The positivist repudiation of Wundt - Kurt Danziger

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228 KURT DANZIGER 23. Wundt, “Ober die Definition der Psychologie.” Also Wilhelm Wundt, “Ober naiven und kritischen Realismus,” Philosophische Studien 12 (1895-1896): 307-408; 13 (1897-1898): 1-105, 323-433. It should be noted that although Wundt frequently criticized views to which he was profoundly opposed, he generally maintained courteous and at times friendly relationships with the authors of these views. See Wolfgang G. Bringmann, William D. G. Balance, and Rand B. Evans, “Wilhelm Wundt 1832-1920: A Brief Biographical Sketch,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 11 (1975): 287-297. 24. Wundt, “Ober naiven und kritischen Realismus,” 1897-1898, p. 410. 25. Wundt, “Ober die Definition der Psychologie,” p. 34. 26. Ibid., p. 15. 27. Ibid., p. 33. 28. In terms of his general prescription, Mach recognized the practical need for introspection, “although my ideal of psychology is that it should be purely physiological” (Mach, Sensations, p. 340). 29. Wilhelm Wundt, “8ber die Eintheilung der Wissenschaften,” Philosophische Studien 5 (1888-1889): 1-55. 30. Wilhelm Wundt, Die physikalischen Axiome und ihre Beziehungen zum Causalprincip (Erlangen: Enke, 1866). 31. In this respect Wundt’s position is closer to certain modern approaches, for example, Edwin A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundation of Modern Science (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1925; Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science 1300-1800 (London: Bell, 1957); Alexander Koyrt, Newtonian Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968). Wundt’s emphasis on the fact that natural science is only possible by virtue of a prior abstraction from the immediate experience of the human observer sometimes receives extreme expression in the assertion that his psychology is much closer to being a strictly empirical discipline than the natural sciences which “everywhere require the assistance of metaphysical concepts,” Logik, vol. 3, p. 250. 32. Wilhelm Wundt, Vorlesungen iiber die Menschen- und Thierseele, vol. 2 (Leipzig: Voss, 1864), p. iii. 33. Wilhelm Wundt, Logik, vol. 2 (Stuttgart: Enke, 1883), p. 491. 34. KUlpe, Outlines, p. 12. 35. Wilhelm Wundt, “Ober Ausfrageexperimente und Uber die Methoden zur Psychologie des Denkens,” Psychologische Studien 3 (1907): 301-360. 36. Wilhelm Dilthey, “ldeen Uber eine beschreibende und zergliedernde Psychologie,” in Gesammelte Schri’Jien, vol. 5 (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1957). 37. Hermann Ebbinghaus, “Ober erkllrende und beschreibende Psychologie,” Zeitschri’jifir Psychologie 9 (1896): 161-205. 38. Herman Ebbinghaus, Grundziige der Psychologie (Leipzig: Veit, 1897 and 1902). 39. Ibid., p. 7. 40. Ernst Meumann, another of Wundt’s assistants who found the master’s system excessively “metaphysical,” was another likely source of influence. He eventually published his criticisms of “psychic causality” and related conceptions and was duly rebutted by Wundt in 1904 (see Wilhelm Wundt, “Empirische und metaphysische Psychologie,” Kleine Schriften, vol. 2 [Leipzig: Engelmann, 191 I]). The high tide of scientism at the turn of the century left its mark on a number of Wundt’s most promising students. 41. Boring, Experimental Psychology, p. 417. 42. Edward Bradford Titchener, Systematic Psychology: Prolegomena (New York: Macmillan, 1929). 43. Ibid., p. 63. Among English-speaking psychologists, Titchener was somewhat unusual in taking his philosophy of science from Mach at first hand. The more common channel for these ideas was provided by Karl Pearson, whose Grammar of Science (London: Walter Scott, 1892) closely followed Mach, and who was respected by psychologists for his contributions to statistics, themselves highly consonant with his philosophy of science. Thorndike probably provides the best illustration of this line of positivist thought in psychology. See Geraldine M. Joncich, The Sane Positivist: A Biography of Edward L. Thorndike (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1968). 44. Titchener, Systematic Psychology, pp. 136-1 37. 45. Edward Bradford Titchener, A Textbook of Psychology (New York: Macmillan, 1909). p. 39. 46. For example, in the last chapter of the Grundriss of 1896. 47. Titchener, Textbook of Psychology, p. 41. 48. In later editions of Analysis of Sensations Mach praised the peripheralism of William James and Hugo Miinsterberg against centralist notions like those of Wundt and Helmholtz (Mach, Sensations, 1959, p. 173). William James greatly admired Mach and agreed with many of his ideas, notably as they related to the biological function of knowledge (including science) and phenomenalism. Although James was hardly a consistent Machian, it was those aspects of his ideas that converged with Mach’s notions which
