Wundt, early German psychology

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Wundt, early German psychology psychology as
academic discipline

• Lecture structure
• What makes a discipline?
• One account of the emergence of psychology
• Problems with the account
• Implications for the present or how
  could it have been otherwise?

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And so?

• Stories of the past the identity of the
  discipline (see ODonnell on Boring)
• What counts as psychology is historically
  contingent but does this matter?
• Thinking of how psychology might be different

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What does it take to be recognised as a separate
discipline?

• Danziger (1990) as a minimum
• object(s) of study
• method(s) of study
• social organisation labs, journals,
  departments, research programmes students!

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Origins histories

• This one can help us understand
• how and why psychology a separate discipline
• how and why dominated by experiment
• And to recognise that it could have been
  otherwise
• consciousness as its object
• cultural studies
• part of physiology or philosophy
• Caution this is not a firsts story and
  consider why do we seek origins?

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Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920)

• Personal background
• medicine, physiology, philosophy
• 1862 Contributions towards a theory of sense
  perception
• 1873-4 Principles of Physiological Psychology

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Wundts lab

• 1879 begins self-funded lab research, Leipzig
• 1883 Official recognition by university
• 1892 expanded to 11 rooms and 20 students

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Lab in 1909
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Wundts interests, ideas beliefs

• what are the basic elements of consciousness?
• how do they combine, that is, what laws or
  processes govern their combination?

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• Psychological elements are not physiological
  elements
• e.g. sensation blue
• Sensations as elements
• BUT
• perceptions as complex combinations
• ideas as internal complex combinations
• Passive combinations association
• Active combination apperception
• intelligent, directional, cohesive
• creative synthesis
• Attention is a crucial concept an act of will
• a system of voluntarism

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A Wundtian experiment

• What is the apperception span i.e. how many
  stimulus elements can be held in mind at once?
• Present letters or words briefly see how many
  can be fixed in consciousness
• finds same number of letters or familiar words
  can be recalled
• words treated as wholes

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Characteristics of the experiment

• Manipulation, artificial conditions, observation
  and/or measurement
• Cooperation
• manipulation of conditions, making measurements
• anothers consciousness

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• observer, reactor person under experiment
• versus
• manipulator, signaller, reader
• Subject as expert
• Difference from natural sciences
• object of investigation participates
• A cooperative exercise

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and here they are
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Other methods by Wundt

• Comparative methods, evolutionary history and
  developmental methods
• Limits of the expt
• Völkerpsychologie

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Wundts Psychology

• Objects of study
• individual private consciousness,
• cultural products
• Method of study
• experiment (Naturwissenschaft),
• cultural science (Geisteswissenschaft)
• Social organisation
• within labs
• students and new labs 100 PhDs
• 1881 founded Philosophische Studien journal

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What the lab did for Wundt

• Lab made possible replicable experiences
• standardised conditions
• short report time
• external/internal unwanted influences at a
  minimum
• replication by trial
• Small numbers of expert subjects
• Individual mind as universal or generalised mind

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The importance of precision

• Precision is an ideal and an argument
• (Benschop and Draaisma, 2000)
• Quality of science
• Reaction times . mental chronometry

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Mental chronometry

• Donders (1865 on)
• Condition 1 mild shock to either left or right
  foot and told which
• Condition 2 mild shock to either left or right
  but NOT told which
• Task move hand on same side that stimulus was
  administered
• Time difference between conditions 1/15 second
  mental processing

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• Human thought not as instantaneous but as
  measurable
• This was the first determination of the
  duration of a well-defined mental process. It
  concerned the decision in a choice and an action
  of the will in response to that decision.
  (Donders, 1869)

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Precision again

• Science requires and produces precision
• Shapin Schaffer (1985) precision produced
  through
• material technology
• literary technology
• social technology

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Technologies for precision

• 1. Material
• instrumentation
• source of precision and error
• Wundts lab and brass instruments

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• Hipp chronoscope
• ... like a stopwatch
• ... depended on vibration of a spring
• ... spring sensitive to disturbance

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• Calibration
• ... Chronograph
• ... problem of calibration
• ?infinite regress

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Literary technology

• Reports encourage reproduction of particular
  ways of conducting experiments
• Philosophische Studien 1881
• Style graphs, charts, formulae, numbers
• Description and advertising of instrumentation
• Rhetoric words like exact, reliable,
  constant, uniform, standardization
  emphasise the theme of precision and portray
  process as being precise
• Texts as model for actions in other labs

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Social technology

• Constancy in conduct in lab by both experimenter
  and observer
• Being Ready poised between attention
  relaxation
• Environment
• Understanding of task
• Extensive practice ... observer as an expert ...
  not person off street
• Aim evenness or constancy in reactions to allow
  access to generalized mind results as
  representative

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Precision its consequences

• Discrepancies between labs
• Reveals variation between individuals
• reasons for variation?
• Precision use of aggregate

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Why there then?

• Physiology
• mind C19 from structure to function
• from anatomy dissection to physiology
  experiment
• Individual private consciousness
• mind as separate, special
• Protestant ethic of self-examination
• German university system
• stress on science knowledge in elite
• reconciling knowledge for own sake with
  producing better citizens .. new forms of
  knowledge

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Wundt legacies

• Institutional
• labs, departments, expt set-up, journals
• Training and students
• Cattell .. founding member of APA, editor
  Science, founded Psychological Review
• Witmer psychological clinic at University of
  Pennsylvania
• Kraepelin schizophrenia
• Titchener structuralism at Cornell
• Scripture director at Yale
• Angell founded Cornell and Stanford labs
• But rejection opposition within Germany
  outside

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and

• Method and object
• Someone/some things to oppose e.g.
• Ebbinghaus
• . Expt higher mental functions memory
• Kulpe
• reduce to physiological
• Even Watsons behaviorism
• the object of psychology is not
  consciousness

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Some critical remarks on this account

• Origin myths
• Boring
• I believe that when Wundts special theories
  have utterly perished his fame will still endure
  because he established a new point of view and
  from it surveyed the whole scientific and
  philosophical domain. In this sense, I am
  prepared to say that Wundt is the founder, not of
  experimental psychology alone, but of
  psychology. Titchener, 1921 (p.177)

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• heroes, foundations, separation
• simplicity
• Emphasis on individual
• Tolstoy any one individual as being swept along
  rather than doing the sweeping

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The And so? question

• Earlier points
• the functions or effects of origin histories
• the characteristics of Wundts science how
  same how different, how legitimised, how
  expanded .. What are these telling us?
• if we had pursued a Wundtian psychology, how
  might todays psychology be different?