Zusammenfassung
Historical and Philosophical foundations of Psychology Farrell full book summary
- Hochschule
- Touro College
Extensive summary of the book, by chapter and topic. Including examples.
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Inhaltsvorschau
Historical and Philosophical Foundations of PsychChapter 1: Logical Positivism and Popper’s Falsificationism
The bucket theory
Empiricism – John Locke, David Hume. According to it, the basic perception is provided by
our senses, and then transformed through association to a whole thing. Our mind is
connecting all the separate events that we experience. According to the empiricist view of
science, scientific theories are created by joining together the isolated facts and
observations that scientists collect in the course of their research.
According to empiricist, the way to a scientific theory is to observe what’s around us with a
mind clear of pre-existing ideas, that’s how you get to unbiased results.
Francis Bacon, one of the first empiricists thought that it is necessary to make careful and
unprejudiced observations of what one really sees, observations that are pure and
uncontaminated. The closest possible you can get to a clean slate. Believed that patterns
would emerge from observations.
Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, and Feyerabend reject empiricism. Scientist is an active seeker, not
devoid of expectations or pre-conceptions, those guide her.
Immanuel Kant was the first to suggest that it is not possible for us to become a clean slate.
He argued that we only see the world through our physiological limitations, for example, our
hearing and seeing range, therefore we can’t see the worlds as it is, but only as what is
available to us.
Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, and Feyerabend all in a way think that also culture and experience
shapes our point of view of things, not only mere physiology.
Logical Positivism and the Question of Meaning
The logical positivists viewed science from an empiricist view. Popper was against them.
They tried to define a meaningful statement, as opposed to pseudo-science or metaphysics,
and they had 2 categories: 1. must contain abstract reasoning (math, square has 4 sides),
definition we made. Will never be 3 sided square. 2. “experimental reasoning concerning
matter of fact” – actual facts about the world, something that can be verified, “it is raining”.
Unlike the first definition, the second one we can actually check and verify. Verificationism.
The Problem of Induction
Raised by David Hume. Even if we have 1000 cases showing one thing, we can never know
that the 1001 case won’t show otherwise. This made Popper question the logic of the logical
positivists.
The Role of Theory in Observation
,Popper argued that you need a theory before you observe, that way you can make sense of
your observation, and choose which facts are important and which irrelevant.
Popper attacked the logical positivist further and claimed that no observation at all can be
made with zero pre-existing knowledge. We all have pre-existing knowledge, like the
language we speak and the objects we use.
The Irrelevance of Verification
Popper argues that verificationism is not a good enough theory, because there are a lot of
theories that can be supported by nearly everything, for example Freud’s theory – someone
close with his mom? Oedipal complex. Someone hates his mom? He resents her because he
has Oedipal complex. Popper believed that what proves the strength of a theory is in its
ability to be refuted, and that this should be the difference between science and pseudo-
science. Falsifiability. this made Popper believe psychoanalysis is not a real science.
The Logic of Falsification
The problem of induction is that even a really large number of observations can’t prove a
theory to be true, but it can be prove false. (swans). Falsificationism.
According to Popper, observations should be used to test a theory, not create it, and it does
not matter how you came up with the theory. His criteria for a good theory is how many
observations can potentially falsify it – the more the better. Falsification tells us more about
the world, because it narrows the information or the number of descriptions, down for us,
like a detective narrowing down a list of possible suspects.
Popper think that another important aspect of falsificationism, is that when we find a theory
wrong, we as scientists can replace it by an adequate theory that has yet been disproven,
thus pushing science forward. It’s not just a failure of a theory, but an opportunity to
improve. That’s why he thinks scientists shouldn’t try to protect their theories, but actively
try to disprove them. This means that a scientist continues a line of thought of the whole
scientific background behind it
Example: a scientist expects a result in all adults, but in fact he only sees it in men. He can
either modify the theory and say it only applies to men, or he could reject the theory.
According to Popper, there’s no progress in modifying it, but by rejecting it, the scientist
would be able to ask questions like why did men and women perform differently?
This means that a theory could not be proven true, only false.
Popper’s falsification also has flaws; when we see that a theory has been falsified, how do
we know if it’s the theory’s fault and not our measurements or the equipment? And even if
we know everything is done correctly, most theories are far more complex than white and
black swans, is one falsification enough to disprove it? And if not, how many observations
would be enough? This depends on the mutual decision of the scientific community. This
means that we cannot entirely falsify a theory either, and Popper even said so himself.
