Bacon to Kant

History and Theory of Psychology: An early 21st century student's perspective

In Section 2 we are jumping past the so-called "Dark and Middle ages" to consider events occurring between the early years of the 17th through to the end of the 18th century. We are zeroing in on the period (surrounding the Reformation up through just prior to the first industrial revolution) because it was an era of renewal and innovation in philosophy, science and society comparable to that of the Presocratic era covered in Section 1.

It wouldn't be completely fair to say that intellectual pursuits stagnated after Aristotle, but there are various historical reasons why it was thought for a long while that Aristotle had already said pretty well everything that was needed to be known about secular matters. If you wanted to know how many teeth were in a horse's mouth, you referred to Aristotle. If it wasn't there, it was either considered as a question that wasn't important or was simply not resolvable. Aristotle was considered for a long time to be the authority on all worldly concerns while the Church in Rome provided authority on the matters of moral conduct and the afterlife.

There are various names for the long period of time between Aristotle and the late 16th century (e.g., the Dark Age, the Middle Ages). Yet since this is a course on the history and philosophical aspects of psychological inquiry, it should suffice to say that there was not all that much occurring (intellectually speaking) during this entire intermediary period that is of any particular interest to us (cf. Watson & Evans, 1991). One notable exception is Galen (the 1st century physician) who revised the Stoic doctrine of "pneuma" (on logical grounds) and made a more definitive connection between mind and brain (by way of comparative anatomical observation and practical investigation). But with regard to the specific development of modern and contemporary psychology most of the intermediary philosophical figures (e.g., Epicurus, Zeno of Citium, Plotinus, or Augustine) were not very important except that some of them constituted that which would have to be argued against in order to kick-start scientific inquiry again.

Even Thomas Aquinus, who was not exactly the quintessential kind of medieval European Scholastic philosopher but rather a representative of the wider 12th-13th century revival of Aristotelian thought (after nearly a millennium of Neoplatonist dominance), can be noted as the sort of clerical authority being argued against during the 17th-18th century rise of scientific endeavor. Although Aquinus was an exceptionally open-minded, inclusive, and empirical thinker (see Tolman, 1995), he was also a product of his theologically preoccupied times.

Aquinus subordinated philosophy to theology; natural law to the revelations of Christ; human society to the official dogma of the Church, and further argued that such subordination was good for all concerned. The combined requirements of expanding commercial trade and the Reformation would challenge the tenability of this long-standing subordination. Similarly, the traditional Idealist authorities (Plato, Aristotle, and the Scholastics) did not hold the answers to the kinds of secular concerns of the era and most of the early scientific developments (empirical, theoretical, and mathematical) were initially proposed as explicit counter-arguments to their views.

Francis Bacon (1561-1626), an influential English statesman and jurist as well as philosopher, was a contemporary of not only Galileo and Descartes, but also Hobbes. Bacon stands out among these peers, however, as the one figure who best expressed two of the characteristic aspects of the dawning modern scientific spirit: The determination to avoid problematic presuppositions based on traditional authority; and an optimism about the utility of secular scientific methods for the betterment of human kind. With regard to the specific methods he proposed for extracting theoretical knowledge from nature, Bacon pleaded eloquently for the collection of facts by way of both induction and practically guided experiments.

In other words, modern psychology -which has a specific conventional starting date of 1879- has obvious roots, but they are not in Aquinus. They are not in anything that went on between Aristotle and Francis Bacon. There are, however, very obvious roots in Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Hume, and Kant. So it is to this latter era of innovation that we will now turn to for elaboration of these roots.

I suppose it all started with Marco Polo (or someone like that), who decided it was not much fun sitting around an old feudal kingdom and that it would be more interesting to venture off somewhere, buy some goods, wander back and sell them. This sort of trade led to increased exploration, building of better ships (for trade and war), and ultimately it occurred to someone that maybe they should not have to go all the way to China to buy fine cloth or pottery but should just learn to make it locally. In this apocryphal story, we have some of the makings of the first industrial revolution.

This first revolution in technological know-how and trade relations had a tremendous impact on life in Europe because for one thing it led to the establishment of an influential social class that never existed before. This was a class of traders, independent craftsmen, and entrepreneurs with a new set of secular concerns and knowledge requirements that did not previously exist on anything but a very limited basis.

During feudal times (the extended intellectually uninteresting era we have skipped), land was basically parceled off to feudal Lords. Each of those Lords had a group of peasants working the land whom, in return, were afforded military protection. So there was relatively little travel except for the purposes of religious pilgrimage, regional war, or occasional crusades.

But eventually, due to basic improvements in agriculture, food was being stocked and citizens were more free to travel abroad, to manufacture and to trade goods. Initially, travel for trade was a huge problem. Imagine, for instance, you are an early tradesperson who wants to go by land from France to Rome with your goods. Assuming you are granted leave, you might start out well enough but you'd soon find few roads to use and to the extent there were roads, they were usually utilized to simply connected one feudal kingdom to another. This means that on your journey you would have to pay a toll in each of those kingdoms in order to be granted safe passage. By the time you got to Rome, you would have given all your goods away!

This kind of situation led to all sorts of social conflicts most notably the Christian Reformation which had a lot to do with the fact the Church in Rome was one of the largest feudal landowners in Europe. Not only was it one of the largest landowners (and therefore standing in the way of this kind of activity), it was also providing ideological support for other large landowners whose privileged status was now being rivaled by that new class of traders.

The Church in Rome functioned as an enemy of the rising middle class. The European Reformation was one attempt to free this rising class from those and other aspects of Papal authority. It was argued, for instance, that an individual's relationship to God did not need to be mediated by Church clerics but could be a more direct relationship between that individual and God. Why reform? Because its traditional intermediary role afforded the Church the kind of power already much abused during the years of the Inquisition -in which secular knowledge and beliefs were punished severely. So the Protestant Reformation in England was a movement that shifted power away from the centralized Papal authority of Rome.

Trade and commerce requires information of a secular sort. They needed to know how big they could build ships, how to make reliable mechanical clocks, how to manufacture more cloth, etc., but Papal authority was otherworldly in its concerns and teachings. When approached on such secular matters, it could not give the required answers even by referring to such traditional secular authorities as Aristotle. So, this Enlightenment period was characterized by a move away from both traditional and Papal authority regarding questions of secular knowledge and individual conduct.

But when we turn away from one kind of authority, we must always find another source of authority to replace it with! For Bacon, Galileo, Descartes and others covered in this Section, the source of knowledge was not the dogmas (doctrines) of the Church or the traditional writings of Aristotle but "reason." Despite being unanimous on this point, however, there were two fundamentally competing kinds of reason upon which these various figures differed in their emphasis:

The former kind can be very Ivory Tower and abstract (as we saw in Plato) but the latter kind is very practical indeed. Pure reason relies on an idealist methodology. It starts from the individual mind and works outward. Instrumental reason leans heavily upon a materialist methodology to investigate, guide, and analyze the outcomes -including personal outcomes- of secular concerns. It starts from the outside and works inward.

In short, the ancient methodological dispute between the Presocratics and the Sophists -as to where reason is to be found- recurs in this early scientific period. That is, should we look to nature or start within the realm of the individual mind for our inquiries? With regard to issues of perception specifically, a disappointing and degenerative cycle of argumentation -from a naively held direct access to objects, followed by various appeals to a supposed "barrier of the senses," followed by outright solipsism- will be noted. Similarly, the ancient debate regarding motion or causation (this time expressed as freewill vs. mechanical determinism) is also repeated in an updated fashion.

