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1 Psychology
We come therefore now to that knowledge whereunto the ancient oracle directeth us, which is the knowledge of ourselves; which deserveth the more accurate handling, by how much it toucheth us more nearly. This knowledge, as it is the end and term of natural philosophy in the intention of man, so notwithstanding it is but a portion of natural philosophy in the continent of nature.... [W]e proceed to human philosophy or Humanity, which hath two parts: the one considereth man segregate, or distributively; the other congregate, or in society. So as Human philosophy is either Simple and Particular, or Conjugate and Civil. Humanity Particular consisteth of the same parts whereof man consisteth; that is, of knowledges which respect the Body, and of knowledges that respect the Mind... how the one discloseth the other and how the one worketh upon the other... [:] the one is honored with the inquiry of Aristotle, and the other of Hippocrates. (Bacon, 1878, pp. 236-237)The claims of Psychology to rank as a distinct science are... not smaller but greater than those of any other science. If its phenomena are contemplated objectively, merely as nervo-muscular adjustments by which the higher organisms from moment to moment adapt their actions to environing co-existences and sequences, its degree of specialty, even then, entitles it to a separate place. The moment the element of feeling, or consciousness, is used to interpret nervo-muscular adjustments as thus exhibited in the living beings around, objective Psychology acquires an additional, and quite exceptional, distinction. (Spencer, 1896, p. 141)Kant once declared that psychology was incapable of ever raising itself to the rank of an exact natural science. The reasons that he gives... have often been repeated in later times. In the first place, Kant says, psychology cannot become an exact science because mathematics is inapplicable to the phenomena of the internal sense; the pure internal perception, in which mental phenomena must be constructed,-time,-has but one dimension. In the second place, however, it cannot even become an experimental science, because in it the manifold of internal observation cannot be arbitrarily varied,-still less, another thinking subject be submitted to one's experiments, comformably to the end in view; moreover, the very fact of observation means alteration of the observed object. (Wundt, 1904, p. 6)It is [Gustav] Fechner's service to have found and followed the true way; to have shown us how a "mathematical psychology" may, within certain limits, be realized in practice.... He was the first to show how Herbart's idea of an "exact psychology" might be turned to practical account. (Wundt, 1904, pp. 6-7)"Mind," "intellect," "reason," "understanding," etc. are concepts... that existed before the advent of any scientific psychology. The fact that the naive consciousness always and everywhere points to internal experience as a special source of knowledge, may, therefore, be accepted for the moment as sufficient testimony to the rights of psychology as science.... "Mind," will accordingly be the subject, to which we attribute all the separate facts of internal observation as predicates. The subject itself is determined p. 17) wholly and exclusively by its predicates. (Wundt, 1904,The study of animal psychology may be approached from two different points of view. We may set out from the notion of a kind of comparative physiology of mind, a universal history of the development of mental life in the organic world. Or we may make human psychology the principal object of investigation. Then, the expressions of mental life in animals will be taken into account only so far as they throw light upon the evolution of consciousness in man.... Human psychology... may confine itself altogether to man, and generally has done so to far too great an extent. There are plenty of psychological text-books from which you would hardly gather that there was any other conscious life than the human. (Wundt, 1907, pp. 340-341)The Behaviorist began his own formulation of the problem of psychology by sweeping aside all medieval conceptions. He dropped from his scientific vocabulary all subjective terms such as sensation, perception, image, desire, purpose, and even thinking and emotion as they were subjectively defined. (Watson, 1930, pp. 5-6)According to the medieval classification of the sciences, psychology is merely a chapter of special physics, although the most important chapter; for man is a microcosm; he is the central figure of the universe. (deWulf, 1956, p. 125)At the beginning of this century the prevailing thesis in psychology was Associationism.... Behavior proceeded by the stream of associations: each association produced its successors, and acquired new attachments with the sensations arriving from the environment.In the first decade of the century a reaction developed to this doctrine through the work of the Wurzburg school. Rejecting the notion of a completely self-determining stream of associations, it introduced the task ( Aufgabe) as a necessary factor in describing the process of thinking. The task gave direction to thought. A noteworthy innovation of the Wurzburg school was the use of systematic introspection to shed light on the thinking process and the contents of consciousness. The result was a blend of mechanics and phenomenalism, which gave rise in turn to two divergent antitheses, Behaviorism and the Gestalt movement. The behavioristic reaction insisted that introspection was a highly unstable, subjective procedure.... Behaviorism reformulated the task of psychology as one of explaining the response of organisms as a function of the stimuli impinging upon them and measuring both objectively. However, Behaviorism accepted, and indeed reinforced, the mechanistic assumption that the connections between stimulus and response were formed and maintained as simple, determinate functions of the environment.The Gestalt reaction took an opposite turn. It rejected the mechanistic nature of the associationist doctrine but maintained the value of phenomenal observation. In many ways it continued the Wurzburg school's insistence that thinking was more than association-thinking has direction given to it by the task or by the set of the subject. Gestalt psychology elaborated this doctrine in genuinely new ways in terms of holistic principles of organization.Today psychology lives in a state of relatively