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Summary introduction and history of psychology
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This is a summary IN ENGLISH of the entire book (Chapter 0 to 16) Pioneers of Psychology by Raymon E. Fancher and Alexandra Rutherford, 5th edition.
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Summary Pioneers of Psychology
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H0 Key terms:Reflexivity: refers to the human ability to become aware of, and reflect upon, one’s own activities. At
its simplest level, reflexivity occurs when young children first recognize that the image in the mirror
are of themselves; at a higher level it occurs when we think about our own thinking; and at its
highest level it refers to the capacity for psychological theories to change the way we understand
ourselves. The capacity of self-awareness.
Historiography: is a collective term for the theory, history, methods and assumptions of writing
history. It can also refer to a body of historical work.
Internalism: focusing on internal factors.
Externialism: focusing on external factors.
Great man approach: history is told through the contributions of eminent people whose ideas have
shaped the field (similar to the celebratory approach). Great man histories often neglect the external
factors that may have surrounded individual contributions such as the networks of colleagues and
peers in which great men have worked and the social, cultural and political systems that may have
influenced them.
Zeitgeist approach: takes into account the fact that what’s referred to as the “spirit of the times”
may affect the ability of a certain person, along with his or her ideas, to take hold and become
historically significant.
Presentism: viewing their subjects form the standpoint of the present, explaining today’s
circumstances by emphasizing that because our predecessors overcame mistaken assumption, we
progressed to the present state of increased, or superior knowledge and wisdom.
Historicism: attempts to recreate the past as it was actually experienced by predecessors, without
distortion by foreknowledge of how things later worked out.
Sophisticated presentism: you can never escape the horizon of the present when writing history, and
that historical study is (and should be) motivated by a desire to better understand contemporary
issues, they do not assume that the present state of affairs is necessarily the “right” or the “best”
one.
New history of psychology/critical history of psychology: Robert M. Young critiqued extant histories
of psychology for being too presentist repeating the same tales and being concerned almost
exclusively with great men, great ideas, and great dates. In the 80s Laurel Furumoto surveyed the
field and articulated the new history of psychology. Moving beyond ceremonial or celebratory aims,
in which the history of psychology is recounted as a progressive series of great accomplishments. The
new history tended to be more contextual and historicist than traditional histories, practitioners
checked the accuracy of everything. The new history also tended to be more inclusive of a greater
diversity of historical actors, moving beyond the great men.
Origin myth process: by Franz Samelson. In this process history is selectively written to make it
appear as though psychology has progressed triumphantly from one great discovery to the next, with
little sense of the complexity, messiness or controversy that might have occurred along the way.
,Continuity-discontinuity debate: disagreements about the decisions about when to start the story of
the “history of psychology” have to involve the background of the terms that define our modern
understanding. It’s possible that there are certain psychological concepts that have been more or less
stable in meaning and continuously developed.
Indigenization: the process whereby local (or national) contexts affect the development of
psychology, including how ideas from elsewhere are imported and changed in response to local
conditions.
H1 Foundational ideas from antiquity
Plato (ca. 424-347 B.C.)
- His teacher was Socrates.
- He established the Academy, a centre for teaching and learning.
- His student was Aristotle.
- Plato wrote the Socratic dialogues.
- The higher realms of reason and ideas.
- Added the question of what is relationship between those innate features and the sensory
experiences imposed on the psyche from the external world.
- Platonic idealism: his notion of an appearance (phenomenon) referred to a person’s actual
conscious experience of something, as when we see a particular tree or horse, or dog. Lying
beneath each transient individual appearance were something much more permanent:
general and ideal forms representing the essences of all trees, all horses and all dogs. This
general view-that there exists something more fundamental and ultimate or “ideal”, lying
behind everyday sensory experience- is referred to as idealism.
- Allegory of the cave: (the republic) he asks the reader to imagine a group of prisoners
confined in a cave, facing its back wall. Men walk along a walled roadway just outside the
cave carrying puppets on sticks, and bright sunlight from the left casts shadows of the
puppets on the cave’s backwall. Thus the prisoners become aware of the events behind them
only indirectly and incompletely as shadows on the wall they face, and not in their full reality.
Metaphorically, the shadows are like Plato’s appearance and the real events like his ideal
forms. If one of the prisoners turned around adjusts to the sunlight and sees what is really
happening and tries to tell his fellow prisoners he is confronted with disbelief. For Plato, the
enlightened prisoner is like the genuine philosopher, whose search for true knowledge is
often painful and disturbing, and whose insights are likely to be dismissed or supressed by
the ordinary population. the relationship between conscious experiences of the external
world and the objective nature of the physical stimuli that give rise to those experiences.
Our conscious experiences consist of sensations such as colours, sounds, shapes which
comes to be interpreted as perceptions of meaningful objects. But the actual physical stimuli
that give rise to such conscious experiences are differing forms of energy, such as light,
soundwaves, and wavelengths.
Socrates (ca. 470-399 B.C.)
- Claimed his only special wisdom was in knowing how much he did not know.