Revisiting these recurring issues (of methodology, perception, causation) as they are expressed or updated in early science and modern philosophy, will be very handy indeed when we cover the disciplinization of psychology and subsequent schools & systems era. For the task at hand is one of finding a way to carry out a principled assessment of the respective origins, strengths, weaknesses, and potential of those schools or systems as part of the future elaboration of psychology.

The culmination of Bacon's optimistic comments on the proper motives and goals of science can be found in the preface to The Great Instauration (1620):

Notice that Bacon is not advocating attainment of knowledge for its own sake, but rather for the benefit and use of life (and more specifically for the common good). The scientist he is portraying is no Platonist sitting around in the Ivory Tower -holding opinions about the world and doing nothing about it. Rather, the scientific imperative proposed is one of improving the common good, and by this it is clear that Bacon is considering the possibility of bringing about the good life for all.

This is a great vision, a mission statement for science to follow. Bacon is suggesting that empirical methods have utility, he is implying that scientific inquiry is the means for establishing the dominion of "man over nature" ("regnum hominis"). The role of any individual scientist, therefore, is one of doing their part in the labors that remain toward establishing this dominion.

Bacon's concern with getting things done and his impatience with idealism were also reflected in his writings on educational reform. It is to these that we now turn, briefly, before returning to the details of his great outline of the methods and "impediments" of scientific practice.

Bacon's The Advancement of Learning (1605) had already informed ensuing educational policy by expelling Scholasticism and Alchemy which entailed both appeal to authority and elements of mysticism. In their place, he proposed to "bring in industrious observations, grounded conclusions, and profitable inventions and discoveries" (Bacon, Works VIII, 108-9; see also S. Warhaft, 1967, p. 8). He found the gentlemen of this era as "good for nothing" and proposed to make them "good for somewhat" by giving them such training in the practical arts as befitting an industrious seafaring people and an epoch which economists now call the first industrial revolution.

Here (and elsewhere) Bacon condemns traditional learning because in all of these hundreds of years "it has failed to make us richer by one poor invention." For instance, in "Prais of Knowledge" Bacon attacks scholasticism and alchemy because they were not practical: "The one never faileth to multiply words, and the other ever faileth to multiply gold" (Bacon, Works VIII, 123-6). He proclaims the necessity for what he calls "a marriage" between the mind of man and the nature of things.

Further elaboration is found in De Augmentis Scientiarum (1623) [Of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning] which is an expansion of his 1605 work and in "The Masculine Birth of Time" (1603) where Bacon writes:

Packed into this great paragraph are criticisms of Plato (figments of the brain), of Aristotle (shadows thrown by words), of scholasticism (adulterated religion) and the "fanciful" pursuits of various Renaissance philosophies. Bacon is proposing to throw out all of the authorities of the past, to start out on his own new heading, and the appeal here is to nature itself (see B. Farrington, 1951; 1964, p. 62). Parenthetically, regarding what would now be considered as the sexist language contained therein, see Alan Soble's paper "In Defense of Bacon" (1995).

Bacon viewed the "work" of science as not merely theoretical and empirical, but also practical. Neither ancient speculative wisdom, nor philosophy based merely on the deductive syllogisms (found in the Organon of Aristotle), were the proper means toward such practical discoveries. He therefore turns to induction and experiment as the proper methods of "extracting" knowledge from nature.

Bacon's account of scientific method, which he sets forth in The Great Instauration, is composed of two aspects: the deconstructive ("pars destruens") and the constructive ("pars construens"). The latter it should be mentioned, however, had two parts (induction and experimentation).

The deconstructive (critical) aspect of his account serves the purpose of alerting the reader to four kinds of prejudices and errors (called "idols") which tend to pervade inquiry:

With regard to the fourth kind of idol, Bacon was merciless in his criticism. He writes that Scholasticism and alchemy (the "received systems") "are but so many stage-plays, representing worlds of their own creation." Further, he suggests that various "principles and axioms in science," such as Aristotle's suggestion that natural movements of earthly bodies are rectilinear and that of heavenly bodies is circular have "by tradition, credulity, and negligence" come to be received (Bacon, 1620, Novum organum [New Instrument], Aphorism 44).

This latter illustration, we should note, indicates that Bacon is siding unequivocally with a new group of scientists against the received philosophical and religious systems of the past. This group of scientists most certainly included Galileo -whose discovery that a projectile moves in a parabola (circa 1609) shocked his Aristotelian colleagues. Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo had to combat both the a priori system of Aristotle and the Bible in establishing the view that the earth is not the center of the universe but rotates once a day and goes round the sun once a year.

Bacon suggests correcting these errors by adopting two empirical methods of looking to nature: A new form of logical induction; and experimentation. Deductive philosophy such as Plato's invention of abstract universals "flies from the senses and particulars to the most general axiom." Inductive science, "derives axioms from the senses and particulars, rising by a gradual and unbroken ascent." It discovers axioms. While the one "glances at experiment and particulars in passing," the other dwells duly and orderly among them (Bacon, 1620, Novum organum, Aphorism 19).

With respect to the specific process of inductive observation being proposed, Bacon explicitly rejects simple enumeration (mere list taking) as "childish" because it makes too much of "too small a number of facts." Then, by way of reference to three metaphorical or actual "tables" upon which initial facts can be placed, he elaborates how taking note of both negative and affirmative occurrences as well as matters of degree might aid in the "formation of notions" about some aspect of nature as well as the "discovery" of "axioms" (the laws regulating that aspect of nature).

The facts placed on this third table, in combination with those on the other tables, lead to questions of difference and transition which can be investigated further by way of experimentation. Could it be that sunlight is warm because that particular star is close whereas nightly starlight is imperceptible because those stars reside a great distance from the earth?; Could it be that the light of the moon and that of other planets like Mars is reflective?; and Why is the sun hotter in the summertime?; etc.

"Induction" (of this orderly, systematic sort), is a naturalistic (object oriented) method which follows directly from Bacon's materialist ontology and methodology. It is, however, portrayed by Bacon as merely the initial method by which he and we might extract or discover truths from the world. For Bacon explicitly recognized that such inductive analysis constitutes an intellectual catalyst for the kinds of deeper questions asked in "experimental" forms of inquiry.

With specific respect to experimentation itself, Bacon outlines two kinds: ("Experimenta lucifera" and "Experimenta fructifera") which, though they different in their motive, share their reliance upon initial induction for the very formulation of the questions they investigate.

In Experimenta fructifera (to seek "fruit") investigations are motivated by practical concerns. For example, mechanics might be trying to finding the best pump for removing water out of a particular sort of mine. This kind of experimentation is carried out for a particular practical use or end. "For the mechanic, not troubling himself with the investigation of truth, confines his attention to those things which bear upon his particular work, and will not either raise his mind or stretch out his hand for anything else."

In Experimenta lucifera (to seek "light") investigators are motivated by more theoretical concerns. For example William Harvey's roughly contemporaneous conclusion that the heart is a "pump" (1628) came from carrying out basic observational investigations of the heart ventricles and blood vessels to see if, as Galen had claimed 1000 years earlier, blood is consumed as fuel. Despite the practical conclusion drawn from it (regarding the circulation of the blood), the actual motive of the investigation was to "settle" the original question either way.

Bacon certainly recognized that practical and theoretically motivated inquiries tend to play-off each other in a cycle of science:

The various quibbles between practical-minded and theoretically-minded individuals who carry out experimental investigations assumes a false dichotomy between their respective concerns. Pure scientists must act like mechanics while undertaking their investigations so there is no sound basis for intellectual snobbery to enter the fray (in either direction).

Accordingly, the seeming difference between those practicing each form of experimental inquiry can, in Bacon's terminology, be labeled as mere Idols of the Cave. Prejudice regarding which one is more important is to be avoided because both are important. Experimental activity of both kinds are related because they utilize inductive methods to inquire about nature upon which subsequent deductive implications or conclusions ("new axioms" for the "service of life") can then be based.

