Transcript Scope of Psychology

Historical view
• Psychology come from the study of two
disparate yet connected fields, Philosophy
and biology.
Modern View
• Psychology is the study of behavior (in its
broadest context).
Philosophical view
• The Platonic allegory of Cupid and
Psyche, the passions that rule mankind.
Two ways at looking at man and
how he interprets his world
• Socratic/Platonic view.
• All knowledge is already contained in the
individual.
• Do not use your sensory experience to
understand the world around you.
Meno’s Slave
• Through question and answer Socrates
showed that an untrained slave could
show he understood the relationship
between the hypotenuse and the two sides
of a square.
Cave allegory
• Prisoners are chained to a wall.
• They see shadows on the wall and depict
this as real.
• The shadows are only reflections of
people before a fire outside the mouth of
the cave.
• Sensory experience causes illusions.
Aristotle
• Use your sensory experience.
• Tend to agree in most matters with Plato
Classical religious people
• The soul as seen from the hands of
Augustine.
• For Augustine, it is virtually axiomatic that
the human soul is both immaterial and
immortal.
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Augustine (cont.)
• It is clear that Augustine is provides a
dramatic account of moral transformation,
one that stresses the role of intellectual
discernment while at the same time
highlighting his conviction that no amount
of discernment is sufficient to account for
what we might refer to, for want of a better
phrase, as the phenomenology of internal
moral conflict.
The concept of Will
• In terms of this agonistic inner turmoil, the
will is both present and emergent and is
on an equal footing with our powers of
rational discernment.
Aquinas
• Man not only is intelligible but also
intelligent; he is intelligent, because he
make intelligent operations. The principle
of these intelligent operations, therefore,
must be the soul itself and not a separate
intellect.
• The form for man is one as is the form for
any individual thing; in man this form is
the rational soul. It is the principle of all
operations, whether material or spiritual.
The issue for Psychology
• What distinguishes the
barbarian from nonbarbarian?
• The non-barbarian is locked in
argument with his fellow nonbarbarian.
What is the argument all about?
• The answer to four specific
questions.
Question 1
• The problem of knowledge:
how is it that I know
anything.
Types of knowing
• Experiential knowledge
• Intuitive knowledge
Question 2
• What does one know?
• The problem of reason.
• What is the one thing each of
you know without error?
• Your own existence.
Question 3
• How should I behave, i.e.
origin of individual conduct
(morality)?
Question 4
The problem of governance?
Continental Rationalist
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Descartes - Cogito ergo sum
Spinoza – a pan theist
Leibnitz - co-developer of The Calculus
Kant – The Logic of Pure Reasoning
Hobbs – the only Brit in this group
British Empericist
• Loch – association of ideas
• Berkeley – all is perception
• Hume - advanced Loch contiguity and
reflection
• Mills
• Mills, J. S.
Wilhelm Wundt
• Developed the first laboratory of
Psychology
• Defined as a Structuralist – what is the
structure of human consciousness.
Scope of Psychology
Schools of Psychology
• Behaviorism
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Ethnologist (European)
Watsonian –Uses classical conditioing
Skinnerist
The organism as a whole
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Gestalt Perception and Sensation
Clinical
Humanistic
Psychoanalytic
Functionalism
• The emphasis: is looking at the organism
• as a unit.