An Approach to Philosophy of Cognitive Science

A century ago, psychology was in the process of separating from philosophy and becoming an experimental science, while also distinguishing itself from physiology. It is usually said that the father of experimental psychology was Wilhelm Wundt, who began conducting experiments in a laboratory in Leipzig in 1879. The domain of Wundt's investigation was that of conscious mental states and processes and his experimental method was skilled introspection under controlled circumstances. The scope of his experiments was relatively narrow, for introspection as Wundt used the notion was not a matter of retrospective and discursive description of phases of one's mental life. Experiments principally concerned sensations rather than higher mental processes and participants – who were usually the same people that conducted the experiments – were typically asked to report the onset of a sensation or to say whether two sensations were the same or different (Danziger, 1980, Thomas, 2001). Wundt's project was taken to the United States by E.B. Titchener who completed his B.A. degree at Oxford – classics, philosophy, and a year of physiology – and, after doctoral research with Wundt, became professor of psychology at Cornell in 1882. Titchener and Oswald Külpe – another of Wundt's students – extended the experimental method of introspection far beyond the bounds that Wundt had set for it, so as to include higher mental processes of thinking within its scope. Titchener claimed that mental images were, in effect, the bearers of content or meaning in thinking and in the early twentieth century he and Külpe were involved in an extended controversy over the possibility of imageless thought. During this period, while Wundt worked at Leipzig and Titchener at Cornell, William James held a series of positions in physiology, philosophy and psychology at Harvard. There are differences between James's teleological functionalist approach and the structuralism of Wundt and Titchener. But both sides were agreed that the emerging discipline of experimental psychology was to be the science of the conscious mind. The experimental approach to psychology was taken up more rapidly in the United States than in Britain. The resources at our disposal, in imparting to Psychology a scientific character, are now numerous. At the head, must still remain Introspection, or the self-consciousness of each individual working apart.. .. In the enumeration of means now available for the study are included observations (and experiments) directed upon Infants, upon Abnormal and Exceptional minds, upon Animals, and …