Two Themes of Reductionism and the Predicaments of Archetypical Empiricism
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CONTRIBUTORS:
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JOURNAL:
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YEAR:
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2007
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PUB TYPE:
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Journal Article
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SUBJECT(S):
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psychological theory, history of psychology, Gestalt psychology, Gestalt theory
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DISCIPLINE:
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Psychology
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HTTP:
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http://gestalttheory.net/gth/
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LANGUAGE:
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English
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PUB ID:
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103-437-894
(Last edited on
2007/10/21 07:07:54 GMT-6)
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SPONSOR(S):
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ABSTRACT:
In three interconnected articles I explore two diverging perspectives on psychology. In the first article (Gestalt Theory 29, 40-58) I sketched out typical traits of the rationalist analyses of mind with examples taken from Helmholtz, Wundt and Husserl. In this second paper, typical traits of empiricism are examined, as well as some of the predicaments of the approach. The empiricist psychology (here exemplified with Külpe and Titchener) had a core based on reductionism: Minds are nothing but the sensuous elements of consciousness. No ‘higher levels’ of mind exist that are beyond the reach of experimental study or beyond the explanatory frames of natural science. Sensations – the building blocks of mind – were considered to be pure quality, with a certain intensity, duration, and extension, co-varying with the events of a specific nervous organ. With a conception of conscious experience as a mosaic of atomized non-connected elements (standing in a one-to-one relationship with equally atomized fractions of stimuli) one soon has to accept the discrepancy between the real constituents of consciousness and awareness. Köhler pointed out that the approaches based on the constancy hypothesis survived with the help of a battery of ‘explain away’ strategies that reinforced a rationalist perspective of mind. Empiricist psychology went in two directions: Behaviourism and Gestalt theory. As Köhler and Koffka relentlessly pointed out, by ignoring conscious phenomena and by not realizing the true nature of conscious compounds, behaviourism failed to free it self from the rigid and mechanistic conception of perception and cognition taken from their empiricist predecessors – thus, psychology could not free it selves from rationalist analyses of mind.
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