Functionalism

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Functionalism American Psychology

• Structure of lecture
• 1. Brief characterisation
• 2. Background in C19 thinking
• 3. William James and John Dewey as examples
• 4. Cultural conditions the nature of
  functionalism
• 5. The legacy of functionalism
• And so?
• adaptation a good and happy life
• the entwining of science morals
  philosophy psychology?

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A brief characterisation of functionalism

• Central intellectual concern
• the purposes of psychological abilities and
  properties
• . And what they allowed people to do
• E.g.
• How does the mind mediate between the
  environment the needs of the organism? (Angell,
  1907)functions not structures
• EVOLUTIONARY in tone

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Roots

• Place of C19 moral mental philosophy
• Producing an appropriate social elite
• e.g. Richards (1995, 2004)
• Noah Porter and James McCosh

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Noah Porter (1811-1892)

• Philosopher
• President of Yale 1871-1886
• Author of The Human Intellect (1868) amongst
  other works

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Porters Psychology

• A science of the soul requiring
• exact observation, precise definition, fixed
  terminology, classified arrangement and
  rational explanation (1868).
• Phenomena apprehended by consciousness
• Emphasized the importance of mental operations,
  individual character and the habit of
  self-knowledge

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• If we would know our fellow-men to do them
  good, we must first know ourselves. This
  suggests the important service which psychology
  may render to teachers of every class.
• (Porter, The Human Intellect, 1868)
• Self knowledge - Other knowledge
• Protestant moral project of self scrutiny and
  this project as effortful

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Porters psychology

• A coming together of
• scientific aims to know and
• religious aims to know
• in order to be a better person and to lead a
  better life
• Richards (1995)
• this approach gave psychology an explicitly
  moral dimension

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Porters legacy

• Psychological knowledge as having moral dimension
• Influential on his students
• e.g. G. T. Ladd
• Yale Professor of mental moral philosophy
  1881
• Taught physiological psyc from 1884
• Wrote early, popular American texts on
• Physiological Psychology
• shared Ps religious leanings and the moral
  aspects of psychology
• Also concerned with practical benefits of
  psychology
• not an uncommon pattern

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Some functionalist views on Psychology

• William James (1842-1910).
• New England, wealthy, scholarly family
• UG at Harvard medicine
• Early 1870s starts to recover from emotional
  problems
• 1875 course in Physiological psychology at
  Harvard

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Some major works

• 1890 Principles of Psychology
• Wundt (allegedly) Its literature, its
  beautiful, but its not Psychology
• The Will to Believe
• 1899 Talks to Teachers on Psychology
• 1902 Varieties of Religious Experience
• 1907 Pragmatism

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Consciousness and free will

• consciousness grows the more complex intense
  the higher we rise in the animal kingdom. it
  seems an organ, superadded to the other organs
  which maintain the animal in the struggle for
  existence the presumption is that it helps
  him in some way in the struggle.
• consciousness helps regulate a complex nervous
  system it has adaptive value

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• Much of the functional value of consciousness
  came through the possession of free will.
• James chose to believe in free will
• opposing determinism idea that complete
  knowledge of the present allows perfect
  prediction of the future
• BUT free will operates under constraint

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James on emotion

• stimuli evoke reaction experience emotion
• stimulus behaviour experience
• bear on path freeze fear
• bear on path run fear
• bear in zoo gaze admiration emotions
  differ
• idea of emotion as embodied and action-based
  not simply mental and passive
• Smith (1997) functionalism also embedded a
  general tendency to focus on what people do
  rather than on what they think

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James on the self

• Self as multi-faceted
• known an object of knowledge empirical ego or
  me
• material self
• social self . itself a variety of selves
• spiritual self
• Self as knower transcendental ego or I
• which cannot be the object of investigation
• but which is the essence of personal identity
  and (illusory) sense of continuity

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Self self-esteem

• Self-esteem a ratio of success to pretensions
• I, who for the time have staked my all on being a
  psychologist, am mortified if others know much
  more psychology than I. But I am contented to
  wallow in the grossest ignorance of Greek. My
  deficiencies there give me no sense of personal
  humiliation at all. Had I 'pretensions' to be a
  linguist, it would have been just the reverse. So
  we have the paradox of a man shamed to death
  because he is only the second pugilist or the
  second oarsman in the world. That he is able to
  beat the whole population of the globe minus one
  is nothing he has 'pitted' himself to beat that
  one and as long as he doesn't do that nothing
  else counts. He is to his own regard as if he
  were not, indeed he is not.

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• Yonder puny fellow, however, whom every one can
  beat, suffers no chagrin about it, for he has
  long ago abandoned the attempt to 'carry that
  line,' as the merchants say, of self at all. With
  no attempt there can be no failure with no
  failure no humiliation. So our self-feeling in
  this world depends entirely on what we back
  ourselves to be and do. It is determined by the
  ratio of our actualities to our supposed
  potentialities a fraction of which our
  pretensions are the denominator and the numerator
  our success thus, Self-esteem Success /
  Pretensions. Such a fraction may be increased as
  well by diminishing the denominator as by
  increasing the numerator. To give up pretensions
  is as blessed a relief as to get them gratified
  and where disappointment is incessant and the
  struggle unending, this is what men will always
  do. The history of evangelical theology, with its
  conviction of sin, its self-despair, and its
  abandonment of salvation by works, is the deepest
  of possible examples, but we meet others in every
  walk of life.