stable tension between the poles of Behaviorism and Gestalt psychology.... (Newell & Simon, 1963, pp. 279-280)As I examine the fate of our oppositions, looking at those already in existence as guide to how they fare and shape the course of science, it seems to me that clarity is never achieved. Matters simply become muddier and muddier as we go down through time. Thus, far from providing the rungs of a ladder by which psychology gradually climbs to clarity, this form of conceptual structure leads rather to an ever increasing pile of issues, which we weary of or become diverted from, but never really settle. (Newell, 1973b, pp. 288-289)The subject matter of psychology is as old as reflection. Its broad practical aims are as dated as human societies. Human beings, in any period, have not been indifferent to the validity of their knowledge, unconcerned with the causes of their behavior or that of their prey and predators. Our distant ancestors, no less than we, wrestled with the problems of social organization, child rearing, competition, authority, individual differences, personal safety. Solving these problems required insights-no matter how untutored-into the psychological dimensions of life. Thus, if we are to follow the convention of treating psychology as a young discipline, we must have in mind something other than its subject matter. We must mean that it is young in the sense that physics was young at the time of Archimedes or in the sense that geometry was "founded" by Euclid and "fathered" by Thales. Sailing vessels were launched long before Archimedes discovered the laws of bouyancy [ sic], and pillars of identical circumference were constructed before anyone knew that C IID. We do not consider the ship builders and stone cutters of antiquity physicists and geometers. Nor were the ancient cave dwellers psychologists merely because they rewarded the good conduct of their children. The archives of folk wisdom contain a remarkable collection of achievements, but craft-no matter how perfected-is not science, nor is a litany of successful accidents a discipline. If psychology is young, it is young as a scientific discipline but it is far from clear that psychology has attained this status. (Robinson, 1986, p. 12)Historical dictionary of quotations in cognitive science > Psychology
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2 Philosophy
And what I believe to be more important here is that I find in myself an infinity of ideas of certain things which cannot be assumed to be pure nothingness, even though they may have perhaps no existence outside of my thought. These things are not figments of my imagination, even though it is within my power to think of them or not to think of them; on the contrary, they have their own true and immutable natures. Thus, for example, when I imagine a triangle, even though there may perhaps be no such figure anywhere in the world outside of my thought, nor ever have been, nevertheless the figure cannot help having a certain determinate nature... or essence, which is immutable and eternal, which I have not invented and which does not in any way depend upon my mind. (Descartes, 1951, p. 61)Let us console ourselves for not knowing the possible connections between a spider and the rings of Saturn, and continue to examine what is within our reach. (Voltaire, 1961, p. 144)As modern physics started with the Newtonian revolution, so modern philosophy starts with what one might call the Cartesian Catastrophe. The catastrophe consisted in the splitting up of the world into the realms of matter and mind, and the identification of "mind" with conscious thinking. The result of this identification was the shallow rationalism of l'esprit Cartesien, and an impoverishment of psychology which it took three centuries to remedy even in part. (Koestler, 1964, p. 148)It has been made of late a reproach against natural philosophy that it has struck out on a path of its own, and has separated itself more and more widely from the other sciences which are united by common philological and historical studies. The opposition has, in fact, been long apparent, and seems to me to have grown up mainly under the influence of the Hegelian philosophy, or, at any rate, to have been brought out into more distinct relief by that philosophy.... The sole object of Kant's "Critical Philosophy" was to test the sources and the authority of our knowledge, and to fix a definite scope and standard for the researches of philosophy, as compared with other sciences.... [But Hegel's] "Philosophy of Identity" was bolder. It started with the hypothesis that not only spiritual phenomena, but even the actual world-nature, that is, and man-were the result of an act of thought on the part of a creative mind, similar, it was supposed, in kind to the human mind.... The philosophers accused the scientific men of narrowness; the scientific men retorted that the philosophers were crazy. And so it came about that men of science began to lay some stress on the banishment of all philosophic influences from their work; while some of them, including men of the greatest acuteness, went so far as to condemn philosophy altogether, not merely as useless, but as mischievous dreaming. Thus, it must be confessed, not only were the illegitimate pretensions of the Hegelian system to subordinate to itself all other studies rejected, but no regard was paid to the rightful claims of philosophy, that is, the criticism of the sources of cognition, and the definition of the functions of the intellect. (Helmholz, quoted in Dampier, 1966, pp. 291-292)Philosophy remains true to its classical tradition by renouncing it. (Habermas, 1972, p. 317)I have not attempted... to put forward any grand view of the nature of philosophy; nor do I have any such grand view to put forth if I would. It will be obvious that I do not agree with those who see philosophy as the history of "howlers" and progress in philosophy as the debunking of howlers. It will also be obvious that I do not agree with those who see philosophy as the enterprise of putting forward a priori truths about the world.... I see philosophy as a field which has certain central questions, for example, the relation between thought and reality.... It seems obvious that in dealing with these questions philosophers have formulated rival research programs, that they have put forward general hypotheses, and that philosophers within each major research program have modified their hypotheses by trial and error, even