Bacon was the first in a long line of scientifically minded philosophers with practical concerns. He was also, however, seeking a changed world for the betterment of humanity and it is in this sense that he claimed "Knowledge is Power." Yet this era of inquiry which starts with great optimism ultimately ends with some very problematic and discouraging positions indeed (particularly with regard to issues of cause & motion, perception, and mind-body relations). If we are to understand why this is so, we should stay mindful of the list of "Idols" provided by Bacon. The motive for doing so is not merely theoretical or historical but also practical. By weeding out the problematic positions in this era we can become both aware of their expression in modern psychology and receptive to other more progressive trends existing therein.

As the most accomplished scientific practitioner and mathematician of his generation, Galileo is best remembered for: astronomical discoveries made with the aid of the telescope; support of the heliocentric view of the planets which he was forced to recant by the Church; empirical-mathematical investigations on falling bodies which yielded a mathematical law of acceleration; and the parabolic law regarding the motion of missiles (e.g., canon balls) which proved that Aristotle's rectilinear theory regarding the motion of earthly bodies was wrong.

For Aristotle, the lesser observable earthly manifestations of the cosmos were considered, to some degree, as disturbances due to chance of purer eternal celestial forms. The various peculiarities and changing situations (characteristic of the terrestrial realm) were considered as something fortuitous that disturbs and obscures our understanding of the essential nature (the form) of the object or process under consideration.

Along with his intellectual predecessors (Copernicus and Kepler), and successor (Newton), Galileo helped to establish that the physical universe (including the celestial bodies) is subject to mechanical laws. In doing so, he also helped promote a shift away from the over-reliance upon the traditional teleological world view (of the bible and other textual authorities such as Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle) toward an empirical-mathematical way of investigating nature.

Galileo, in his early career phase of mathematically guided thought experiments (designed to promote reconsideration of established facts) and in his successive excursions into empirical-experimental research, indicated not only that: (1) the celestial realm was not perfect or immutable but also that (2) the mechanical laws of the universe, when properly understood, applied equally well to the terrestrial realm.

Further, he gradually came to view scientific laws as general statements by which to understand and study particulars, including apparent exceptions. For him, all aspects and all parts of the universe are lawful -heavenly and earthly bodies, frequent and infrequent events, particular and general (shared) aspects of a situation. Modern physics would eventually embrace this understanding of the unity (a.k.a., homogeneity) of the physical universe.

While the Copernican and Aristotelian views of the cosmos had been taught side by side for some years, it was Kepler (by way of both calculation and direct observation) who first advanced the theoretical standing of the heliocentric view by showing that rotational movements in the heavens were "not perfect" -not circular but elliptic and did not take place at a uniform speed. This initial extension of Copernicanism constituted a direct challenge to the Aristotelian doctrine that the heavens were "perfect and invariable" (admitting no change), quite unlike the mutable earth (see J.H. Randall, 1940). It was then left to Galileo to further extend and drive these astronomical points home by carrying out detailed observations through the newly developed telescope.

Prior to the period in which his attention was turned increasingly toward astronomical topics, Galileo had already published a theoretical work on the motion of the earth (De Motu, 1590) and was serving as a professor of mathematics at Padua (1592 onward) where he performed various mathematically informed investigations into falling bodies and ballistics (up to 1609) as described below.

In 1604, a new star (the supernova of Ophiuchus) had been discovered by astronomers to have appeared in the heavens. This occurrence indicated to all open-minded thinkers of the era, including Galileo, that changes did take place in that realm. So, in 1609, Galileo started using the telescope. In his Sidereus Nuncius [Starry Messenger] (1610), he reported viewing mountains on the moon, four satellites around Jupiter, and also provided calculations regarding both the relative rotational phases of Venus as well as the monthly cycle of "blemishes" (sunspots) on the sun's surface.

These latter observations and calculations aroused a storm of controversy for two reasons. They brought new evidence to bear against established Aristotelian doctrine regarding the long-standing qualitative separateness between "sublunary and celestial" realms. They also relied upon a new sort of scientific technology (the telescope).

While some of Galileo's contemporaries continued to engage him actively along sincere (yet traditional) theoretical lines, others simply refused to even look through the newfangled device: "As I wished to show the satellites of Jupiter to the Professors in Florence, they would see neither them nor the telescope. These people believe there is no truth to seek in nature, but only in the comparison of texts" (see Randall, 1940). It would take another century, up to the time of Newton, for the heliocentric view to be accepted outright and thereby open up new vistas for ongoing empirical inquiries.

One object lesson we can take away from this brief intellectual career sketch is that scientific advance often takes generations to become established. Further, we should note that the recognition of advances in the theoretical aspects of science often follow very far behind advances in the empirical (measurement, statistical) aspects of inquiry. Many years of conservative counter-arguments, institutional obstacles, and misuses of potentially progressive (empirical or theoretical) trends typically stand between their first proposition (application or refinement), and their eventual acceptance or incorporation into established doctrine.

Such is the general importance of Galileo to the history of science. There are, however, two aspects of Galileo's work that are more specifically significant to our understanding of later developments in philosophical and psychological thought: His sharp distinction between the physical vs. psychological aspects of sound -which implied an indirect perceptual theory (later known as the doctrine of primary & secondary qualities); and the particular kind of scientific laws he sought (the contrast between what is now known as the Galilean vs. Aristotelian view of "lawfulness").

The first aspect of his work had a de facto negative impact on later developments in philosophy because it was one of the first applications of the problematic "Representationalist theory of perception" which dominated Western thought right up into the 20th century. The second aspect regarding lawfulness in nature has at least the potential of a more progressive impact on psychology but has yet to be adopted on more than an occasional or sporadic basis.

That pitch is dependent upon the length of a plucked string was well known to the early Greeks. Galileo, however was the first to establish experimentally a mathematical relation between pitch (as a particular number of physical vibrations) and the subject's experience (R.I. Watson, 1979).

While reporting the outcome of his studies on the speed of the transmission of sound and measurement of the relative string vibration frequencies associated with different pitches, Galileo (1623) was careful to demarcate the boundaries of the physical aspects of his inquiry. He did this, however, by excluding the work of the senses in a fashion which would later be called by Locke the doctrine of "primary" and "secondary" qualities:

According to Galileo's above demarcation, both motion and singleness reside in the string but sound resides in our senses. By treating the physical aspects as real (as in objects) and the other aspects (of not only sound, but also vision and touch) as spurious, he is sometimes said to have been the first to have narrowed the boundaries of subsequent psychology to contentual subjectivity.

Be that as it may (for "psychology" came along a very long time after Galileo indeed), what we want to emphasize here is that the implied theory of perception being utilized is a three-moment indirect theory which was picked up and made explicit by other figures to be covered in this Section (including both Rationalists such as Descartes and Kant, and Empiricists like Locke, Berkeley, and Hume).

Along with other problematic positions, we will follow the subsequent development of this indirect theory of perception in due course. Our immediate concern at this juncture, however, is to simply state outright that it is a "static" (mechanical, point-to-point, passive) theory which has been problematic because it suggests that the only direct access we have as observers is to transduced sensations (retinal image, cochlear vibration, or proprioceptive cell firings).

To illustrate, how the adoption of this Indirect theory of perception can work to mislead initial conclusions drawn from both naturalistic observation and commonsense, let's take a quick look at one of Galileo's successors in this respect, Isaac Newton (1642-1727).

