Experimental Psychology Its Scope and Method: Volume I

History and Method

Jean Piaget, Paul Fraisse, Maurice Reuchlin

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781848724624
• eBook ISBN: 9781317630579
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Experimental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

First published in English 1968, in this volume Paul Fraisse begins with history, looking at the evolution of experimental psychology, starting with its origins. He then moves on to the establishment of experimental psychology around the world. In the second chapter he discusses the experimental method. In the third chapter Jean Piaget tackles the questions of explanation and parallelism and their problems within experimental psychology. The final chapter by Maurice Reuchlin goes on to discuss measurement in psychology looking at various scales with their experimental conditions and numerical properties.

Chapter 1

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The evolution of experimental psychology

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Paul Fraisse

Experimental psychology is so called because its method is directed towards establishing psychology as a science. If science is the knowledge of the laws of nature, scientific psychology endeavours to extend the area of science to include animals and man—considered as parts of nature. The experimental method is certainly not the only scientific method, and scientific psychology is not, and never will be, based on knowledge derived solely from experiment. Observation of all kinds will always play an important part in scientific procedure and especially in those cases where the opportunity for experiment is limited by the nature of the material or by ethical considerations. The experimental method remains the scientist’s ideal, for it is only when we are able to reproduce it that we can regard a fact as having been adequately and properly understood. When this happens, a science can not only predict phenomena but can also point to applications which are, properly speaking, scientific.

This chapter cannot claim to cover, even broadly, the history of psychology. In the first sections of this treatise we shall simply trace the important stages in the birth and development of experimental psychology. This will enable us to learn its true dimensions, stemming from its definition, rather than from the limits set by academic tradition and the false claims made on behalf of humanism.¹

1 Origins

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1 ‘Before’ psychology

On beginning his studies in psychology the student will be astonished to learn that it is a very recent discipline. Certainly there has always been an ‘implicit’ psychology (P. Guillaume, 1943), corresponding to a practical knowledge of oneself and others, and a pre-scientific psychology, which was the systematized knowledge of men of letters (Theophrastus, La Bruyère), of moralists (Marcus Aurelius, Montaigne, Pascal, La Rochefoucauld) or of philosophers (Aristotle, Lucretius).

Of these, philosophy comes closest to science, since the first advance of the mind must be ontological. Originally, however, the distinction between philosophy and science did not exist. Aristotle’s De Anima, primarily a metaphysical study of the soul as a kind of living organism, is also a biological work full of notes, many of which were extremely accurate, based on the observations of a philosopher-scientist.

It was not until the decline of Aristotelian physics and philosophy in the seventeenth century that the need to understand man came to be regarded as a specific problem. A new discipline cannot emerge unless two conditions are present: on the one hand the evolution of thought must give rise to new problems, and on the other hand new means of investigation must be available to scientists. The developments from which psychology emerged were both philosophical and biological.

2 Philosophical developments in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

The progress made in the theory of knowledge helped in the discovery of psychology as a separate subject. It began with the revolt of Descartes (1596–1650) against the established School. Although he considered all sciences as belonging to one tree, with metaphysics as the roots and physics as the trunk, he maintained, against all previous forms of realism, that what is best known and most familiar to us is the soul, of which we have direct knowledge. As Canguilhem (1958) correctly pointed out, Cartesian intuition was not the same as nineteenth-century introspection. Nevertheless, the latter is indirectly related to the former, because Descartes introduced the concept of duality in man; the distinction between soul and body. Although the pineal gland joined them, it did not create as firm a union as that imagined by Aristotle, who could not conceive of form without matter or, consequently, of the immortality of souls. This duality of mind and body engendered a series of developments favourable to a growing awareness of psychological problems, though later it was to lead to considerable obstacles. Two methods of approach emerged, the mental and the mechanical. On the one hand, a direct attack on the soul as a spiritual substance, the centre of innate ideas, and on the other an empirical, not to say experimental, research into the mechanics of the body, which Descartes already claimed to have done.

We cannot follow, as a history of philosophy would, the developments which have since been incorporated into this approach, which is too complex and too composite to avoid distortion by its followers. Instead, we will trace some of the lines of evolution, according to an admittedly arbitrary geographical classification, in those centuries when the intellectual life of Europe was at its fullest.

In England, Descartes’ influence brought about the empiricist school, which took from his philosophy the direct intuition of ideas and, in general, of a psychic life, but rejected the idea of innateness. According to Descartes, we had innate ideas of God, of the soul, and adventitious ideas, transmitted to the soul by the pineal gland, which were simply the signals of external reality. According to Locke (1632–1704), the founder of empiricism, with his Essay on Human Understanding (1690), all our ideas come from experience and are a representation of things. For this school, the problem was to identify the simple ideas and to discover the laws governing their composition—without undue emphasis, it is true—Locke was the first to refer to the simultaneous or successive association of ideas though he did not place particular emphasis on it. English empiricism followed a path which changed subtly from author to author. Associationism had a greater place in the philosophy of Hume (1711–66), and Hartley (1705–57) recognized it as the great principle of mental life.