Chapter 2: Kuhn and Scientific Revolutions
,Thomas Kuhn (1922-96), agreed with Popper that no correct theories could be created from
induction. He also agreed with him that theory should come before observation, and that
there’s no such thing as “clean” observations. Kuhn, however, didn’t agree with Popper that
theories keep replacing other ones. He believed that scientists don’t hurry to abandon
previous prevailing theories, but base their own on them.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
According to Kuhn, scientific revolutions are not a frequent event. Scientists, he believed,
actually work within frames and conventions of an accepted paradigm. He thought that this
was actually a good thing. Scientists didn’t have to argue about the basic things and could
concentrate on deeper research within the range of a paradigm. Kuhn claims, unlike Popper,
that a scientist does not try to disprove the paradigm, but to widen it to more areas, filling
gaps in it. He referred to it as solving a puzzle.
Scientific Revolutions
When findings are inconsistent with the paradigm, it’s more likely the scientist would think
something was not working well and that the results cannot be trusted. If this continues -
anomaly, then science would take it more seriously.
According to Kuhn, the fact that science doesn’t immediately falsify a paradigm is a way
forward. He claims that the “puzzle solving” is what takes science forward. Scientists would
try to tweak the paradigm to fit the results, but when more anomalies arise from tweaking it
that it solves, that’s when there’s a scientific crisis that leads to a revolution.
He states that science never replaces a paradigm with nothing, but always with another
paradigm, and it’s only in times of crisis (many anomalies in the existing paradigm) that a
new paradigm could be considered. Paradigm shift is not an over-night thing, long process
(Ptolemaic theory took centuries).
For Kuhn, like Popper, it doesn’t matter where a new theory comes from, and like Popper,
he thinks it should be researched, But unlike Popper, who thinks you should try to falsify a
theory, Kuhn thinks you should refine and extend it.
Kuhn compared paradigm shifts to politics – when you choose a new one, you don’t know
for a fact that it will work. Maybe it has solutions to some things the old one didn’t have, but
that doesn’t guarantee it’s the right one. We need to look at it carefully. It’s accepted not
because of its achievements, but because of its potential.
The Non-Rational Nature of Paradigm Shifts
Kuhn thought that the changing from one paradigm to another is not a rational thing,
because it cannot be predicted, and also because the theory-laden nature of observation
and the incommensurability of paradigms.
Theory-Laden Observation
Kuhn believed that there was no such thing as a theory neutral observation, that everything
we see is through a prism of a paradigm. More so, he believed that scientists from different
, fields who subscribe to different paradigms live in different worlds, because their point of
view of things is completely different (gestalt shifts). Your learning and education have an
effect on what you see (words for the illiterate are just random lines). This adoption of the
paradigm is not immediate, and it requires practical engagement in it. It’s also usually
irreversible.
Kuhn claims that unlike the rabbit-duck man-made example, we cannot know what’s
outside our paradigm’s scope in science. We cannot know if we are seeing the full objective
picture as it really is, or are we influenced by our paradigm.
Kuhn thought that paradigm shifts were wholesale and irreversible, and affected not just
that phenomenon, but the whole field, and that’s why they weren’t a rational thing to do.
We cannot just compare a paradigm with data, because our data is biased.
According to Kuhn, a paradigm shift doesn’t just mean seeing the same things in a different
way, but also seeing thing we didn’t see before. Sunspots were visible to scientists before
the Copernican revolution, but they only noticed them after they embraced a paradigm that
was supported by that finding. Unintentional blindness. They weren’t ignoring it; they simply
couldn’t see it (basketball gorilla).
Incommensurability
Another reason Kuhn claims we cannot compare paradigms with data, is that different
paradigms have different standards of evidence, different rules. A paradigm can be superior
by its own standards, but inferior by another one’s. there is no evidence that is true
independently of a paradigm. We cannot compare paradigms, and this is called
incommensurability.
The Myth if the Framework
According to Popper, the way scientists reject a theory and replace it with another is by
conversing with one another, Kuhn, however, who thinks that scientists in different
paradigms are in completely separate worlds, therefore they don’t share a common point to
be able to start a dialog.
The myth of framework is a term coined by Popper that comes to express the overemphasis
people put on theories (and belief systems in general). He recognized that people
subscribing to different paradigms have a different view on things, of course, and that it
would be hard for them to communicate, but certainly not impossible. The ancient Greeks
lived in a vastly different world than us, full of gods and magic, but we can, even if it’s not an
easy task, understand them. Through their songs, writings, we can imagine how they
perceived the world. Popper believe that a discussion between two different beliefs like that
is actually very fruitful.
The Importance of Convention
Kuhn and Popper are similar by that that they think there is no neutral observation, and that
our preconceptions not only constitute our observation, but affect the outcome. They
disagree, however, on the goals of scientific activity. While Popper believes the goal should
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