Newton first described these and other phenomena of light in a report called An hypothesis explaining the properties of light which was sent to the Royal Society in 1675. In the following extract, both his naturalistic style of argumentation and the controlled structure of his experiment (which included a second observer) are important to note. In this early account Newton draws an analogy to vibrations of sound (as did Galileo) and indicates quite rightly that light itself does not enter the sensorum but is transduced in a manner similar to that of sound vibrations. But he also seems to indicate that there is a direct correspondence between the varied refracted physical light rays which are ordered according to their size of vibrations and the ultimately perceived set of colored bands recorded. Further he indicates an important role for the second observer in the experiment which was repeated "diverse" times:

This early account is completely consistent with a Direct Realist correspondence view of perception which while recognizing transduction in the organism also suggests that what is being picked up is a common referential property of light itself -in this case, as differentially refracted through a prism. Indicative of this point, Newton (1675) reported that the actual boundaries between these bands (appearing in the above diagram) were recorded by a second observer who was naive to Newton's "hypothesis."

Also indicative of Newton's early realism is the content of his argumentation. From the perspective of naturalistic observation of light, Newton argued that colors are not "modifications" of light derived from refractions or reflections of natural bodies (as was generally believed), but "original properties" of sunlight, which under experimental conditions were drawn out and separated. One of his arguments for this position was that once any one sort of ray had been well separated, it obstinately retained its color, notwithstanding his various endeavors to change it by way of interception -with colored films or with intervening air between two compressed plates of glass.

Simply stated, Newton's (1675) argument is that separated sunlight retains its color. Similarly, he noted that when blue and yellow powders are mixed together, they appear green, but when the resulting mix is subjected to microscopic investigation the particles therein are seen to retain their blue or yellow hue.

It is the early naturalistic line of reasoning (from Newton's 1675 account) that allows the text -from which the above engraving was obtained- to claim that the experimental situation being shown "proves" that "light in its pure form is colored." This is the conclusion of the Direct Realist correspondence view (with the "correspondence" being between the physical vibrations of light -now known as wavelengths- and resulting transduction in the "sensorum" by which the colored spectrum is perceived at various times, by various observers, and on various papers).

There is, however, a significant historiographic hitch when one attempts to apply this belief unequivocally to Newton himself because many years and many experiments later, his initial statements regarding the physical components of sunlight were eventually qualified along more "philosophical" lines.

In the Definitions section of his Opticks (1704) he explicitly denies that color is located within light rays:

This time, Newton indicates a belief that color is not in the light but is located in us. Here we see a position very similar to both that proposed by Galileo (regarding sound) and to Locke's recently proposed formal doctrine of "primary and secondary" qualities. Notice also that the second observer originally described as a "friend" -who while naive to Newton's specific hypothesis was otherwise competent and in fact superior at discerning the boundaries of the resulting light band separation- is now downgraded to the status of a "vulgar" participant.

Such is the methodological function of the Indirect theory of visual perception in the case of Newton's later account of light. It produces a philosophical account where there was originally naturalistic description; it produces doubt or at least potential variance of opinion where there was once common reference; and it produces apparent divisions between the status of participants in such experiments where there was originally a relative equality.

As we proceed, this Indirect theory of perception will become our first clear case of what Bacon meant in his warning to avoid the "Idols" of the Marketplace or Theater: limitations of current terms used in scientific discourse, or set up by a priori systems of thought. In other words, various versions of indirect perception have dominated from the time of Galileo right up into the 20th century when they were initially called into question by "Direct Realist" philosophers holding to a correspondence theory of perception similar to Newton's initial account (e.g., E.A. Burtt, J.H. Randall) and then by a psychologist called J.J. Gibson -who put forward an alternative Direct theory of perception. This latter "ecological" theory" of Direct Perception recognizes the physiological role of transduction by the sensory organs as did the correspondence view but further argues that what is observed by the organism is not sensations in the classical sense but rather "stimulus information" (the active pickup of variance and invariance from the environment over time).

We now turn to a contrast between so-called "Aristotelian vs. Galilean views of lawfulness" and introduce their respective implications for subsequent empirical method used in psychological science. We are considering this issue of lawfulness, not for its own history of science sake, but rather because, as Kurt Lewin (1931/1935) puts it, early experimental psychology had come to "resemble" Aristotelianism in both its structure of empirical research and views of lawfulness. It was producing the kinds of arguments "against which Galilean physics had to struggle" (1935, p. 18).

Throughout the 20th century era of competing "schools & systems" (such as Behaviorist, Freudian, and Gestalt analysis), one of the major differences is the kinds of psychological laws sought after by those respective outlines of psychology. So, the consideration of this issue is a self-serving one for our eventual sorting out of progressive and regressive trends in the intellectual legacy of our science from the time of Galileo up to the relative present.

In the interest of disentangling these progressive trends, there is one important proviso to be mentioned upfront: What would later be called the Aristotelian view of lawfulness (for example by Lewin, 1931/1935) actually reflects only one of two aspects of Aristotle's approach to the study of nature.

In other words, just as we distinguished between what would later be called "Aristotelian" (either/or) Formal logic from the more inclusive kinds of cause (Formal, Material, Efficient, and Final) utilized by Aristotle in his biological investigations (see Section 1), so too must we distinguish his actual approach to method (which included both deductive "demonstrative" and observational or inductive "discovery" aspects) from what would later be called the Aristotelian view of lawfulness.

In the Posterior Analytics, Aristotle explicitly distinguished between the demonstrative (deductive or descriptive discourse) and discovery (empirical) aspects of inquiry. Each had their own starting-point and role in inquiry (see table right).

These two overlapping aspects of inquiry (discourse regarding nature and empirical investigation of nature) are clearly reflected in Aristotle's treatment of apparently diverse cosmological topics such as: his postulation of a fifth element; his denial of the void (vacuum of space); and his theory of falling bodies. As in all serious inquiry, there is a constant interplay between observable facts, the logical assumptions being made, and the conclusions eventually drawn from inquiry. The actual structure of empirical observation (where we look or what procedures are used to look) and outcome of inquiry (what is learned from looking) depend upon the interplay between facts and assumptions.

According to Aristotle, everything in the imperfect transitory terrestrial realm is composed of compounds of "earth, water, air and fire" (Aristotle, On Coming-to-be and Passing-away). Every particular tangible terrestrial body is compounded of these four substances and can be characterized (classified) by observing the respective manifestations of opposing qualities (dry vs. wet, hot vs. cold) contained therein. But the heavenly bodies, he suggests, consist of a fifth element "aither" (ether) which is not subject to these opposing forces. His varied motives for proposing the existence of this fifth element are instructive for our understanding of the reciprocal interplay between logical discourse and empirical aspects of inquiry.

The problem, as Aristotle put it in Meteorology, was to account not only for the distinctly eternal, unvarying, circular movements of heavenly bodies but also for the very possibility of their movement as well. The natural movement of the four terrestrial elements is either upward or downwards (away or toward the center of the earth). Fire and air, for instance, naturally rise while water and earth naturally fall as long as nothing "artificially" impedes their movement. But an object which moves naturally in a circle, he argued, can not logically be presumed to be made up of one or any combination of the opposing terrestrial elements.

Relatedly, terrestrial elements are in a constant state of conflict and relative balance. If these elements filled the vast celestial distances between earth and farthest stars, the earth would be overwhelmed and destroyed. The very fact of the existence of the earth seemed to imply the existence of either a void or some other element in the celestial region.

Aristotle's implied theory of moving or falling bodies ties in here because it tipped the balance of his judgment against the existence of a void. First of all (in his Physics) he observed that for a greater weight to be moved the same distance in a shorter time, more force had to be employed. The commonplace examples he used included ships being hauled through the water. Movement increased with the number of men hauling and ships can be hauled more easily when unladen with cargo. Given that sufficient force to move an object has been attained, that required force was obviously inversely proportional to the weight of the body moved.

