The Analysis of Mind, Bertrand Russell [best desktop ebook reader .txt] 📗

>occasions. Suppose that in the end you had an abstract

memory-image of the different appearances presented by the negro

on different occasions, but no memory-image of any one of the

single appearances. In that case your image would be vague. If,

on the other hand, you have, in addition to the generalized

image, particular images of the several appearances, sufficiently

clear to be recognized as different, and as instances of the

generalized picture, you will then not feel the generalized

picture to be adequate to any one particular appearance, and you

will be able to make it function as a general idea rather than a

vague idea. If this view is correct, no new general content needs

to be added to the generalized image. What needs to be added is

particular images compared and contrasted with the generalized

image. So far as I can judge by introspection, this does occur in

practice. Take for example Semon’s instance of a friend’s face.

Unless we make some special effort of recollection, the face is

likely to come before us with an average expression, very blurred

and vague, but we can at will recall how our friend looked on

some special occasion when he was pleased or angry or unhappy,

and this enables us to realize the generalized character of the

vague image.

 

There is, however, another way of distinguishing between the

vague, the particular and the general, and this is not by their

content, but by the reaction which they produce. A word, for

example, may be said to be vague when it is applicable to a

number of different individuals, but to each as individuals; the

name Smith, for example, is vague: it is always meant to apply to

one man, but there are many men to each of whom it applies.* The

word “man,” on the other hand, is general. We say, “This is

Smith,” but we do not say “This is man,” but “This is a man.”

Thus we may say that a word embodies a vague idea when its

effects are appropriate to an individual, but are the same for

various similar individuals, while a word embodies a general idea

when its effects are different from those appropriate to

individuals. In what this difference consists it is, however, not

easy to say. I am inclined to think that it consists merely in

the knowledge that no one individual is represented, so that what

distinguishes a general idea from a vague idea is merely the

presence of a certain accompanying belief. If this view is

correct, a general idea differs from a vague one in a way

analogous to that in which a memory-image differs from an

imagination-image. There also we found that the difference

consists merely of the fact that a memory-image is accompanied by

a belief, in this case as to the past.

 

* “Smith” would only be a quite satisfactory representation of

vague words if we failed to discriminate between different people

called Smith.

 

It should also be said that our images even of quite particular

occurrences have always a greater or a less degree of vagueness.

That is to say, the occurrence might have varied within certain

limits without causing our image to vary recognizably. To arrive

at the general it is necessary that we should be able to contrast

it with a number of relatively precise images or words for

particular occurrences; so long as all our images and words are

vague, we cannot arrive at the contrast by which the general is

defined. This is the justification for the view which I quoted on

p. 184 from Ribot (op. cit., p. 32), viz. that intelligence

progresses from the indefinite to the definite, and that the

vague appears earlier than either the particular or the general.

 

I think the view which I have been advocating, to the effect that

a general idea is distinguished from a vague one by the presence

of a judgment, is also that intended by Ribot when he says (op.

cit., p. 92): “The generic image is never, the concept is always,

a judgment. We know that for logicians (formerly at any rate) the

concept is the simple and primitive element; next comes the

judgment, uniting two or several concepts; then ratiocination,

combining two or several judgments. For the psychologists, on the

contrary, affirmation is the fundamental act; the concept is the

result of judgment (explicit or implicit), of similarities with

exclusion of differences.”

 

A great deal of work professing to be experimental has been done

in recent years on the psychology of thought. A good summary of

such work up to the year agog is contained in Titchener’s

“Lectures on the Experimental Psychology of the Thought

Processes” (1909). Three articles in the “Archiv fur die gesammte

Psychologie” by Watt,* Messer** and Buhler*** contain a great

deal of the material amassed by the methods which Titchener calls

experimental.

 

* Henry J. Watt, “Experimentelle Beitrage zu einer Theorie des

Denkens,” vol. iv (1905) pp. 289-436.

 

** August Messer, “Experimentell-psychologische Untersuchu gen

uber das Denken,” vol. iii (1906), pp. 1-224.

 

*** Karl Buhler, “Uber Gedanken,” vol. ix (1907), pp. 297-365.

 

