin an ambitious project for a comprehensive new physics. This ne...