- He wanted his students to appreciate what is true and permanent as opposed to temporarily
convenient and popular. He let his students engage in dialogues which encouraged them to
discover their own innate capacities for finding truth, rather than passing on to them
predetermined ideas or lessons.
, - He opposed the entire notion of writing things down, believing that writing ideas can
represent true ones only partially and imperfectly, and that relying on writing weakens the
faculties of memory and serious thinking.
- Plato rejected this and wrote the now called Socratic dialogues. They emphasized the
importance of those “higher” capacities of rational thinking and mathematical reasoning. The
dialogues became foundational statements of the approaches to mental philosophy know as
nativism, emphasizing inborn as opposed to acquired properties, and rationalism,
emphasizing reason.
- Dialogue meno: a myth that the human psyche or soul is immortal and becomes repeatedly
reincarnated in new bodies following the deaths of older ones. In the process of rebirth, each
psyche’s accumulated knowledge is forgotten but under certain conditions can be partially
rearoused or “recalled”. This myth represents an extreme version of philosophical nativism,
fully formed but forgotten knowledge lies within a psyche, and just needs help from
empirical experiences to bring it out.
- The human mind contains innately with itself features an predispositions that enable it to
interpret and comprehend empirical experiences in ways that go far beyond their raw
sensory input. The ability to create abstract ideas, or to comprehend mathematical
regularities as the Pythagoreans or to formulate other “laws of nature” lies somehow
innately within the human mind.
- The path to wisdom was to “know thyself” and interpret those experiences in light of one’s
own innate rational faculties.
Aristotle (ca. 384-322 B.C.)
- Student at the Academy.
- He placed far more emphasis than Plato on the systematic observation of the natural,
empirical world of senses.
- He became the first great proponent of empiricism, the notion that true knowledge comes
first and primarily through the processing of sensory experiences of the external world.
- Empirical solidity of the earth.
- Was the tutor of king Philips son Alexander the Great for three years. Aristotle may have
learned something about the military and political fields from Alexander.
- Lyceum: the school of Aristotle, broader in scope than the Academy.
- For him the mind was not passive, but it functioned primarily as the organizer rather than the
origin of ideas and knowledge.
Theophrastus (ca. 371-287 B.C.)
- First student of Aristotle. They shared interest in the diversity of life forms in the natural
world, and began what would become the first recorded and systematic observations in
natural history (plants and animals).
- Aristoteles + Theophrastus: Biological taxonomy: Careful and extensive observation, followed
by systematic classification into meaningful groups or categories Their early classification of
zoological and botanical specimens marked the beginning of the biological field of taxonomy:
the arrangement of organisms into hierarchically ordered groups and subgroups.
-
The Greek miracle and the presocratic philosophers
The Greeks used the word barbaros to describe all non-Greek speaking people, the origin of the
word barbarian. The Greeks coined two important words: logos (“word” or “reason”) a study of
, (geology, psychology). Philosophia (“love of wisdom”) discussion about the true and ultimate
foundations of the world as we know it.
The first philosophers: observing the natural world and attempting to understand it in terms of
underlying fundamental principles.
Thales (ca. 624-546 B.C.)
- Astronomical and meteorological observations.
- Idea: water is the most important element in the physical make up of the cosmos.
- First recorded Absent-minded philosopher.
The concept of psyche:
- Meaning psyche “breath”. All living things were said to possess a psyche and dead things
not. The Latin translation of psyche was anima ( root for the words animal, animated for
living things, and inanimate for dead ones. Directly translated from Greek to English it means
“soul”. In modern English it is a synonym for mind and root word for psychology and
psychiatry.
- Philosophers began analysing the psyche in terms of its functionality in controlling different
aspects of life.
- Plato argued that the human psyche has 3 separate basic components that govern the
appetites (physical gratification), courage (confront difficulties with action), reason
(appreciate the underlying realities of the world). He further believed that each person’s
psyche innately possesses these 3 components in different proportions, giving rise to three
general types, or classes within a society.
o Appetite ordinary masses. Courage soldiers. Reason elite guardians.
Pythagoras (ca. 570-495 B.C.)
- Discovered and emphasized the wondrous regularities of mathematics, and their relationship
to the physical world.
- The famous Pythagorean Theorem: for any right triangle (90 degree angle), the square of the
long side (hypotenuse) is precisely equal to the sum of the squares of the two shorter sides.
- The Pythagoreans attached a religious significance to the correspondences between abstract
mathematics and concrete experiences in the psychical world.
Heraclitus (ca. 535-470 B.C.)
- The relationship between stability and change, you can never step in the same river twice.
- The idea of unity of opposites, a road going upward is also going downward.
Zeno (ca. 490-430 B.C.)
- The concept of infinity. Meditations on the concept of infinity have played a huge role in the
development of modern mathematics, science and, indirectly, psychology.
Protagoras (ca. 490-420 B.C.)
- It was fruitless to speculate about big questions about the universe, or hypothetical
paradoxes. He favoured to focus on purely human experience and behaviour.
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