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CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
THIS IS a book of exploratory essays on approaches to thinking. The central topic is the relation of processes of an associative kind (sometimes irrational, in so far as they are not enmeshed with a world of shared experience) to those involving some degree of reference to a common world and hence forming the basis of constructive, critical and logical thought.
This theme runs through a good deal of current psychological controversy. It is a very old theme that has been dealt with many times and in many ways in the course of its history. One might have chosen to discuss approaches to it other than those considered in the present volume. These, however, have been selected for their bearing on one another, and because they form an interesting part of the background to contemporary psychological theory.
Most people are well aware that during the past fifty or sixty years there have been moves, on the part of varied disciplines, away from a ‘picture’ and towards a ‘process’ conception of thinking. And in some cases thinking has come to be treated as analogous to action.
In the last quarter of the nineteenth century it was still possible to approach thinking from a standpoint characterized by one or more of the following five assumptions. First, thinking should be studied by seeking the ‘elements’ into which its content might be analysed. Secondly, these elements were mainly ideas and images. The latter, if one belonged to the empirical tradition, were treated either as copies of sensations, as originally suggested by Hobbes, or they were derived fairly directly from sensations. They might indeed be revived sensations. Thirdly, these sensations, ideas and images were ‘presented’ to the mind or treated as passing before the mind’s eye, somewhat as in a species of internal theatre. Fourthly, the constituents of such thinking obeyed the laws of association by similarity, contrast and contiguity in time and place, or variants of these laws. All this implied, fifthly, that in some respects the thinker, in some cases passively and in others actively, scrutinized that which was ‘before his mind’. Few authors, in fact, lost sight altogether of activity in thinking, those in the continental rationalist tradition least of all. But active thinking was sometimes treated almost casually in terms of focusing on or selecting ingredients germane to a purpose, either without very much consideration of what constituted such relevance, or such ‘rational’ thought was hammered, if possible, into a framework of associationist assumptions. Witness to this last are parts of the curious argument between Spencer and John Stuart Mill on the relational thinking involved in the syllogism.
In short, in the empirical tradition at any rate, and in this tradition much early systematic psychologizing was rooted, interest tended to be focused on the content of thinking, sensation was considered a fundamental source of that content, and thinking, so far as it was an activity, approximated to some form of internal visual inspection. Ideas, images, their permutations and combinations constituted that which came under this conscious scrutiny.
This broad approach to thinking was the product of the English empirical tradition originating before John Locke, but given special impetus by his writing. As soon as one turns back to Locke himself, however, one begins to appreciate how much tradition omitted. So in discussing Locke in Chapter Two, I have followed scholars, such as R. I. Aaron,1 in emphasizing the amount of ‘rationality’ Locke slipped in. Much of Locke’s rationalism, together with his interest in language, was lost in the process of transmission and modification of his original outlook.
To the breakdown of an associationist approach at the turn of the last century and the beginning of our own, many complex causes contributed. In the background one can detect the influence of continental rationalism, to which, historically, Descartes in the seventeenth century (and Kant in the eighteenth) were probably the most influential contributors. But apart from his insistence on clear and distinct ideas, an insistence whose historical importance is hard to overestimate, Descartes’ treatment of thinking is less interesting to a modern psychologist than that of Spinoza. So, Chapter Three has been devoted to Spinoza’s views, considered in the context of modern controversies about conditioning and insight.
Aside from this and other general factors in the background, we can discern four mainly psychological trends contributing to the rejection of a simple associationist treatment of thought. First, are the complex interrelated factors, psychological and otherwise, that led eventually to the notion of unconscious functioning and thought. About this I have tried to say something historically in Chapter Four, following this in Chapter Five with a critical appreciation of certain aspects of Freud’s approach in the light of its historical background and of later developments.
Secondly, is the emphasis on active perception, apperception and organization that is to be found in some nineteenth-century English writers, such as Ward and Stout, and to a certain extent in their continental contemporary Franz Brentano. From his work, it is possible to trace a historical link, as Professor Boring2 has briefly shown, with writers such as Ehrenfels, Meinong and Cornelius, the early defenders of Gestaltqualität, who emphasized active perception of relation and form. Also in this tradition, though differing in some respects, are Wertheimer, Koffka and Köhler, the founders of modern Gestalt psychology, who stressed the active nature of perception and challenged the whole procedure of analysing thought into elements. Professor Hearnshaw4 has considered the English work in his recent book A Short History of British Psychology. The development of Gestalt treatments of thinking can be traced in Ellis3 and also in Henle.5 Only brief comment has therefore been made in Chapter Nine on the much-debated issue of insight and learning on which Gestalt and behaviouristically-oriented psychologists have opposing views.
Only passing comment has also been made on the third important source of the downfall of associationism. This is the work of the Würzburg experimenters. Their studies of thinking, at the beginning of this century, produced evidence of selectivity in imaging, and of the effect, on the development of a train of thought, of the problem set, and of ‘determining tendencies’, which did not fall within an associationist framework. Their findings also suggested that much thinking was imageless, a viewpoint that became extremely controversial. Professor Humphrey,6 in his invaluable survey of experimental studies of thinking, has dealt in detail with this work, but he mentions only in passing that of Binet and his colleagues in France.
Binet’s work on closer scrutiny seems significant enough to constitute a fourth line of attack on simple associationism. It is particularly interesting in so far as Binet himself started as a loyal associationist and changed to something very different in the course of his own development. This aspect of his work has, moreover, been masked by his better-known contribution to intelligence testing. As many of his books are hard to obtain, and most of his articles untranslated, the long Chapter Seven has been devoted to restoring Binet to his historical position as an important and interesting contributor to studies of thinking, and the forerunner of Piaget. The bearing of studies of intelligence upon those of thinking has been sketched in the process.