Further, he observed that speed of fall (or movement) seemed to be inversely proportional to the "density" of the medium through which the object was moving. Objects tend to move more quickly through air vs. water (Aristotle On the Heavens, Physics). But having thus assumed that motion necessarily takes place through a medium he may be said to have stayed "too close, rather than not close enough, to the data of experience" (Llyod, 1970, p. 114). For Aristotle, the lack of any medium logically implied the lack of any possibility of motion, and he therefore denied that motion through a void is possible. In other words, since we do observe regular movement in the celestial bodies, they must be traveling through some sort of medium.

As Lloyd (1970) points out, if there is a lesson to be learned from the empirical aspects of Aristotle's diverse cosmological views, it is not that he blindly ignored the observable facts to base his theories on mere a priori principles, but rather that his theories are hasty generalizations based upon superficial observations and classifications. What it comes down to is that Aristotle emphasized "becoming" and "observation" in the discovery aspects of science (particularly in his biological investigations) but both his analytic and discursive concepts (those used in the demonstrative aspects of his cosmological inquiries) were static like Plato's:

So, according to Lloyd, much of the fault for any over-reliance upon the universal and mathematical aspects of method (of the kind which we will see excludes the account of particular cases) lies on the doorstep of Plato and not Aristotle per se. But just as the Aristotelian doctrine that the heavens were perfect and invariant was a logical implication of his semi-absolute Idealist position, so too was at least part of his conception of lawfulness "colored" by this position. In other words, Aristotle's logical rejection of particulars in favor of perfect "forms" was ultimately reproduced in his discursive views on "lawfulness" -which in turn imposed limitations on the structure and conclusions drawn from the various empirical or observational (discovery) aspects of his work.

Kurt Lewin's (1931/1935) analysis of the transition from so-called Aristotelian to Galilean mode of physics was aimed at providing a viable exemplar (regarding the issue of lawfulness) for psychological science to adopt. In this analysis, however, Lewin was "less concerned with the personal nuances" of Galileo vs. Aristotle per se than with specific "ponderable differences" in the "modes of thought" utilized by the "medieval Aristotelians and... the post-Galilean physicists" (1935, pp. 1-2).

Put more plainly, there were two distinct sets of approaches to lawfulness running loose in psychology at the time and Lewin's main concern was to indicate the different methodological implications (for theory and research) of adhering to one versus the other. As adapted from Lewin's (1931) article (reprinted as Chapter 1 of A Dynamic Theory of Personality, 1935), the respective characteristics of the "Aristotelian and Galilean" approaches to lawfulness are as follows:

The main methodological contrast, here, is between the Aristotelian view which separates lawful events from chance events -with lawfulness itself being defined abstractly in terms of amount (frequency or regularity of occurrence); and the Galilean view which claims that everything is lawful and seeks not an abstract but a concrete conception of the events (objects or processes) under investigation -including peculiar or occasional cases thereof.

		Aristotelian	Galilean
1	The regular is	lawful	lawful
	The frequent is	lawful	lawful
	The individual case is	chance	lawful
2	Criteria of lawfulness	regularity & frequency	not required
3	That which is common to all cases is	an expression of the fundamental nature of the thing or process	a descriptive incidental

The Aristotelian approach to empirical discovery focused upon the commonly held surface features of various observable classes of objects (events, processes, or organisms) and was aimed at working out an account of their decontextualized shared attributes. The individual (particular or peculiar) cases of a class, and/or occasional occurrences of an event, were considered as noise or error in our efforts to ascertain the ideal forms to which those particular manifestations might belong.

The label of "lawful" was reserved for events which displayed the required stability of occurrence. All particularities were systematically relegated to the realm of chance because the emphasis of empirical inquiry was to discover the common features of a class. Those common features, in turn, were interpreted as an expression of the fundamental nature of that class.

The Galilean approach to empirical inquiry accepted classes of events (or objects) as part of our understanding (as an important descriptive, observational parceling out of nature) but went further by way of adopting experimental manipulation upon the whole situation (including the varied circumstances and settings upon which occurrences of the events, objects or processes under study depend).

Lewin (quite rightly I believe) favors the latter Galilean view of lawfulness and suggests that psychology both recognize the theoretical implications and adopt the empirical methods which that view allows. So, at this point in the course, we'll augment his account with illustrative details from Aristotle and Galileo. In subsequent Sections, too, we'll return periodically to the points raised as they apply to various systems or schools of psychology.

A leading characteristic of Aristotelian discourse regarding nature was that it described transitory and particular events by way of reference to supposedly eternal, universal "forms" which were decontextualized and static. A similar decontextualizing trend is recognizable in the discovery aspects of Aristotelian inquiry (in the empirical investigation into nature). In Aristotle's cosmological and biological inquiries any particular aspect of nature was analyzed according to that which is common to the general class of objects, processes or organisms to which it belongs. Despite its assumed or ultimate overlying discursive reference to abstract form potentials, Aristotelian empiricism (in and of itself) is still a fairly superficial sort of inquiry. You simply count the concrete cases of occurrence and relate them to the generalized class of events to which they might belong.

The Galilean method of research, however, is directly opposed to this decontextualizing procedure. The aim of observation, descriptive analysis, experimentation, or theoretical generalization, is not to reduce experiential events to "pure" elements (or static externals) but to reflect the important situational aspects of occurrence.

This contextualizing trend (toward understanding particulars) is present in both Galileo's early career phase of argumentative thought experiments (1584-1592) and in his subsequent experimental investigations into falling bodies and the parabolic path of projectiles (1602-1609). In each of these kinds of inquiry, Galileo is attempting to either conceive of or actually physically construct situations which will elucidate the contextualized dynamics of the event or process under investigation.

In considering motion Aristotle followed the largely typology centered (though partly teleological) view that each class of objects must find their own natural place. There were two directions for terrestrial objects to move: "up" (air, fire) and "down" (earth, water). Light a match, and the flame points upward; drop a rock and it will fall. Once the various differential (imperfect) manifestations of earthly motion were suitably decontextualized and parceled out into various abstract typologies (the generalized classes or forms), that was the end of the matter.

Galileo's De Motu (1590), however, was a spirited attack on Aristotle's views of motion. It attempted to consider both generalized classes of objects and the concrete conditions in which they travel. His De Motu is notable not only because it was motivated by his faith in the role of mathematics over crude reporting of surface experience (see Shea, 1972); but also because in proposing his (admittedly flawed) counter-theory Galileo takes an important methodological half-step out of the former typology centered considerations toward the post-Galilean situation centered consideration of motion (cf. William R. Shea, Galileo's Intellectual Revolution: Middle Period, 1972).

With regard to the counter-theory proposed therein, Galileo (1590) came up with a forerunner of Newton's (1686) theory of gravitation. He argued that everything must tend to move toward the center of the earth, and that any observed upward motion is due to that thing being surrounded by a denser medium which pushes it up just as a cork will rise to the top of a tub of water:

Stated more plainly, he was not arguing that all bodies fall at the same speed regardless of their weight (as later laid out in Newton's general law of gravitation), but rather that the speed of a falling body is proportional to the difference between its specific gravity and the density of the medium in which it falls. Having based his contention on mathematically informed thought experiments regarding established facts of motion, he reaches the erroneous conclusion that bodies of the same material but of different sizes fall at the same rate, while bodies of the same size but of different materials do not.

Galileo's "error," however is one of the details of his theory (a theory which reflected the limitations of the knowledge of the day) and not of the methodology being employed per se. The overall structure of research being employed (even during this early period; cf. Shea, 1972), was not in error because his search is not for decontextualized classes of static eternals (e.g., circular vs. rectilinear forms of motions) but is aimed instead at discriminating and isolating the basic situational dynamics of motion which can then be applied to varying (and particular) conditions of occurrence.

