Introduction into psychology and the history of psychology
Lecture 1 foundational ideas from antiquity
Ideas from people who lived far before psychology developed into science.
Plato and aristotle (ancient greek philosophers)
Socrates → Plato → Aristotle (all pupils from the former)
Plato interpreted the idea of nativism → knowledge is already within yourself. You don’t acquire
knowledge because someone teaches it to you, it is already there.
Plato
- Idealism → we experience the world outside of us through our senses, but our sensory
input is imperfect. Where some people say something is red, others might say its orange.
True knowledge does not come from our senses. The true knowledge comes from the
ideal form → something that exists in your mind, not the true world. True knowledge
resides in your soul/mind, not in the true world
- Reason drives appetites (food, sex) and duty/courage (sometimes you have to do things
you don’t like/want to do). Your psyche has to guide these two in the same direction.
Aristotle
- Empiricism → knowledge = observation + classification (taxonomy)→ knowledge is
derived from things you see in the world around you. But you don’t see things as they
are. You see things through a filter. This creates an image in your mind about what the
world around you is like.
- The mind filters observations through categories of experience; substance (what do I see),
quantity (how much), quality (color, shape), location (where), time (when), relation
(bigger-smaller), activity (what is it doing). The mind is active as a filter and the
knowledge comes from the outside
- Scale of nature;
- Vegetative souls → nourishment, reproduction (e.g. plants)
- Sensitive souls → Sensation, locomotion, memory, imagination (e.g. animal kingdom)
- Rational souls → logical reasoning (e.g. humans)
Alhazen and Avicenna → Islamic philosophers
Alhazen
- Studied optics (lights, reflection, visual perception, etc.). → eye works like a camera
obscura (a dark room). Explained how vision works.
- Knowledge comes from the outside in
,Avicenna
- Extending the idea of Aristotle's functions of the soul → Aristotle failed to describe
interior senses; common sense, imagination, memory, estimation (opportunities and
threats), appetition (impulses to approach or avoid) and self awareness (floating man
thought experiment).
Chapter 1
Socrates argued that written ideas can represent true ones only partially and imperfectly, and that
relying on writing weakens the faculties of memory and serious thinking.
Plato established the Academy → a gathering place for scholars of varying ages and interest to
congregate and pursue their intellectual goals. It was a center for teaching and learning as well as
what we today call scholarly research.
Aristotle places far more emphasis on observation of the natural empirical world of the senses.
Although he never denied the importance of certain innate rational faculties, 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.
Psyche (which is the greek word for breath, but today used as translation for soul/mind) is
something that all living things possess and death things lack.
Socrates relates 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
aroused or ‘recalled’. → this myth of reincarnation and recollection represents an extreme
version of nativism, in the notion that fully formed but forgotten knowledge lies within a psyche,
and just needs help from empirical experience to bring it out.
Plato's notion of appearance referred to a person’s actual conscious experience of something, as
when we see a particular tree, or horse, or dog. Lying behind each transient individual
appearance was something much more permanent; general and ideal form representing the
essences of all trees, all horses, or 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.
Plato illustrated the appearance-form distinction in one of his most famous works, the allegory of
the cave. (prisoners see the events behind them indirectly and incompletely as shadows on the
wall they face, but not in their full reality)
Our conscious experiences - Plato’s appearances - consist of sensations such as sounds, colors, or
shapes, which come to be interpreted as perceptions of meaningful objects.
,Plato argued that the human psyche (or soul), has three separate basic components that govern
1. Appetites → needs for physical gratification
2. Courage → the propensity to confront difficulties with action
3. Reason → the ability to appreciate the underlying realities of the world
The horse analogy → one horse represents the appetites and tries to pull in the direction of the
fastest and most immediate physical gratification; another represents duty and motivation to
respond bravely to threats to the self and society; and the charioteer represents the rational
component that must try to direct and coordinate the horses so they cooperate and proceed in the
same direction.
Each person’s psyche possesses these 3 components in different proportions, giving rise to three
general classes within society
- Those dominated by their appetites constituted the ordinary masses of a civilized society
- Those dominated by courage became the soldiers who protected the society
- And the small minority dominated by reason should be the elite guardians who govern
society.
Plato didn’t believe that democracies were the best form of government. The masses, he
believed, were like those prisoners in the cave who had been unable or unwilling to accept the
acquired wisdom of the one who had been enlightened. Decisions left to them were likely to be
impulsive and dangerous. His ideal was an oligarchy, a society ruled by the select few of elite
guardians
Aristotel, like Plato, also owned his own school, the Lyceum. Broader than the Academy, the
Lyceum attracted hundreds of scholars who worked and studied collaboratively in subjects
ranging from what we today call the humanities and arts through the social and natural sciences.
Taxonomy → the arrangement of organisms into hierarchically ordered groups and subgroups.
For Aristotle, the mind was not passive, but it functions primarily as the organizer rather than the
origin (as Socrated and Plato maintained) of ideas and knowledge
Aristotle argued that living organisms possess psyches with varying degrees of complexity
depending upon their relative positions on the scale of nature (hierarchical order bounded by
simple plants and the bottom and humans at the top)
- Vegetative soul → lowest organisms, plants, possess 2 abilities that differentiate them
from dead objects; to nourish themselves and to reproduce (nourishment and
reproduction)
- Sensitive soul → (animals) possess, additionally, the ability to move themselves
(locomotion), to react to changing stimuli in their environment (the function of
, sensation), and the capacity to remember, learn from their sensory experiences (memory),
and to anticipate the future by imagination.
- Rational soul → possessed only by human beings, the ability to reason; to think logically
about their remembered or imagined experiences.
Democritus formulated an atomic theory which held that there is a limit to the divisibility of all
material objects, and that they are ultimately composed of tiny, solid, unbreakable particles he
called atoms. He believed the interactions between atoms was random, and in doing so
contradicted the predominant Greek assumptions about the nature of causality, which held that
every caused event had to have a purpose.
Aristotle provide the most authoritative statement of this viewpoint by asserting that all caused
events had to have 4 essential components
- A material cause, the stuff out of which something is made (marble of a statue)
- A formal cause, the plan or idea behind the caused thing (the sculptor’s model/image)
- An efficient cause, the actions or interactions that bring the caused thing into being (the
hammer and chisel blows that shape the statue)
- A final cause, the purpose for which the hing is caused (the sculptors desire to create
beauty, or to commemorate someone)
Al-kindi promoted a mathematical numbering system (indo-arabic numerals). It represented the
numbers 1 through 9 with distinctive symbols and added the all important zero.
Alhazen wrote treatises on optics and the theory of visual perception. Vision wired because of
signals or rays originating in the objects and impressing themselves on the eye. He found this out
through experimentation with a camera obscura.
Avicenna wrote the canon of medicine. Most of the work provided detailed empirical
observations of many disease states, ranging from those specific to particular organs to those that
are systemic (e.g. fever) and described the most effective techniques that had been developed to
treat them.
Avicenna’s discussion of the soul included 2 noteworthy features. It elaborated on Aristotle’s
hierarchy of functions but he differentiated between ‘exterior’ and ‘interior’ senses. The exterior
senses constituted the basic capacities for receiving impressions via the organs of vision, hearing,
touch, taste and smell; the interior senses all involved doing something with those exterior
sensations.
Lecture 2 Pioneering philosophers of mind
Descartes → the only way to develop true knowledge is he should be convinced about what is
true or not. He started this by doubting everything he saw/thought.
