If you are taking surveys for example,
you see a stem an item stem and
it gives you something to read and think about and then it gives you
a response scale, right? So, everybody's reading it
with whatever levels of English that they feel like they've mastered.
Everybody interprets words a little bit differently, even if they're all speaking
the same language.
So, introspectively, you are subjectively interpreting it
but then we get it reported on a standardized scale
so that everybody's subjective interpretation comes back to us
in a relatively unbiased scale that we can compare amongst people
in a valid and reliable way. So, introspection is still with us.
Now, I point out this last thing because I think it's interesting but you'll notice
it's not indented.
So, it's guaranteed not to be on your tests. It's an interesting fact that Wundt had
so many students. It was really amazing how productive this guy was
and how many people flocked to his laboratory to learn under his tutelage, to
understand what he was doing to start a new science
and then those people having learned that information and those skills and
techniques would then fan out the world
over and start starting their own labs and spreading that knowledge
and getting new knowledge and so he started up
a movement that continues today unabated and grown
to proportions he could probably not begin to imagine
back in 1879. So, that's how we get started with
Wilhelm Wundt. You can see that you better know what structuralism is for your test.
If you're philosophically minded and just interested it starts
sparking some ideas about what consciousness is and how you experience the
world yourself
but then you go, well Wilhelm Wundt, he got an asterisk beside him so he might be
a bonus item on my test. The introspection is a technique that he used,
y'all should know what that means but at the very bottom, hey that's an interesting point
of fact that really does relate to how we get here today in this very room,
right? If not for this person, probably somebody else would have done it, but we
trace our roots back
right here. In fact, I can trace my own professional lineage
all the way back to this guy right here. Right, the person
who trained under him, who trained somebody else, who trained somebody else, who trained
somebody else, who trained Scott Geller who trained me,
right? And so we see it goes all the way back. So, fascinating
and relevant to some degree but it will not be on your test. The functionalism
is a school that you want to be able to contrast with structuralism
and looking right there at just that one word, it ought to tell you something fundamentally
different.
Ism is still there, so it's still a school of thought,
but it's functionalism instead of structuralism
and when we look at functionalism, we see that they're interested in consciousness too.
The functionalists also want to know all about this human experience,
individuals, and group experiences. How
we function with consciousness though is their idea of focus.
Doesn't really matter for them what it's made up of if you can even find little
units and sub units of consciousness.
What does that really tell us from their point of view is not something you
discard
but it's not the most important factor of human consciousness. What the most important
factor
of human consciousness, and keep in mind that Darwin was all the rage back then,
was adapting to circumstances right.
The species which adapt are the species which survive. What species is dominant
on earth?
Human beings. So, they have this unique
human consciousness that allows them to adapt
unbelievable circumstances at times. So, it's the function
of consciousness to allow you to adapt and survive.
From a species point of view, it's what makes us particularly
particularly adaptive, right?
Because all species adapt or they die off but we seem to be able to adapt to
unbelievably different circumstances and keep on keeping on.
William James, got him an asterisk,
brother Henry James, a novelist, you may have read some of Henry James. I find him
hard to read. I had to read some when I was an undergraduate. Turned the screw.
Had to have a dictionary beside me to understand what the man was saying every paragraph.
It's a little too thick for me. I didn't quite enjoy it but he was famous.
The Jameses were famous. They were rich.
Rich white dudes which means what they had
leisure time to indulge in the pursuit of knowledge
right. Other people are making a living trying not to die,
right? They had the privilege of being able to indulge
academic interests. So, it's not that they were
all that in and of themselves. They had circumstances that allowed them to emerge as
all that. And, in fact, they were geniuses. They did
demonstrate that they were very exceptional people. So he led the school
of thought called Functionalism.
He is formally trained as a physician. You'll find a lot your early psychologists
are physicians.
That's really early in medical science as well and the physicians that wind up
in psychology are the ones that think
the human experience, the psychological aspects of it, the mental health aspects
of it
are the most interesting facets of human existence. And so they wind up in psychology
oftentimes to
understand where things go wrong with people.
Not always. But William James is just as famous almost as Wilhelm Wundt
because he was our first American psychologist. He published principles of
psychology in
1890 and one of the most influential texts it became.
Interestingly enough, the man was plagued with chronic depression
and somatic concerns. He always had these non-specific physical complaints that didn't
seem to have any
real physical causes. But that's hard to determine especially back then,
and with some of the travels they might have contracted some
some other kinds of rare, you know, microbes that
infected him. But he seemed to have problems somatically that
were probably psychological in nature and he was depressed a lot.
And he wrote this gigantic book on psychology
and when he was done with it, he didn't even like it. He thought it was
less than his best by a long shot. But it was the best.
It was the best that existed at the time and it became the leading
psychology textbook for decades. So for decades
most people introduction to psychology was reading
Wilhelm, not Wilhelm, excuse me, William, because he's American, no W there being a V,
William James's principals of psychology.
That turns out to be, if you ever read it today, and it's available online for
free,
a very prescient book. In other words, he's making
suggestions and guesses basing on the rudimentary knowledge of the day that was
research-based, on
all kinds of aspects of the human experience
and on many occasions, he turns out to be right.
In other words, it's just theorizing at that point, there's not a lot of data to
support it.
In fact, he wasn't really that much of a researcher. He had a research lab
but he left it to other people to do the researching. He's also a
very well-known philosopher.
His main contribution to philosophy is
a type of philosophy called pragmatism where you look at truth with a little t
in terms of its practical applicability to life. If it works,
it's true for now until we find a better model, right? So,
his interests in our experience were philosophical
and somewhat science-based and he took the information he had in the day
and made some pretty remarkable guesses theorizing
that was later backed up by actual actual science.
So, he was doing some. His students were doing a lot more.
And he believed that consciousness was a continual flow of mental activity. If
you've ever heard
the term stream of consciousness then you've heard of William James
because that's his term. Stream of consciousness means
your mind never stops. It always goes, it's
always moving. It's in constant flux. If we want to go back to Heraclitus,
and a pre-Socratic philosophy, right? It's always moving so
trying to get to the structure os something that never stops moving would be
very difficult wouldn't it?
In fact, the fact that it's always moving may contribute to its adaptivity
that allows us on a moment to moment basis to reckon with our environment
and make adjustments in our behavior so that we're able to, on the short term and
long term,
survive and reproduce and keep the species going.
So, this idea of this flux of mental activity
gives you the notion that, wow, you really would have a hard time breaking it
down into little
discrete bits and little structural units that would make it up because
its constantly moving. If you're into meditation
one point of some types of meditation is to reach one pointedness of mind
or a state of no thought.
I don't know that you can do that because how would you know that you weren't
thinking
unless you went, oh I am not thinking and that's a thought.
Right, you can't get away from it whether you're daydreaming
or whether you are actively engaged, your mind is always doing
some mental activity which we would call consciousness. So, he thought you should
study it as a whole.
Functionally what does it do? We want to see how it enables
people to adapt to environments, it's essential
function. So you can distinguish it if you know what you're talking about
pretty quickly on the basis of the name, structuralism
vs functionalism. So, sometimes our terms are actually pretty common sense and
they make a lot of sense
and sometimes they are a little bit more esoteric and a little more difficult to follow.