As Lewin (1935) pointed out, while the situational and dynamic considerations of later physics (including that of Newton) were incidental and foreign to the Aristotelian mode of thought they were highly characteristic of Galilean thought. It was this appreciation of situational aspects of motion, for instance, which would eventually allow Galileo (1638) to propose his hypothesis of the uniform acceleration of objects in the void of celestial space.

Despite various historiographic equivocations (made by Koyre or Shea) regarding the applicability of this point to Galileo's early career, an appreciation of situational aspects was most certainly highly characteristic of the structural details of the empirical research into falling bodies and the parabolic path of projectiles which Galileo conducted during his middle career.

Situational and measurement aspects of Galileo's experimental investigations

Galileo's early discursive orientation was aimed at indicating that crude observation and mere production of typology centered object classes (those unaided by careful mathematical considerations) might lead to hasty generalization. But between 1602-09, he entered his middle career phase by, among other things, carrying out careful experimental investigations into falling bodies and the path of projectiles. It is here that the full expression of the Galilean situational methodology of research (which was aimed at establishing a general foundation of dynamics) first emerges.

In these experiments, Galileo did not investigate heavy versus light bodies themselves (as had been done under the Aristotelian tradition and in his own early career phase), but rather the process of free fall -movement on an inclined plane. In other words, the mathematical law of movement on an inclined plane (as shown in the resulting graphical representation appearing above) was not established by taking the average of as many cases as possible of natural stones rolling down actual hills and then considering this average as the most characteristic case. It was established instead upon the simplified laboratory case of relatively frictionless rolling of brass marbles down a straight and hard wooden plane, -that is, upon an artificial situation which even the laboratory can only approximate and which is most improbable in daily life. Galileo was striving for a kind of general validity and concreteness, yet used an empirical method which, from the point of view of the preceding Aristotelian epoch, would have been regarded as peculiar or exceptional.

As Lewin (1935) puts it, in investigating the process of free fall (which is itself too rapid for direct observation) by way of manipulating slower movements along an inclined plane, Galileo presupposes that the dynamics of the event under investigation are "no longer formally tied to the isolated objects as such," but are understandable by way of investigating its dependence upon the whole situation in which the event occurs. This was a full-fledged break with Aristotelian methodology and signifies a transition toward a search for concepts which can only be defined with reference to given sorts of situations -in this case the presence of a wooden plane with a given inclination and of an unimpeded vertical extent of space through which to fall.

The goal of these experimental procedures was to discover and approximate the situational aspects of occurrence. The goal of the law was to allow its application to other situations no matter how varied they might be in particular. For Galileo, the orbits of the planets, the free falling of a stone, the movement of a body on an inclined plane and the oscillation of a pendulum, -which if classified merely according to their varied surface features belong to distinct or antithetical types of events- might prove to be simply various expressions of the same law.

Similarly, as Ernst Cassirer (1932) points out, the parabolic path of the projectile could not have been discovered by just looking:

Observation to be sure, but also other methods -including experimental simplification and mathematics- had to be applied in order to isolate the relevant aspects of the event and to state them in a generalizable manner. Galileo had to analyze the conditions of the simplified laboratory case (the strength of initial impulse, the force of gravity), produce mathematical statements for them, and then combine each in a summary mathematical statement which could be applied productively to other quite different situations.

The resulting parabolic path law is "general" (in the sense that it applies to all cases). But, since the law also isolates (or rather highlights) the underlying situational dynamics of the measured phenomena, it can be utilized to explain apparent exceptions by relating them to the "peculiar conditions" of an individual exceptional case -such as the size of the ball, the strength of the charge, or the length of the canon.

According to Stillman Drake (1975/1999), the parabolic path was probably discovered by Galileo rather serendipitously "no later than 1608" and the mathematical proof was worked out by "early 1609" (see Drake, 1999, Vol. 2). But while Galileo both lectured upon the law and was long recognized for its discovery, he did not mention it formally in print until 30 years later (see the last part of Discourse on Two New Sciences, 1638). By then a similar proof had already been published and a short-lived but bitter exchange over priority of discovery had occurred in which Galileo wrote that no one knows better than he how hard it had been to make the initial discovery and yet how easy it was to produce the mathematical proof once the shape of the trajectory was already known.

Drake, has devoted considerable efforts into historically reconstructing the details of Galileo's laboratory investigations. He uses an echo of this statement (appearing in the Discourse) to dismiss those historians who portray Galileo as stuck in the Platonic mode of argumentative discourse:

In other words, Galileo started out his career by proposing critically argumentative thought experiments; subsequently dove into empirical and experimental inquiries during the middle phase of his career; and only returned to the discursive style later on.

Having spun-off on this historiographic tangent, I want to now reiterate a related and rather central aspect of Kurt Lewin's (1935) argument because it will become especially important when we return to the specific issue of its implications for psychology per se. In his contrast between Aristotle's emphasis (on forms or typological categories of material objects) and Galileo's eventual emphasis (upon the situational dynamics of forces), Lewin is careful to highlight a point regarding the relative merits of mathematical exactitude and extent of lawfulness as demarcating aspects of Galileo's methodology.

In Galilean Physics, says Lewin, the use of mathematical tools and the tendency to exactness, important as they are, "cannot be considered the main substance of the difference from Aristotelian physics." Rather the main progress was one of a change in the content rather than merely a change in the empirical measurement tools used during investigation. The increased emphasis in modern physics on quantitative considerations is not derived from the tendency to logical formality but rather from the tendency to a fuller description of concrete actuality, even that of particular cases.

In other words, while Galileo's adoption of mathematical exactitude was a necessary ingredient, -in that it helped dislodge over-reliance upon untutored analysis of observable surface characteristics- the truly revolutionary part of his methodology and the one that made room for the advent of modern empirical science, is his position on the extent (inclusiveness) of scientific lawfulness. Why was Galileo's position on lawfulness so revolutionary? Because it altered both the very structure or content of the research conducted and the practical generality of the results of that research.

For Galileo, the trajectory of every ink-splattered brass ball rolled down an inclined plane and every bullet or cannon ball fired is lawful. Even though the details of observed results may vary from case to case (with different bullets, different powder, or different cannons), the results are lawful because we can specify the situational conditions of this variance. The function of (and modus opperendi) of the mathematically exact derivation (the law) is intended to be able to account for the exceptional aspects as well as the shared regularities of an individual case.

Lewin (1935) suggested that psychology has lagged far behind the other sciences in not having adopted this commonsensical "Galilean" approach to scientific lawfulness. By the mid-1930s a problematic logical opposition between individual cases and lawfulness had become customary in both experimental psychology and in various applied individual differences research subdisciplines. The examples Lewin mentions including early studies of motivation, I.Q. testing, and personality research are instructive. Each of these subdisciplines had adopted outright the classic Aristotelian view of lawfulness which required both regularity and frequency to be demonstrated before calling some event lawful or generalizable. Note that Lewin's main bone of contention is not with empirical investigation itself but rather with the unwarrantable limitations on research and interpretation which the adoption of the Aristotelian (exceptionless) conception of generalization has set up.

Recall that the Aristotelian view of generality requires the analytical deletetion of concrete detail because its emphasis is upon describing what is "common" to all cases. In psychology, this sort of deletion of exceptions is carried out by way of the statistical techniqes and the very structure of the questionairre or test batteries used in research. Just like Plato's abstract "ideals" or Aristotle's "form" categories, these investigatory tools are ways of systematically stripping away exceptions ("outliers" or "error variance") and leaving only statistically derived "average" cases or commonly grouped "factors" to consider.

