The observer must maintain strained attention.

The phenomenon must bear repetition.

4. And the phenomenon must be capable of variation.
Regarding sensations, it was determined that there

Are seven «qualities» of sensations: The visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, cutaneous, kinesthetic, and organic. Several of these have additional aspects. Vision,

For example, has hue, saturation, and value. And qualities could vary in intensity, duration, vividness, and (for the visual and cutaneous senses) extension.

Feelings were analyzed into three quality dimensions: pleasure-displeasure, tension-relaxation, and excitement-depression. They, too, could vary in terms of intensity and duration.

As for the laws of association, the structuralists included contiguity, similarity, frequency or repetition, intensity, and inseparability.

To this apparently molecular assortment of qualities, Wundt added the idea of apperception: the combination of sensations (etc.) to form a creative synthesis — ie. a whole that is more than the sum of its parts. So, for example, emotions were defined as feelings plus ideas, volition as emotion followed by action, and so on. The was also the basis for a theory of meaning as «associational context*.

Functionalism

Functionalism as a psychology developed out of Pragmatism as a philosophy: To find the meaning of an idea, you have to look at its consequences (see where it leads). So truth is what is useful, practical, pragmatic. This led James and his students towards an emphasis on cause and effect, prediction and control, and observation of environment and behavior, over the careful introspection of the Structuralists.

Pragmatism blended easily with Darwinism: To understand an idea, ask «what is it good for?» i. e. what is its function in the organism, what is its purpose in an ecosystem, how does it add to a creature's chances of survival and reproduction?

Some aspects of Functionalism were clearly just «anti-structuralism*, a reflection, perhaps, of James impatience with details and poor grasp of the German language. In particular, he felt that the structuralists were ignoring the whole (holism) and paying too much attention to the tidbits. The anti-structuralism of later functionalists was based more on Titchener's inaccurate interpretation of Wundt's work rather than on Wundt's work itself.

An example of functionalist thinking can be found in James' view of emotions (known as the James-Lange theory):

Holism; «A disembodied human emotion is a sheer non-entity». I.e. you can't talk separate emotion from phsyiology.

Evolutionary purpose: Animals need to fight or flee or some kind of behavior that serves survival. Hence emotion comes from behavior, not vice-versa. Practicality: «If we wish to conquer undesirable emotional tendencies in ourselves, we must assiduously, and in the first instance cold-bloodedly, go through the outward movements of those contrary dispositions which we prefer to cultivate*, {i.e. «put on a happy face» — which James did to deal with his depression).

Commonalities

In reality, structuralism and functionalism were more like each otherand different from modern mainstream psychology in that both were f ree-willist and anti-materialistic, and both considered the proper study of psychology to be the mind:

Wundt:

«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 right of psychology as a science... «Mind», will accordinly be the subject to which we attribute all the separate facts of internal observation as predicates. The subject itself is determined wholely and exclusively by its predicates. James:

There is only one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed, and... we call that stuff «pure experience*. Both Wundt and James were empiricists, and considered their psychologies experimental. Neither liked the rationalistic systems prevalent in the philosophy of their day — such as Hegel's grand system. However, neither were anything like what most people understand as experimentalists today, because neither of them were materialists or reductionists.

Unit 3

Unit 3