if they sometimes refuse to admit that that is what they are doing. To that extent philosophy is a "science." To argue about whether philosophy is a science in any more serious sense seems to me to be hardly a useful occupation.... It does not seem to me important to decide whether science is philosophy or philosophy is science as long as one has a conception of both that makes both essential to a responsible view of the world and of man's place in it. (Putnam, 1975, p. xvii)What can philosophy contribute to solving the problem of the relation [of] mind to body? Twenty years ago, many English-speaking philosophers would have answered: "Nothing beyond an analysis of the various mental concepts." If we seek knowledge of things, they thought, it is to science that we must turn. Philosophy can only cast light upon our concepts of those things.This retreat from things to concepts was not undertaken lightly. Ever since the seventeenth century, the great intellectual fact of our culture has been the incredible expansion of knowledge both in the natural and in the rational sciences (mathematics, logic).The success of science created a crisis in philosophy. What was there for philosophy to do? Hume had already perceived the problem in some degree, and so surely did Kant, but it was not until the twentieth century, with the Vienna Circle and with Wittgenstein, that the difficulty began to weigh heavily. Wittgenstein took the view that philosophy could do no more than strive to undo the intellectual knots it itself had tied, so achieving intellectual release, and even a certain illumination, but no knowledge. A little later, and more optimistically, Ryle saw a positive, if reduced role, for philosophy in mapping the "logical geography" of our concepts: how they stood to each other and how they were to be analyzed....Since that time, however, philosophers in the "analytic" tradition have swung back from Wittgensteinian and even Rylean pessimism to a more traditional conception of the proper role and tasks of philosophy. Many analytic philosophers now would accept the view that the central task of philosophy is to give an account, or at least play a part in giving an account, of the most general nature of things and of man. (Armstrong, 1990, pp. 37-38)8) Philosophy's Evolving Engagement with Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive ScienceIn the beginning, the nature of philosophy's engagement with artificial intelligence and cognitive science was clear enough. The new sciences of the mind were to provide the long-awaited vindication of the most potent dreams of naturalism and materialism. Mind would at last be located firmly within the natural order. We would see in detail how the most perplexing features of the mental realm could be supported by the operations of solely physical laws upon solely physical stuff. Mental causation (the power of, e.g., a belief to cause an action) would emerge as just another species of physical causation. Reasoning would be understood as a kind of automated theorem proving. And the key to both was to be the depiction of the brain as the implementation of multiple higher level programs whose task was to manipulate and transform symbols or representations: inner items with one foot in the physical (they were realized as brain states) and one in the mental (they were bearers of contents, and their physical gymnastics were cleverly designed to respect semantic relationships such as truth preservation). (A. Clark, 1996, p. 1)Socrates of Athens famously declared that "the unexamined life is not worth living," and his motto aptly explains the impulse to philosophize. Taking nothing for granted, philosophy probes and questions the fundamental presuppositions of every area of human inquiry.... [P]art of the job of the philosopher is to keep at a certain critical distance from current doctrines, whether in the sciences or the arts, and to examine instead how the various elements in our world-view clash, or fit together. Some philosophers have tried to incorporate the results of these inquiries into a grand synoptic view of the nature of reality and our human relationship to it. Others have mistrusted system-building, and seen their primary role as one of clarifications, or the removal of obstacles along the road to truth. But all have shared the Socratic vision of using the human intellect to challenge comfortable preconceptions, insisting that every aspect of human theory and practice be subjected to continuing critical scrutiny....Philosophy is, of course, part of a continuing tradition, and there is much to be gained from seeing how that tradition originated and developed. But the principal object of studying the materials in this book is not to pay homage to past genius, but to enrich one's understanding of central problems that are as pressing today as they have always been-problems about knowledge, truth and reality, the nature of the mind, the basis of right action, and the best way to live. These questions help to mark out the territory of philosophy as an academic discipline, but in a wider sense they define the human predicament itself; they will surely continue to be with us for as long as humanity endures. (Cottingham, 1996, pp. xxi-xxii)10) The Distinction between Dionysian Man and Apollonian Man, between Art and Creativity and Reason and Self- ControlIn his study of ancient Greek culture, The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche drew what would become a famous distinction, between the Dionysian spirit, the untamed spirit of art and creativity, and the Apollonian, that of reason and self-control. The story of Greek civilization, and all civilizations, Nietzsche implied, was the gradual victory of Apollonian man, with his desire for control over nature and himself, over Dionysian man, who survives only in myth, poetry, music, and drama. Socrates and Plato had attacked the illusions of art as unreal, and had overturned the delicate cultural balance by valuing only man's critical, rational, and controlling consciousness while denigrating his vital life instincts as irrational and base. The result of this division is "Alexandrian man," the civilized and accomplished Greek citizen of the later ancient world, who is "equipped with the greatest forces of knowledge" but in whom the wellsprings of creativity have dried up. (Herman, 1997, pp. 95-96)Historical dictionary of quotations in cognitive science > Philosophy
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