Any sensations A, B, C, etc., by being associated with one another a sufficient number of times, get a power over corresponding ideas a, b, c, etc., that any one of the sensations A, when impressed alone, shall be able to excite in the mind, b, c, etc., the ideas of the rest. (Boring, op. cit., p. 197).

Taking into account its postulate of a parallelism between sensations and ideas, it made repetition the fundamental principle of all association.

Associationism flourished with the mental mechanics of James Mill (1773–1836) and the mental chemistry of his son, John Stuart Mill (1806–73). While remaining empiricist as far as the origin of ideas was concerned, this school developed a psychology centred around the analysis of mental activity. It was, however, indebted to philosophical knowledge, which was based on coherent syntheses. But it prepared a framework of thought for those who, like Wundt and Titchener, were to do research into the birth and association of ideas.

In France the psychological heritage of Descartes was not independent of Locke. Condillac (1715–80), a cleric and a doctor, was a friend of the Encyclopedists. His principal work, Traité de sensations (1754) reveals the current attitude towards psychology. An empiricist in principle, more so in fact that Locke, he wrote a treatise which was a great philosophical work. Using the image of a statue, made fashionable by Deslandes (see Mayer, 1956), he endowed it first with a sense of smell, and from its smelling the scent of a rose, he deduced all our ideas and even our mental faculties without ever resorting to physiology. The Swiss naturalist and philosopher Charles Bonnet (1720–93) was to add this last idea to his own work.

Adhering to Descartes’ theory of the mechanism of the human body, La Mettrie (1709–51) a priest, and subsequently a physician, published in rapid succession UHistoire naturelle de Vâme (1745) and Uhomme machine (1748). During an illness, he had noticed that, while draining his physical strength, the illness also diminished his mental powers, and he set himself up as the spokesman of a determinist philosophy where thought was simply the result of the activity of the nervous system.

Cabanis (1757–1808), also a doctor, accepted the sensationalism of Condillac and the mechanism of La Mettrie while preserving his religious beliefs. He regarded sensation as the basis of psychic life and he constructed a synthesis on this principle. Revolutionary as it was, his thinking was directed by the question: ‘is the body of a guillotine victim still conscious after decapitation’? Out of these researches came a book, Rapports du physique et du moral de Vhomme (1802) in which he maintains that consciousness, a higher level of mental organization, depends on the function of the brain, and that the soul is therefore not independent of the body.

Maine de Biran (1766–1824) at first went with the empiricist current, but gradually this meditative man turned towards the observation of his inner life and ‘through him psychology became the technique of the intimate diary and the science of intimate feeling’ (see Canguilhem 1958), an attitude inherited from Descartes and from empiricism. In preferring to concentrate his studies on inner experience, he was the first of a long line including, in direct or indirect descent, the eclectics, Bergson, Proust and, in one sense, the existentialists.

Empiricism was reborn in France with Taine (De l’intelligence, 1870) and Ribot (La Psychologie anglaise contemporaine, 1870), in reaction to the official eclecticism and under the direct influence of the English school.

In Germany, the developments of thought were more original, and marked a reaction against English empiricism. Leibniz (1646–1716) regarded simple or monad substances, like composite ones, as being capable of activity. This principle, on which he laid great stress, was to become the basic tenet of a whole school of psychology called act psychology (Brentano, Stumpf), a school which stood aloof from experimental psychology till its principles were fully established. During the eighteenth century C. Wolff (1679–1754), a disciple and popularizer of Leibniz, suggested that a subject called psychology should be conceived of as a possibility. But, paradoxically, it was Kant (1724–1804) who, in the sphere of ideas, was to give considerable impetus to psychological work. He challenged Wolff’s view that psychology could be a science:

The T subject of every aperceptive judgment is a function of the organization of an experiment but it cannot be a science, since it is the transcendental condition of every science … we are not free to perform experiments, either on ourselves or on others. And close observation alters its object… (see Canguilhem, 1958).

But posterity saw fit to reject this epistemological line and retained only the principle of the transcendental aesthetic:

Ideas of space and time are not simple tracings of things, but a way of considering them.

Kant himself was merely concerned under what conditions these ideas could form the basis of a science. During the post-Kantian era the origin and nature of these ideas of space and time were to be studied. With this framework the first German psychologists carried out researches into and put forward theories on the constitution of time and space.

To summarize, then, it seems that since Descartes thinking on psychic life has developed along two classical lines since ancient philosophy; the first concerned with the origin of our sensations and their laws of combination puts the emphasis on their empirical origins and on association, in which contiguity and repetition are the dominant principles; the second stressed rather the activity of the mind.

Still others—particularly in France, from Condillac to Cabanis—emphasized the importance of the body. They put forward a physiological psychology.

3 Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophers and the idea of measurement in psychology

Science in general and the experimental method in particular are based on observations which become precise only when they are quantified. Also we must consider briefly how the idea of measurement developed and became adapted to psychology.

The first person to mention measurement in psychology was a German, Wolff, It was he who first distinguished, i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Chapter 1 The Evolution of Experimental Psychology
• Chapter 2 The Experimental Method
• Chapter 3 Explanation in Psychology and Psychophysiological Parallelism
• Chapter 4 Measurement in Psychology
• Index