For my part I am unable to attach as much importance to this work

as many psychologists do. The method employed appears to me

hardly to fulfil the conditions of scientific experiment. Broadly

speaking, what is done is, that a set of questions are asked of

various people, their answers are recorded, and likewise their

own accounts, based upon introspection, of the processes of

thought which led them to give those answers. Much too much

reliance seems to me to be placed upon the correctness of their

introspection. On introspection as a method I have spoken earlier

(Lecture VI). I am not prepared, like Professor Watson, to reject

it wholly, but I do consider that it is exceedingly fallible and

quite peculiarly liable to falsification in accordance with

preconceived theory. It is like depending upon the report of a

shortsighted person as to whom he sees coming along the road at a

moment when he is firmly convinced that Jones is sure to come. If

everybody were shortsighted and obsessed with beliefs as to what

was going to be visible, we might have to make the best of such

testimony, but we should need to correct its errors by taking

care to collect the simultaneous evidence of people with the most

divergent expectations. There is no evidence that this was done

in the experiments in question, nor indeed that the influence of

theory in falsifying the introspection was at all adequately

recognized. I feel convinced that if Professor Watson had been

one of the subjects of the questionnaires, he would have given

answers totally different from those recorded in the articles in

question. Titchener quotes an opinion of Wundt on these

investigations, which appears to me thoroughly justified. “These

experiments,” he says, “are not experiments at all in the sense

of a scientific methodology; they are counterfeit experiments,

that seem methodical simply because they are ordinarily performed

in a psychological laboratory, and involve the co-operation of

two persons, who purport to be experimenter and observer. In

reality, they are as unmethodical as possible; they possess none

of the special features by which we distinguish the

introspections of experimental psychology from the casual

introspections of everyday life.”* Titchener, of course, dissents

from this opinion, but I cannot see that his reasons for dissent

are adequate. My doubts are only increased by the fact that

Buhler at any rate used trained psychologists as his subjects. A

trained psychologist is, of course, supposed to have acquired the

habit of observation, but he is at least equally likely to have

acquired a habit of seeing what his theories require. We may take

Buhler’s “Uber Gedanken” to illustrate the kind of results

arrived at by such methods. Buhler says (p. 303): “We ask

ourselves the general question: ‘WHAT DO WE EXPERIENCE WHEN WE

THINK?’ Then we do not at all attempt a preliminary determination

of the concept ‘thought,’ but choose for analysis only such

processes as everyone would describe as processes of thought.”

The most important thing in thinking, he says, is “awareness

that…” (Bewusstheit dass), which he calls a thought. It is, he

says, thoughts in this sense that are essential to thinking.

Thinking, he maintains, does not need language or sensuous

presentations. “I assert rather that in principle every object

can be thought (meant) distinctly, without any help from sensuous

presentation (Anschauungshilfen). Every individual shade of blue

colour on the picture that hangs in my room I can think with

complete distinctness unsensuously (unanschaulich), provided it

is possible that the object should be given to me in another

manner than by the help of sensations. How that is possible we

shall see later.” What he calls a thought (Gedanke) cannot be

reduced, according to him, to other psychic occurrences. He

maintains that thoughts consist for the most part of known rules

(p. 342). It is clearly essential to the interest of this theory

that the thought or rule alluded to by Buhler should not need to

be expressed in words, for if it is expressed in words it is

immediately capable of being dealt with on the lines with which

the behaviourists have familiarized us. It is clear also that the

supposed absence of words rests solely upon the introspective

testimony of the persons experimented upon. I cannot think that

there is sufficient certainty of their reliability in this

negative observation to make us accept a difficult and

revolutionary view of thought, merely because they have failed to

observe the presence of words or their equivalent in their

thinking. I think it far more likely, especially in view of the

fact that the persons concerned were highly educated, that we are

concerned with telescoped processes, in which habit has caused a

great many intermediate terms to be elided or to be passed over

so quickly as to escape observation.

 

* Titchener, op. cit., p. 79.

 

I am inclined to think that similar remarks apply to the general

idea of “imageless thinking,” concerning which there has been

much controversy. The advocates of imageless thinking are not

contending merely that there can be thinking which is purely

verbal; they are contending that there can be thinking which

proceeds neither in words nor in images. My own feeling is that

they have rashly assumed the presence of thinking in cases where

habit has rendered thinking unnecessary. When Thorndike

experimented with animals in cages, he found that the

associations established were between a sensory stimulus and a

bodily movement (not the idea of it), without the need of

supposing any non-physiological intermediary (op. cit., p. 100

ff.). The same thing, it seems to me, applies to ourselves. A

certain sensory situation produces in us a certain bodily

movement. Sometimes this movement consists in uttering words.

Prejudice leads us to suppose that between the sensory stimulus

and the utterance of the words a process of thought must have

intervened, but there seems no good reason for such a

supposition. Any habitual action, such as eating or dressing, may

be performed on the appropriate occasion, without any need of

thought, and the same seems to be true of a painfully large

proportion of our talk. What applies to uttered speech applies of

course equally to the internal speech which is not uttered. I

remain, therefore, entirely unconvinced that there is any such

phenomenon as thinking which consists neither of images nor of

words, or that “ideas” have to be added to sensations and images

as part of the material out of which mental phenomena are built.

 

The question of the nature of our consciousness of the universal

is much affected by our view as to the general nature of the

relation of consciousness to its object. If we adopt the view of

Brentano, according to which all mental