Sixteen Experimental Investigations from the Harvard Psychological Laboratory, Hugo Münsterberg [top fiction books of all time TXT] 📗
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caused by simultaneously given stimuli.
A few observations made in connection with these experiments are of
general interest. The frog, when it first sees a moving object,
usually draws the nictitating membrane over the eye two or three times
as if to clear the surface for clearer vision. Frequently this action
is the only evidence available that the animal has noticed an object.
This movement of the eyelids I have noticed in other amphibians and
in reptiles under similar conditions, and since it always occurs when
the animals have need of the clearest possible vision, I think the
above interpretation of the action is probably correct.
Secondly, the frog after getting a glimpse of an object orients
itself by turning its head towards the object, and then waits for a
favorable chance to spring. The aiming is accurate, and as previously
stated the animal is persistent in its attempts to seize an object.
XII. THE PAIN-SCREAM OF FROGS.
While making measurements of the frog’s reaction time to electrical
stimulation, I noticed that after a few repetitions of a 2-volt,
.0001-ampère stimulus an animal would frequently make a very peculiar
noise. The sound is a prolonged scream, like that of a child, made by
opening the mouth widely. The ordinary croak and grunt are made with
closed or but slightly opened mouth. The cry at once reminds one of
the sounds made by many animals when they are frightened. The rabbit,
for example, screams in much the same way when it is caught, as do
also pigs, dogs, rats, mice and many other animals. The question
arises, is this scream indicative of pain? While studying reaction
time I was able to make some observations on the relation of the
scream to the stimulus.
First, the scream is not given to weak stimuli, even upon many
repetitions. Second, it is given to such strengths of an electrical
stimulus as are undoubtedly harmful to the animal. Third, after a frog
has been stimulated with a strong current (two volts), until the
scream is given with almost every repetition, it will scream in the
same way when even a weak stimulus is applied. If, for instance, after
a two-volt stimulus has been given a few times, the animal be merely
touched with a stick, it will scream. It thus appears as if the strong
stimulus increases the irritability of the center for the
scream-reflex to such an extent that even weak stimuli are sufficient
to cause the reaction. Are we to say that the weak stimulus is painful
because of the increased irritability, or may it be concluded that the
reflex is in this case, like winking or leg-jerk or the head-lowering
and puffing, simply a forced movement, which is to be explained as an
hereditary protective action, but not as necessarily indicative of any
sort of feeling. Clearly if we take this stand it may at once be said
that there is no reason to believe the scream indicative of pain at
any time. And it seems not improbable that this is nearer the truth
than one who hears the scream for the first time is likely to think.
The pain-scream is of interest in this consideration of auditory
reactions because it increases the range of sounds which we should
expect frogs to hear if we grant the probability of them hearing their
own voices.
It may be worth while to recall at this point the fact that a whistle
from the human lips—the nearest approach to the pain-scream among the
sounds which were used as stimuli in the experiments on
respiration—caused marked inhibition of respiration. Perhaps this
fact may be interpreted in the light of the pain-scream reaction. I
may add that I have never seen a frog give a motor reaction to the
pain-scream. Thinking it would certainly alarm the animals and cause
them to make some movement which would serve for reaction-time
measurements, I made repeated trials of its effects, but could never
detect anything except respiratory changes.
*
STUDIES IN PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORY.
*
THE POSITION OF PSYCHOLOGY IN THE SYSTEM OF KNOWLEDGE.
BY HUGO MÜNSTERBERG.
The modern efforts to bring all sciences into a system or at least to
classify them, from Bacon to Spencer, Wundt and Pearson have never, if
we abstract here from Hegel, given much attention to those questions
of principle which are offered by the science of psychology. Of course
the psychological separation of different mental functions has often
given the whole scheme for the system, the classification thus being
too often more psychological than logical. Psychology itself,
moreover, has had for the most part a dignified position in the
system; even when it has been fully subordinated to the biological
sciences, it was on the other hand placed superior to the totality of
mental and moral sciences, which then usually have found their unity
under the positivistic heading ‘sociology.’ And where the independent
position of psychology is acknowledged and the mental and moral
sciences are fully accredited, as for instance with Wundt, psychology
remains the fundamental science of all mental sciences; the objects
with which philology, history, economics, politics, jurisprudence,
theology deal are the products of the processes with which psychology
deals, and philology, history, theology, etc., are thus related to
psychology, as astronomy, geology, zoölogy are related to physics.
There is thus nowhere a depreciation of psychology, and yet it is not
in its right place. Such a position for psychology at the head of all
‘Geisteswissenschaften’ may furnish a very simple classification for
it, but it is one which cannot express the difficult character of
psychology and the complex relations of the system of mental sciences.