This artificial opposition between individual cases and generalizable statistical statements has to some extent persisted in psychology even up to the present and the subdisciplines in question are just now beginning to move beyond the formidable limitations on research or theory which that original methodological adoption set up. In other words, this sort of critique does not belong to a bygone era of quaint argumentation or rough science but is a matter of ongoing disciplinary concern. So let's try to understand and illustrate its main features by way of example.

The very psychological statistics courses which you have taken, are taking, or soon will take, tend to portray proper empirical research in just this Aristotelian manner -as a technique by which one pulls out or searches for regular and frequent patterns in a set of data. Whether these sought after patterns consist of quantitatively derived regularily obtained factors, or frequently observed significant differences between group "means" (averages), the assumption that they must be regular and frequent in order to be "lawful" rather than mere chance change is always made. But under the Galilean view, the statistical average per se is merely a descriptive incidental which may or may not have any fundamental (underlying, essential, -you pick the term) relation to the more central aspects of the event under study (be it human intellect, personality, motivation, learning -or whatever).

Similarly, such courses portray the proper kind of empirical generalization as one which sets up and stays at the "abstract" or nomothetic rather than particular or idiographic level of description. To paraphrase another "critical" German psychologist (Klaus Holzkamp), -who was speaking this time from the historical vantage-point of the late 1980s- "Generalization" in its typical psychological usage is not the analysis of appearance in terms of essential determinants (the concrete Galilean way of describing the trajectory in terms of gravity and initial impulse). It is more often defined as nothing more than to draw conclusions from a distribution of similar elements (attributes) about a larger or infinite numbered distribution of like elements (statistical generalization from samples to populations). Even the most complicated statistical procedures in psychology (including those of the multivariate kind) rely upon this "uninspired" concept of abstract generalization according to which one merely moves between various large piles of surface data (see Holzkamp, 1991a&b).

Put more plainly, the kinds of questions being asked by Holzkamp here are: "Can you see yourself in those resulting piles of data? If not, why not?" As I have argued more obtusely elsewhere the empirical generalizations produced by psychometrically driven subdisciplines -such as those which ultimately promoted the widespread use of personality inventories and successive IQ or standardized school testing booms- have failed to rise above the scientific level of Initial (a.k.a., abstract) generalization in that they reveal mere superficial aspects of their subject matter (see Ballantyne, 1995; 2002). In order to become more concrete (reveal essential or necessary interrelations), each of those subdisciplines must begin to address (and reconstruct) the general developmental transformations of the subject matter they are purported to be dealing with. In other words, they must become more Galilean and more developmentally oriented in order to become more explanatory.

To illustrate, let's briefly consider the rise, the disciplinary function, and the present knowledge claims of modern personality inventories in this respect. During the first quarter of the 20th century the concept of personality was first differentiated from the older concept of "character." Various early, clinically based, dynamic and qualitative personality typologies (including those of Freud, Jung, and Lewin) were put forward in Europe. In America, however, it was personnel questionnaires and statistical personality inventories that were developed, applied, and psychometrically refined on a massive scale. All modern personality inventories were worked out by way of factor analysis -a statistical technique which hunts out common groupings of data points along various lines of best fit.

Although occasional subdisciplinary transition figures (e.g., Allport and Vernon, 1930) recognized the need to situate the psychometrically based "trait" view within the broader sociocultural context (e.g., historical events, cultural values), such concerns were subsequently dropped as a matter of subdisciplinary convenience (see Section 5). The abstractness of subsequent trait views of personality can be seen in their tendency toward "methodolatry," a shift of concern away from elaborating some dynamic causal process toward concern over statistical outcome (Danziger, 1990, pp. 111-112; Bakan, 1967, pp. 157-159). In other words, a recurring shift into and out of nominalist argumentation (naming without claiming) is characteristic of psychometric trait analysis research reporting.

In this purified trait approach, the question of whether traits (a.k.a., personality attributes or variables, etc.) exist as anything more than empirical convenience was replaced with the question of how many psychometric factors or quantitative dimensions are produced by which statistical method (Cattell vs. Eysenck vs. McCrae & Costa). Cattell (1957, 1966) reduced Allport's list of 200 terms to 16 personality "factors." He had his subjects rate their acquaintances and this data was factor analyzed producing 12 factors to which Cattell added the extra four on the basis of his own authority. Similarly, Eysenck (1953) came up with 2 "dimensions" (stable-unstable, introverted-extroverted) and McCrae & Costa came up with the now famous "big-five" factors (neuroticism, extroversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness).

These sorts of descriptive nominalistic categories, -that is the knowledge products which these inventories produce- were initially used for personnel selection in contexts of business or the military and only then obtained widespread cachet in the psychiatric community by way of appearing in successive editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

In the test battery now called the "big-five," for instance, your specific pattern of answers to questions is compared to generalized norms -themselves produced by the cumulative and partitioned out averages of scores along five hypothetical "dimensions" (neuroticism, extroversion, openness, agreeableness and conscientiousness respectively). The resulting psychometric profile is a static, snapshot of a pattern of decontextualized relative nomothetic (and nomonalistic) rankings on various subscales claimed to be correlated with human personality per se. In other words, this pattern of psychometric labels does not really tell you about your personality, instead it tells you how your score pattern fits into a statistically standardized distribution of hypothetical prerequisites (or correlates) of personality.

What does this kind of psychologized, statistical typology really tell you about how you became the way you are, or for that matter what you might do about it in the future? Not a whole hell of a lot! The psychometric labels which modern personality inventories produce are merely descriptive Aristotelian categories -obtained by way of the law of averages and frequency- and nothing more.

Contrast this highly abstract statistical approach of so-called "personality assessment" with that of Freud's old psychoanalytic approach and the limitations of inventories jump right out at you in sharp relief. In Freud's elaboration of the "oedipal complex" and other psychical stages (including the "oral, phallic, anal, and latency" phase), we can see how these developmental categories might have applied to us at different stages of our lives. Anyone who has taken the step of becoming a parent in this complex western civilization can also observe how these stages are played out in their own children.

What Freud was trying to do was to provide a generalized set of dynamic concepts so that any person can understand and account for the origin or inner-workings of their own specific personality characteristics. Further, it was explicitly realized by Freud (and by the early psychoanalytic tradition of therapy itself) that the way those characteristics are expressed in any particular human being might not match up with the way they are expressed in anyone else (hence the need for a psychoanalytic dream analysis, etc., to guide the client through such analysis).

Despite their apparent lack of respective empirical rigor: Is it surprising that any reasonably intelligent person with a disturbed psyche (be it regarding relationship issues, career aspirations, depression, etc.) would seek help from the host of self-help books (or personal power programs) currently on the open market? In our continuing quest for self-understanding and improvement, classic psychoanalytic or even "popular psychology" books or programs tend to strike a meaningful cord with us in ways that no psychometric test ever has!

It is by referring to these (albeit rather simplified) kinds of comparisons that we can obtain some gleanings about what both Lewin and Holzkamp are on about: They are struggling with the issue of how to make it possible for psychologists to go from the particular case to the general without losing the human being in the resulting general statement of a psychological law. They are attempting to find a way to produce concrete (rather than abstract) general statements in psychology. They are also raising issues of the empirical and theoretical maturity of various subdisciplines; of the relevance of various knowledge products produced by those subdisciplines; and of the unity and relation between psychological subject matter as a whole. Galileo and Freud, as well as many others to be mention throughout this course, provide good exemplars in this respect.

