The positivist repudiation of Wundt - Kurt Danziger

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224 KURT DANZIGER sensation. Because the addition of “context” is itself frequently not a conscious act, “the test of such a meaning can only be behavioural.” 83 Meaning is a matter of dis- criminatory response, and Titchener’s context theory of meaning finally fathers behaviorism. Knowledge and purpose become “habit mechanisms,” 84 and value is a matter of preferential response. The victory of behaviorism, from its first self-conscious announcements to its cap- ture of the main citadels of American psychology, was accomplished with extraordinary speed. If this was a “scientific revolution” it must surely be the fastest revolution known to the history of science! Indeed, it has frequently been observed that the gospel of behaviorism fell on ears that had been very well prepared to receive it. The role that func- tionalism played in that regard needs no elaboration. But it may well be that from a wider perspective the role of positivist sensationalism must be judged to have been of more fundamental importance. Such judgments depend on the level of generality at which a theory such as behaviorism is examined. Any scientific theory involves a hierarchy of assumptions and associated prescriptions at various levels of abstraction. The point, however, is not that more and less abstract concepts exist side by side but that the same concept has both a more specific content as well as a base of more abstract assumptions that usually remain implicit. Thus, the prescription that all psychological phenomena are to be analyzed into stimulus and response elements is a specific instance of the more general prescriptions that complex psychological events consist of elements and that these elements are to be such as can be described in a physical “thing” language. Now, the concepts of behaviorism have a rather specific level whose content will vary with the particular ver- sion of the doctrine one happens to be dealing with, but they also involve more abstract prescriptions which are shared by all the varieties of behaviorism as well as by many psychological theories that might not be self-consciously behavioristic. These abstract prescriptions are derived from a positivist philosophy of science. The distinctive feature of most twentieth-century psychology lay in the fact that positivism became its form of scientific orthodoxy.8S Therein lies the historical importance of the positivist reform of psychology which we have traced to the effcnts of a group inspired by Mach around the turn of the century. Their work is of interest, not only because it establishes a real historical link between Machian positivism and the mainstream of academic psychology, but also because it expresses rather directly certain basic preconceptions which later generations simply took for granted. The important role played by Machian positivism at the period when psychology formed its self-conception as an independent discipline also explains the peculiar susceptibility of psychology to subsequent infusions of positivist philosophy in the form of operationism and logical positivism.86 No other science showed this effect; no other science had started off by defining its aims in a framework of positivist philosophy. Among his fellow physicists Mach’s philosophy of science remained the object of considerable controversy and never gained general accep- tance.81 What behaviorism did contribute was the strong practical interest of American psychology. For the purpose of manipulating individuals in the context established by real social institutions the older, descriptive form of psychological positivism was indeed useless. But, in taking this turn, behaviorism was actually restoring the positivist philosophy of science to its traditional role. Because of its emphatic rejection of any possible role for science in providing insights into a real world behind appearances, this philosophy was left with only two ways of justifying scientific activity. One was to justify
THE POSITIVIST REPUDIATION OF WUNDT 225 science in terms of the satisfaction it gave to its practitioners and a small circle of cognoscenti, the scientific equivalent of l’art pour l’art. The other, and far more popular, alternative was to justify science in terms of its practical usefulness. Both themes are actually to be found in Mach’s writings, although, understandably, the public emphasis on the theme of practical usefulness has always far outweighed the other theme. Positivism has been the favorite philosophy of those who wished to justify science in terms of its usefulness for achieving established social goals. However, for many individual psychologists it also proved to be a convenient philosophy for reconciling a public justification of scientific activity in terms of social usefulness with a private justification in terms of personal satisfaction, a pattern that has been greatly encouraged by the internal struc- ture and the external relationships of psychology as a profession.88 It was the professionalization of psychology that also completed the repudiation of Wundt which had been taken such a long way by the first generation of Machian psychologists. Wundt strongly opposed that professionalization,*e which hardly helped to persuade the younger men that hi Is fundamental attitudes were compatible with their concerns. He counselled extreme caution in the face of pressures to turn psychology into an applied science. He perceived, correctly, as it turned out, that the predominance of practical interests would have a decisive influence on the methods, the goals, and the concepts of the discipline.g0 As regards methods, they would become more crude so that they might be used by unsophisticated technicians working in circumscribed settings. The social institutions within which psychology was applied would impose their own biases on the subject; for example, psychology in education would be pushed into intellectualistic problem formulations and away from the dynamic bias of Wundt’s voluntarism. Finally, psychological concepts would become defined in ways narrowly determined by the practical context of their application, and here Wundt pointed to the example of the new work on intelligence which seemed to him to involve a revival of faculty psychology. Hardly anyone listened to him by now. Wundt and his philosophy were clearly out of step with the way psychology was going. It is true that this was largely attributable to the fact that the world of the twentieth century suggested tasks to which he could not respond and created interests with which he could not sympathize. At the same time, it must be recognized that his system had been a failure, even on its own terms. Had his achievement been more convincing, his repudiation might not have proceeded quite so smoothly. His attempt to retain a place in psychology for the concept of value led, in practice, to a schematism that probably reminded not only Max Weber of the nineteenth-century faith in progress. His insistence on the dynamic foundation of psychological phenomena, which he called his “voluntarism,” was not supported by concrete research on drives and motives, although ver- bally he stressed their importance. His notion of psychological analysis, although sup- posedly subordinated to his synthetic concepts, was not intrinsically determined by these concepts, thus leading to a number of inconsistencies. Most damaging, however, was his failure to endow his concept of psychic causality with the kind of content that might open up new perspectives for others. The principles of psychic causality which he enumerated remain rather empty abstractions. In his determination to avoid the errors of the associationists, who had mistaken logical relationships for psychological relationships, he did not recognize that the notion of psychic causality was doomed to sterility unless linked to categories of subjective meaning. The idea of psychic causality was reformulated in various ways by a number of twentieth-century psychologists who stood outside the positivist mainstream. The princi-
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The positivist repudiation of Wundt - Kurt Danziger

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