The positivist repudiation of Wundt

Abstract

Near the turn of the century, younger psychologists like Külpe, Titchener, and Ebbinghaus began to base their definition of psychology on the positivist philosophy of science represented by Mach and Avenarius, a development that was strongly opposed by Wundt. Psychology was redefined as a natural science concerned with phenomena in their dependence on a physical organism. Wundt's central concepts of voluntarism, value, and psychic causality were rejected as metaphysical. For psychological theory this resulted in a turn away from Wundt's emphasis on the dynamic and central nature of psychological processes toward sensationalism and processes anchored in the observable periphery of the organism. Behaviorism represents a logical development of this point of view.

The Researcher as Experimental Subject: Using Self-Experimentation to Access Experiences, Understand Social Phenomena, and Stimulate Reflexivity

“…This was the positivist repudiation of Wundt (Danziger, 1979). Psychologists such as Ebbinghaus and subsequently the behaviourists argued that Wundt's concepts were too Social Self-Experimentation 7 metaphysical and, consequently, not sufficiently observable.…”

“…Thus, there began a "fundamental shift of interest from the analysis of psychological processes, necessarily manifested in specific individuals, to the distribution of psychological characteristics in populations […] what emerged was an impersonal style of research in which experimental subjects played an anonymous role, experimenter-subject contacts were relatively brief, and the experimenter was interested in the aggregate data to be obtained from many subjects" (Danziger, 1985, p. 137). As an embrace of logical positivism throughout the natural sciences brought behaviorism to the fore of experimental psychology, self-observation was deemed by many as an inappropriate approach to laboratory science (Danziger 1979(Danziger , 2000Farr, 1983). As Farr (1978, p. 302) explains, "the experimenter now became the 'observer' and it was the behavior of the subject rather than his experience which constituted the raw data."…”

História da psicologia: pesquisa, formação, ensino

“…As contribuições de K. Danzinger (1979aDanzinger ( e b, 1984Danzinger ( , 1989Danzinger ( , 1990a traçam um itinerário por ele mesmo definido como "História Crítica da Psicologia", em que o processo histórico é considerado como o produto da interação dinâmica entre os atores humanos e o contexto social. O texto Psicologia: tra ideologia e scienza (1974) do autor italiano Dario Romano propõe uma perspectiva histórico-crítica na abordagem do estudo de conceitos utilizados pela Psicologia moderna, tais como a percepção, o eu, o inconsciente.…”

Prólogo à história da psicologia

“…Mas há, também, escorregos intertextuais do historiador da psicologia, de grandes historiadores, que contribuem para a propagação de idéias freqüentemente desorientadoras sobre o texto de grandes psicólogos (Danziger, 1979;Henle, 1980;Smith, 1986).…”

“…A história da psicologia é pródiga em exemplos de apreciações vazias do texto psicológico. Para citar a crítica apenas de três: a psicologia de Wundt é um periferalismo (Danziger, 1979), a psicologia da Gestalt é um inatismo (Henle, 1980), Tolman foi infl uenciado pelo positivismo lógico (Smith, 1986). De outro lado, o texto psicológico pode ser cego se não examina, por exemplo, se uma determinada noção de consciência é ou não atomista, ou se determinada noção de comportamento é ou não mecânica.…”