Out of all this emerges the suggestion that in assimilating thinking to action and moving away from the inspectionist viewpoint, we must be careful not to throw away key processes such as recognition, without which it seems impossible to derive constructive, realistic and logical thinking from that which is governed by immediate stimulus and motive. In Chapter Ten, therefore, the move towards a dispositional treatment of conceptual thinking (which is involved in the move away from an inspectionist viewpoint) is discussed in the light of Professor Price’s treatment of concepts and recognition in his Thinking and Experience. Since many current psychological studies of thinking adopt a dispositional view, Price’s reflective study is of prime importance in grasping the theoretical issues in the background of such an approach. Chapter Eleven underlines the extent to which psychological treatments of thinking imply that it is the whole man who thinks when thinking is constructive. This involves us in speculation on the social psychological presuppositions of intelligibly formulated constructive thought.
REFERENCES
1. Aaron, R. I., John Locke, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2nd edition, 1955.
2. Boring, E. G., History of Experimental Psychology, New York and London: Appleton Century, 2nd edition, 1950.
3. Ellis, W. D., A Source Book of Gestalt Psychology, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1939.
4. Hearnshaw, L. S., A Short History of British Psychology, London: Methuen, 1964.
5. Henle, M., Documents of Gestalt Psychology, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961.
6. Humphrey, George, Thinking: An Introduction to its Experimental Psychology, London: Methuen, 1951.
7. Price, H. H., Thinking and Experience, London: Hutchinson, 1953.
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CHAPTER TWO
JOHN LOCKE’S EMPIRICISM AND ITS RATIONALITY
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
MACBETH
How far that little candle throws his beams!
So shines a good deed in a naughty world.
PORTIA
THE ENGLISH empirical tradition is usually traced back to Hobbes, who made the first systematic attempt to derive the content of knowledge from sense experience and who hazarded a physical basis for this on lines suggested by Galileo. To many people in the twentieth century, the fact that knowledge is acquired from sense experience, and is in no sense inborn, seems so obvious a proposition as to be hardly worth stating. Not so in the seventeenth, or, for that matter, in the first half of the eighteenth century, when support existed not only for some innate concepts, such as Descartes’ idea of God, but also for innate foundations to logical and moral principles. Locke, profoundly liberal both politically and ethically, presented a challenge to the authoritarianism often latent in such a position. Largely on common-sense grounds, he was defending the rôle of the senses and learning in providing the content of psychological life, part of that content also being derived from reflection on our own psychological responses and activities. Since the context of Locke’s discussion was epistemological, his emphasis was indeed on cognitive processes. To say that the content of knowledge is derived from experience, however, is not to deny that human beings are born with various capacities, e.g. to perceive, retain, discern, or compare. So Locke’s empirical standpoint is not equivalent to accounting for the whole of psychological life in terms of the imprinting of sensations upon a receptive wax and their compounding in accordance with the laws of association. With this general statement about Locke’s position let us look at his views in slightly more detail.
Having spent a whole book of the Essay concerning Human Understanding refuting the notion of innate ideas, Locke turns in Book 2 to his alternative account of the way in which the mind is furnished.
Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas: how comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store, which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer in one word, from experience; in that all our knowledge is founded, and from it ultimately derives itself.4a
According to Locke there are two main sources of experience, namely: sensation, and perception of the operation of our own minds, i.e. internal sense or reflection. External objects furnish the mind with ideas of sensible qualities, which are all those different perceptions these objects produce in us; the mind furnishes the understanding with ideas of its own operations. By sensation Locke understands: ‘Such an impression or motion made in some part of the body, as produces some perception in the understanding.’ In other words, under sensation he is not including the condition in which a stimulus impinges but is unnoticed. Simple ideas are the units both of sensation and reflection: the understanding once stored with these simple ideas has the power to repeat, compare and unite them to an almost infinite variety and so can make at pleasure new complex ideas. But it is ‘not in the power of the most exalted wit or enlarged understanding, by any quickness or variety of thought’, to invent or frame one new simple idea in the mind, not taken in by the ways already mentioned. As R. I. Aaron1 has pointed out, Locke sometimes means by a ‘simple idea’ that which is primary in presentation, or in the face of which the mind’s rôle is passive, and sometimes those units of sensation or reflection which are incapable of further analysis.
Simple ideas may come from one sense only. For example, colours via the sense of sight, and smells by the olfactory senses. Many of these shades and smells, as Locke remarks, have no names. Or they may come from diverse senses; for example, space or extension, figure, rest and motion, make perceivable impressions both visually and tactually. Or they may be derived by reflection upon the two principal actions of the mind, i.e. perception or thinking and volition or willing. Finally, simple ideas may be suggested both by sensation and reflection. Locke offers existence, unity, power and succession as examples of this last class. It is by no means clear how he thought that sensation and reflection co-operated in their production. But that one must leave.
Ideas, in the case of sensations, represent external objects and are neither identical with the properties of external objects nor in many cases do they resemble these properties; the latter are, in fact, powers in external objects to produce ideas in us. In the case of the primary qualities of objects—Locke gives varied lists of these, but solidity, extension, figure, mobility and occasionally number, are the main candidates—the ideas aroused in us resemble inherent properties of the objects that produce the ideas. In other cases, those of sensory or imputed qualities, ideas are produced in us by means of powers due to the insensible primary qualities of the external objects. Such powers are themselves derivative, so what we experience bears no resemblance to any inherent property of the object in question. To use Galileo’s example, from which Locke’s view is in part derived, motion would be a primary quality of external objects and what we experience both represents and is in principle similar to that w...