To his credit, Lewin explicitly recognized that the initial slip into Aristotelian descriptive classification was at least in part due to the fact that the experimental aspects of psychology were a fairly new disciplinary development. Early empirical inquiry would inevitably be carving out seemingly separate and distinct "subfields" rather than having a firm grasp upon how each subfield (or aspects therein) falls into a united whole of subject matter (see further Ballantyne, 1992; 1995). Lewin, therefore, called for a concerted, communal, disciplinary effort to "harmonize" the whole field of psychology (comparable to Galileo's unified cosmos) so as to promote the future practical generality of psychological research. As Lewin put it, just as Galileo's methodology had altered the very relation between the world and the task of research for subsequent physics, psychology now had the potential of doing the same.

Reading between the lines, it is clear (at least to me) that Lewin's call for unity would not be found in the abstract mental reductionist kind of homogeneity characteristic of associationism (a term which we will explore shortly). Suffice it here to say that associationism (with its emphasis upon exceptionless connection between ideas or sensations; its emphasis upon frequency of connection; and its exclusion of so-called accidents from its discourse) was a direct outcome of Aristotelianism. Nor would the desired unity of subject matter be of the kind adopted by the first late 19th century structuralist system of psychology. Wundt, for instance imposed severe restrictions upon experimental investigation and afforded extravagant valuation to repetition (he considered frequency of occurrence as a fundamental criterion and expression of psychological lawfulness). Nor, would it be achieved through adopting the varied psychologized forms of the more Logical-positivist aspects of early 20th century physics (a.k.a., operationism) just then asserting itself in the discipline while Lewin was writing his critique.

I don't expect you to grasp the fuller implications of this issue of generality of research at this early stage of the course. Instead, the above list of problematic influences is intended merely to give you a heads-up on matters to be covered in detail later on. For now, though, we must return to the roughly chronological developments surrounding Descartes' 17th century Mind-Body dualism and Rationalism; as well as to the rise of 18th century Empiricism and Associationism.

Initially educated at the Jesuit college of La Flèche, Descartes (or "Cartesius" -the Latin form of his name) first served with various armies during the Thirty Years' War and, after 1628, settled down in Holland to a relatively quieter life of mathematical scholarship and philosophy. Despite sharing Galileo's heresies regarding the earth's rotation and infinity of the universe, Descartes remained a practicing Catholic throughout his life.

His two major works (Discourse on Method 1637; Meditations 1641) were published in the vernacular French language rather than in Latin. By virtue of his method of inquiry Descartes can legitimately lay claim to being the father of modern philosophical Rationalism.

His direct participation in the Thirty Years' War (between Protestant and Catholic nations) as well as the ideological tolerance of Holland likely played no small part in his creation and adoption of this novel rationalist method of philosophical inquiry. For as Russell (1946) put it:

But there are also other, more immediate disciplinary reasons for Descartes to have carried out his philosophical "quest for certainty" by way of a rationalist method and its procedure of systematic "Cartesian" doubt. These disciplinary reasons include his concern over the ethical implications of contemporary mechanically reductive materialist positions (including that of Hobbes); and his own initial overemphasis upon the fallibility of the senses. Descartes created a new rationalist system of philosophy in order to bridge the gap between his own idealist starting-point and his continuing ambition to make logically defensible contentual or mathematical statements about the world.

With respect to psychology, among the most relevant pronouncements Descartes made include his opinion that animals are living automata (whose actions are dictated by the dispositions of their bodily organs); and his outline of an "interactive" mind-body dualism with regard to human kind. The particulars of Descartes' elaborate theory regarding what is now termed bodily reflex, however, were both as mechanistic as that of Hobbes (a contemporary figure covered below) and as speculative as the fanciful stage-plays which Bacon had already warned against. Descartes, therefore, was merely one among many speculative precursors and not a "founder" per se of later physiological psychology.

Although the details of Descartes physiological theories were speculative rather than scientific (observational or experimental in the Baconian sense), his interactive mind-body dualism can be considered relatively progressive given the 17th century intellectual context in which it was proposed. Accordingly, we will be highlighting two aspects of Descartes' efforts which retain equal historiographical cogency for psychologists and philosophers alike. They include: (1) the anti-reductive motives for his adoption of interactive dualism; and (2) the rationale for his decision to throw out ontological materialism while retaining the representationalist theory of perception.

With regard to Descartes and his eventual mind-body dualism, I think it is useful to mention that the notion of mechanical bodily reflex and even the view of animals as living automata is not unique to Descartes. Other people were wrestling with the issue of voluntary and involuntary action around the same time. The fully-fledged formulation of his interactive dualism is surely unique, but the recognition of the basic mechanical mechanism under debate was part of the practical and intellectual context of the 17th century.

Practically speaking, Descartes simply drew a direct analogy between: (a) the mechanical structure of existing automata (in clock towers or the French Royal Gardens) -which moved, made sounds and played musical instruments; and (b) that of the physical workings of the human body. According to this analogy, the tubes in the robot's body correspond to nerves; the springs and motors to muscles and tendons; and the hydraulic action of water to the action of "animal spirits" (vital fluids):

Intellectually speaking, mechanical terminology had been utilized by Galileo with regard to the physical world and by physicians for some time. But most importantly, when we get to Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) we have a very good example of someone who looked at the supposed mental faculties and concluded that they could all be accounted for by way of reference to reflex mechanisms. In Hobbes' Human Nature: Or the fundamental elements of policy, (1650); and Leviathan, (1651), we have a very strict and reductive materialist monism being expressed. All these things which we call mental faculties, capabilities, whatever, are in his words "nothing but the passing of external motion through this body like they are passing through a machine."

Descartes was obviously uncomfortable with that particular formulation of the issue. He was as enthusiastic about the mechanical sciences of his time as anybody, but was also disturbed about the position that all mental faculties are reducible to physical or physiological mechanisms. Hobbes achieved his materialist monism through a methodological procedure called reductionism. In our consideration of the late 19th and 20th century disciplinary debates we will talk about forms of nonreductive materialism (including functional and dialectical materialism) but it is important to note that these options were not available to Descartes back in the 17th century.

In recognizing that Descartes was disturbed with the contemporary reductionist account of mentality, we can begin to understand his motivation for proposing a dualism with respect to human beings. Descartes' mind-body dualist position is a resistance to reductionism. It is an attempt to formulate a way of saying that the mental abilities of human beings are not just mechanical acts dictated by the bodily organs and that we therefore need a special theory to account for human mentality. All later anti-reductionist formulations are developmental and/or evolutionary. But in the 17th century there was, as yet, no firm concept of evolutionary development. So, given the intellectual context of the times, the only way by which Descartes could reasonably resist reductionism was by adopting some sort of mind-body dualism.

What I am suggesting, therefore, is that in some ways, Descartes' dualism is very appropriate response to something which is quite disturbing -the implications of mechanistic materialism for freedom, ethics, and personal conduct. Some historiographic sources (e.g., O.J. Flanagan, 1984) imply that Cartesian dualism was a self-serving concession to the pressures of the Church and that beneath the dualism Descartes was really a mechanist. But given that he was operating primarily within the atmosphere of Dutch tolerance, -a Protestant country where the subordination of Church to state was well underway- this portrayal does not stand up. In other words, Descartes was more concerned with the intellectual constrains posed by other philosophers than he was with the occasional "vexatious attacks of Protestant bigots" (see Russell, 1946, pp. 543-44).

For Descartes to preserve anything that is vaguely human and to retain a conception of humanity that is consistent with the facts of civil society, this kind of dualism seemed necessary. That said, it must also be recognized that his selection of the pineal gland as the location of interaction, was due as much to rational reflection and speculation on the possible physiological implications of his theory as it was to any rough observational considerations.

	Home Page \| Contents \| Section 3 \| Course Intro \| Bibliography