The Transformation of Positivism

Lindenfeld, David

doi:10.1525/9780520312173

Cited by 20 publications

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“…After his emigration to the United States in 1937, Brunswik came into contact with new statistical methods that had a lasting impact on the development of his psychological mod- 5 Meinong scholars might insist that this might find a further elaboration in Meinong's distinction between the "target object" (Zielgegenstand) and the "auxiliary object" (Hilfsgegenstand; cf. Lindenfeld, 1980, p. 163, with Meinong, 1915/1972, where Meinong argues that different "auxiliary objects" will lead to the same "target object," and cf. p. 188.…”

Section: Brunswik and Bühler: From The Duplicity Principle To The Len...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Bringing the environment in: Early Central European contributions to an ecologically oriented psychology of perception.

Radler

2015

History of Psychology

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This article explores the Central European philosophical roots of perceptual psychology from a historical perspective. It will be shown that Alexius Meinong's notion of a forum of perception is the point of departure for a beginning inclusion of external factors in explaining perception. This conclusion is mainly because of Fritz Heider's early contributions on perception and its influence on Egon Brunswik. In addition, the impact of Meinong and Edmund Husserl-both students of Franz Brentano-on Brunswik's teacher, Karl Bühler, is highlighted.

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Section: Brunswik and Bühler: From The Duplicity Principle To The Len...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Bringing the environment in: Early Central European contributions to an ecologically oriented psychology of perception.

Radler

2015

History of Psychology

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“…Once the preconceptions stemming from outward experience are removed, inner experience reveals itself as a continuous, heterogenous flow of mental states, melting into one another in a way that could not be analysed. 13 To theorise a fluid melding of the mind's pathways and the unanalyzable quality of those states is to work against the notion of a knowable, constant self, and so to pose potentially radical challenges to conventional suppositions of a single unified individuality, in control of its thoughts and actions. In place of that coherent self is a conception of human consciousness that sits much closer to that of the weird, open to the possibility of multiplicity and contradiction, resisting stable and absolutely-determined answers.…”

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confidence: 99%

Weird Fiction and Science at the Fin de Siècle

Alder

2020

Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine

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Machen's 1890s fiction did much to establish the terms or basis of the weird tale in the latenineteenth century. Jekyll and Hyde and The Great God Pan (1890) use scientific ideas to rationalise the generating of a weird monster that then exceeds the capacity of science to know it. The predominant scientific worldview wobbles under its inability to cope and a weird version of what really is takes its place. These stories, I argue, find weird crevices in nineteenth-century science and prise the cracks open to imaginatively explore what the implications might be.Weird fiction contests a deterministic, mechanical, positivist worldview. It rejects assumptions that human beings can ultimately comprehend the universe. It makes space for the unknown and unknowable, for realms of existence beyond those of the human and indifferent to human concerns. As we see in the tales discussed here, encountersaccidental or deliberatebetween humans and other dimensions or their occupants can produce awe, wonder, insanity, horror, terror and sometimes briefly an advanced state of knowledge. The weird worldview is forward-looking. Rather than rejecting the current state of scientific knowledge (in favour of fantasy, metaphysics, gothic revenant or supernaturalism), the weird reworks it, arguing that different conceptions of "science" or "knowledge" may do better at describing reality while still allowing rational (rather than superstitious) scope for the unknown and unknowable lying beyond. "Ripples over the threshold": the weird case of Jekyll and HydeRobert Louis Stevenson's most famous story is not usually claimed for the weirdit is more often recruited to the gothic tradition and sometimes to sf. 1 Yet, James Machin points out, it was received by contemporary readers as "a 'weird story' and a 'weird novelette' with a 'weird hero', but not a Gothic novelette." 2 Traits identified in the novella by critics also mark it as weird even when they don't call it that. In a centenary essay on the multiple narrative voices of Jekyll and Hyde, Ronald R. Thomas remarks that readers "move through [the] secret door" of Enfield's story "into a world where names cannot be named, points cannot be

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“…(This argument is a familiar one in the history of psychology, as it was made by the founders of experimental psychology in Austria, Franz Brentano and Alexius Meinong, not surprisingly among the European originators of contemporary analytic philosophy [cf. Lindenfeld 1980].) For Cohen, the psychology experiment is clearly not the proper setting for the relevant encounters.…”

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confidence: 99%

Social epistemology: What’s in it for psychologists?

Fuller¹

1989

Theoretical & Philosophical Psychology

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Social epistemology (the name of both a journal and a book [Fuller 1988; also Fuller 1989]) is an interdisciplinary project that mobilizes the empirical resources of the "sociology of knowledge" (understood very broadly to include social and cognitive psychology and the social history of intellectual life) for the purposes of informing a normative philosophy of science. Put simply, then, the social epistemologist gives informed advice on how inquiry should be conducted. Because of its prescriptive character, social epistemology is nowadays most naturally seen as a branch of philosophy. However, the social epistemologist differs from most other philosophical theorists of knowledge in two respects.First, she accepts the empirical methods and findings of the human sciences as constraining the nature of the advice she gives. No doubt, to psychologists this is just to concede the obvious. After all, what good would a norm or method be that people could not follow because it exceeded their cognitive capabilities? Yet the history of epistemological speculation has largely gone against this pragmatic sensibility. From Descartes onward, it has been argued that the imperfections and limitations of actual human beings are sufficiently variable, and the possibilities for improvement sufficiently great, that one might as well devise norms and methods that would lead an idealized inquirer to greater knowledge. The social epistemologist finds this position not only scientifically unsound but also politically naive, especially in its suggestion that people would automatically submit to a method that has been determined to be the most efficient means of solving their problems.The second respect in which the social epistemologist differs from more conventional colleagues is in her broadening the normative enterprise to include considerations of the ends of inquiry, which is to say, the reasons why we might be interested in pursuing knowledge. As opposed to most of her fellow philosophers (an exception is Laudan 1984Laudan , 1987, the social epistemologist does not recognize "truth" or "the representation of reality"

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The Transformation of Positivism

Cited by 20 publications

References 0 publications

Bringing the environment in: Early Central European contributions to an ecologically oriented psychology of perception.

Bringing the environment in: Early Central European contributions to an ecologically oriented psychology of perception.

Weird Fiction and Science at the Fin de Siècle

Social epistemology: What’s in it for psychologists?

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