THE POSITIVIST REPUDIATION OF WUNDT 229 seem to have had the greatest appeal for most of his psychological readers. See also Paul Tibbetts, “The Doctrine of ‘Pure Experience’: The Evolution of a Concept from Mach to James to Tolman,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 1 1 (1975): 55-66. 49. Kiilpe, Outlines, p. 448. 50. Ebbinghaus, Grundziige, pp. 584-585. 51. Walter B. Pillsbury in Murchison, A History of Psychology in Autobiography, vol. 2 (New York: Russell and Russell, 1961), p. 270. 52. Titchener, Textbook of Psychology, p. 367. 53. Alfred Georg Ludwig Lehmann, Die Hauptgesetze des menschlichen Gef~hlslebens (Leipzig: Reisland, 1892); Friedrich Kiesow, “Versuche mit Mossos Sphygmamanometer Uber die durch psychische Erregungen hervorgerufenen Verhderungen des Blutdrucks,” Philosophische Studien 11 (1895): 41-60. 54. Edward Bradford Titchener, Lectures on the Elementary Psychology of Feeling and Attention (New York: Macmillan, 1908), pp. 137-138. 55. Edward Bradford Titchener, “Zur Kritik der Wundt’schen Gefiihlslehre,” Zeitschrift Jir Psychologie 19 (1899): 321-326. 56. Wilhelm Wundt, “Bemerkungen zur Theorie der Geflihle,” Philosophische Studien 15 (1900): 149-182. 57. Titchener’s “data” were in part based on the introspective jottings made by a student while going about his daily business! 58. Wilhelm Wundt, Logik, 3d ed., vol. 3 (Stuttgart: Enke, 1908), p. 210. 59. Ibid., p. 214. 60. The “Gefilhlszentrum” is regarded as being identical with the “Apperzeptionszentrum.” See Wilhelm Wundt, Viilkerpsychologie, vol. 1 (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1900), p. 62. 61. Mach, Sensations, p. 26. 62. Ibid., p. 22. 63. Although Mach himself had been inclined to regard even pleasure and pain as sensations, the Machians among the psychologists recognized that they must be given a special status. The reason, as Ebbinghaus points out (Grundziige, p. 543), lies in their role as determinants for the movements of the organism, including, in the case of man, the movement of ideas. Pleasure and pain therefore constitute the noneliminable residue of complex central selecting and directing processes. 64. Titchener, Lectures, p. 159. 65. Edward Bradford Titchener, Lectures on the Experimental Psychology of the Thought Processes (New York: Macmillan, 1909), p. 36. According to Boring, Titchener was eventually persuaded that even the last remnant of the category of feeling, pleasantness-unpleasantness, could be reduced to sensation. See Edwin G. Boring, The Physical Dimensions of Consciousness (New York: Century, 1933), pp. 18-19. 66. Wundt, “Uber naiven und kritischen Realismus.” 67. Edward Bradford Titchener, An Ourline of Psychology (New York: Macmillan, 1896), p. 13. 68. Ibid., p. 15. 69. Wundt, Logik, vol. 3, 1908, p. 193. 70. Ibid., p. 271. 71. Looking back on his achievement at the end of his life, Wundt arrives at the following succinct statement of his essential endeavour: “Whereas physiology believed it had to restrict itself to the strictly delimited area of sensation, it became my aim, on the contrary, to show, wherever possible, how the elementary processes of consciousness, sensations and associations, everywhere already reflected the mental life in its totality.” Wilhelm Wundt, Erlebtes und Erkanntes (Stuttgart: Kr6ner, 1920). 72. Wilhelm Wundt, “Uber reine und angewandte Psychologie,” Psychologische Studien 5 (1909): 1-47. 73. In the preface to the third edition of the Logik. Wundt, 1908. 74. It is profoundly misleading to consider Mach an “ancestor” of Gestalt psychology, as is sometimes suggested (for example, Boring, Experimental Psychology, p. 590). For Mach, the sensation of-the whole was simply an additional element added on to the elements that constituted the parts, a view that is the precise antithesis of the Gestalt doctrine about the relationship of parts and wholes. In their search for respectable ancestry some Gestalt psychologists occasionally read things into Mach that were not really there. 75. This was one reason for Wundt’s emphatic rejection of anything resembling the doctrine of “mental chemistry” (see Logik, vol. 3, p. 270 ff.). 76. From the point of view of a new systematic sociology, Max Weber took issue with Wundt’s conception of the appearance of value in cultural experience. While Weber agreed that values were of fundamental importance in social life, he treated them relativistically; Wundt’s approach, with its notion of a hierarchical development of objective values, Weber considered to be an expression of the nineteenth-century belief
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