The historical and philological and theological sciences cannot be
subordinated to psychology if psychology as science is to be
coördinated with physics, that is, if it is a science which describes
and explains the psychical objects in the way in which physics
describes and explains the physical objects. On the other hand, if it
means in this central position of mental sciences a science which does
not consider the inner life as an object, but as subjective activity
needing to be interpreted and subjectively understood, not as to its
elements, but as to its meaning, then we should have two kinds of
psychology, one which explains and one which interprets. They would
speak of different facts, the one of the inner life as objective
content of consciousness, as phenomenon, the other of the inner life
as subjective attitude, as purpose.
The fact is, that these two sciences exist to-day. There are
psychologists who recognize both and keep them separated, others who
hold to the one or the other as the only possible view; they are
phenomenalists or voluntarists. Mostly both views are combined, either
as psychological voluntarism with interposed concessions to
phenomenalism or as phenomenalism with the well-known concessions to
voluntarism at the deciding points. Further, those who claim that
psychology must be phenomenalistic—and that is the opinion of the
present writer—do not on that account hold that the propositions of
voluntarism are wrong. On the contrary: voluntarism, we say, is right
in every respect except in believing itself to be psychology.
Voluntarism, we say, is the interpretative account of the real life,
of immediate experience, whose reality is understood by understanding
its meaning sympathetically, but we add that in this way an objective
description can never be reached. Description presupposes
objectivation; another aspect, not the natural aspect of life, must be
chosen to fulfill the logical purposes of psychology: the
voluntaristic inner life must be considered as content of
consciousness while consciousness is then no longer an active subject
but a passive spectator. Experience has then no longer any meaning in
a voluntaristic sense; it is merely a complex of elements. We claim
that every voluntaristic system as far as it offers descriptions and
explanations has borrowed them from phenomenalistic psychology and is
further filled up by fragments of logic, ethics and æsthetics, all of
which refer to man in his voluntaristic aspect. We claim, therefore,
that such a voluntaristic theory has no right to the name psychology,
while we insist that it gives a more direct account of man’s real life
than psychology can hope to give, and, moreover, that it is the
voluntaristic man whose purpose creates knowledge and thus creates the
phenomenalistic aspect of man himself.
We say that the voluntaristic theory, the interpretation of our real
attitudes, in short teleological knowledge, alone can account for the
value and right of phenomenalistic psychology and it thus seems unfair
to raise the objection of ‘double bookkeeping.’ These two aspects of
inner life are not ultimately independent and exclusive; the
subjective purposes of real life necessarily demand the labors of
objectivistic psychology. The last word is thus not dualistic but
monistic and the two truths supplement each other. But this
supplementation must never be misinterpreted as meaning that the two
sciences divide inner experience, as if, for instance, the
phenomenalistic study dealt with perceptions and ideas, the
voluntaristic with feelings and volitions. No, it is really a
difference of logical purpose of treatment and thus a difference of
points of view only; the whole experience without exception must be
possible material for both. There is no feeling and no volition which
is not for the phenomenalist a content of consciousness and nothing
else. There is, on the other hand, no perception and no idea which is
not, or better, ought not to be for the voluntarist a means, an aim, a
tool, an end, an ideal. In that real life experience of which the
voluntarist is speaking, every object is the object of will and those
real objects have not been differentiated into physical things under
the abstract categories of mechanics on the one hand, and psychical
ideas of them in consciousness on the other; the voluntarist, if he is
consistent, knows neither physical nor psychical phenomena.
Phenomenalist and voluntarist thus do not see anything under the same
aspect, neither the ideas nor the will.
This difference is wrongly set forth if the antithesis to voluntarism
is called intellectualism. Intellectualism is based on the category of
judgment, and judgment too is a ideological attitude. Phenomenalism
does not presuppose a subject which knows its contents but a subject
which simply has its contents; the consciousness which has the
thought as content does not take through that the voluntaristic
attitude of knowing it and the psychologist has therefore no reason to
prefer the thought to the volition and thus to play the
intellectualist. If the psychologist does emphasize the idea and its
elements, the sensations, it is not because they are vehicles of
thought but because their relations to physical objects make them
vehicles of communication. The elements of ideas are negotiable and
thus through their reference to the common physical world indirectly
describable; as the elements of ideas are alone in this position, the
psychologist is obliged to consider all contents of consciousness,
ideas and volitions alike, as complexes of sensations.
The antithesis is also misinterpreted, or at least wrongly narrowed,
if it is called voluntarism versus associationism. Recent
discussions have sufficiently shown that the principle of association
is not the only possible one for phenomenalistic theories. If
associationism is identified with objective psychology, all the
well-founded objections to the monopoly of the somewhat sterile
principle of association appear as objections to phenomenalism in
psychology, and voluntaristic theories, especially those which work
with the teleological category of apperception, are put in its place.
But without returning to apperceptionism we can overcome the
one-sidedness of associationism if full use is made of the means which
the world of phenomena offers to theory. The insufficiency of
associationism disappears if the content of consciousness is
considered as variable not only as to
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