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truth

• James Pragmatism (1907)
• Ideas (which themselves are just part of our
  experience) become true just in so far as they
  help us get into satisfactory relations with
  other parts of our experience.
• truth is found through instrumental means
  truth is instrumental

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What was Jamess Principles of Psychology about?

• Richards (1996)
• Principles of Psychology is at heart really
  about how to stay sane and honest

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again a set of instructions a theory
psychology and the good life

• Refuse to vent a passion and it dies. Count ten
  before venting your anger, and its occasion seems
  ridiculous. Whistling to keep up courage is no
  mere figure of speech. On the other hand, sit
  all day in a moping posture, sigh, and reply to
  everything in a dismal voice, and your melancholy
  lingers. There is no more valuable precept in
  moral education than this.....if we wish to
  conquer undesirable emotional tendencies in
  ourselves, we must assiduously, and in the first
  instance cold-bloodedly, go through the outward
  movements of those contrary dispositions which we
  prefer to cultivate. The reward of persistency
  will infallibly come, in the fading out of
  sullenness or depression, and the advent of real
  cheerfulness and kindliness in their stead.
  Smooth the brow, brighten the eye, contract the
  dorsal rather than the ventral aspect of the
  frame, and speak in a major key, pass the genial
  compliment, and your heart must be frigid indeed
  if it do not gradually thaw!

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James is revealing instructing

• On how to
• live our lives
• he lived his life
• Through using
• autobiography
• psychological knowledge
• moral and ethical injunctions

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Another functionalist John Dewey (1859-1952)

• Philosophy at Johns Hopkins
• PhD with Hall
• Chair in Psy Phil at Chicago
• then Columbia
• Education

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Deweys most famous paper The Reflex Arc (1896)

• Background
• reflex stimulus-links-response
• three stages each causing next
• Dewey this is wrong!

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• Stimulus - association - response
• are not separable psychic entities
• they are differing functions within an integrated
  whole and one does not cause the other in any
  simple sense
• Analogy
• watch cat through a peephole
• conclude whiskers cause tails

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The S R account
Response
Stimulus
Stimulus
Response
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Reflex arc

• NOT
• see candle-grasp-burn-withdraw hand
• (stimulus-response-stimulus-response) but
• act of looking, of seeing, reaching and pain
• Activities obtain their significance only as part
  of the whole
• so not see reach grasp
• but an integrated system (see also Charles
  Sherrington)

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Dewey as functionalist

• Perception-action as adaptive
• Mind was representational allowed organism to
  guide organism and allow it to adapt and
  anticipate
• Mind is an actor on the world
• knowledge of it becomes a means of understanding
  and then changing the world

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Back to the cultural context

• Summary so far
• Broadly what functionalism is
• Intellectual roots in moral philosophy
• .. Psychological knowledge for improvement of
  self, others society
• Examples of functionalist style
• William James John Dewey

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Where from ..?

• Moral philosophy as discussed
• More widely in US culture
• Religion
• Enlightenment project
• Education

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Religion

• Centrality of religion
• moral imperatives
• Religious belief common among psychologists
• compatible with science
• allying knowledge and values
• beware anachronistic thinking

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Enlightenment project

• Crudely
• to understand the nature of the world through
  human effort the application of rational
  enquiry
• and beliefs in the importance of direct
  experience, progress and egalitarianism.
• Criticism in late C19 Europe
• Germany elites fear of Enlightenment
  (Harrington, 1996)
• But in USA more persistent Constitution ..
  Social values

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• Roger Smith writes of Cattell
• Cattell, like many in his generation, believed
  in expertise as the means to make America modern,
  civilized and democratic. His interest in
  science was an interest in the occupations that
  he believed would contribute to social advance
  he was not interested in the development of an
  academic discipline for the sake of learning. It
  was precisely because these values were widely
  shared that psychology gained an academic base so
  quickly in the US in the 1890s.
  Smith (1997, p. 523)
• my emphasis

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Education

• Equiping immigrants for life in America
• Education allows exploitation of opportunity and
  to attain individual fulfilment.
• Education a site for inculcating the right morals
  and the right values.
• Expertise in child development and in the process
  of education was worthwhile (Baldwin, Dewey, Hall)

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• The project of moral training of providing a
  conventional morality in a pluralistic society
• a. no longer solely the provinces of philosophy
  and religion but has been taken on by the New
  Psychology
• b. it is no longer solely a programme for the
  elite - it is a moral project for the population

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Legacies of functionalism

• Attitude rather than specific theories
• notion of expertise becomes central loaded.
  E.g. testing (week 4)
• Values knowledge is of value for its own sake?
• or for the benefit of society? Or the
  individual life?
• Recurrent themes adaptiveness, action, Dewey and
  reflex arc, role of free will, consciousness,
  improvement
• Are we all functionalists now?
• Most of all how notions of values, science, and
  purposes of psychology can become inseparable?
  Discuss..