Psychoneurology: The Program

As a science emerges from a common-sense understanding of certain kinds of phenomena it only gradually becomes clear what are the fundamental entities of the ‘world’ under study. Psychology grew out of our everyday reflections on the beliefs and practices relevant to people thinking, acting, feeling and perceiving. The scientific study of these phenomena should, we believe, be built on a common fundamental presumption: that persons are the basic beings at the root of a scientific psychology. It is persons who think, act, feel and perceive. Persons are the fundamental entities of psychology. In a sense a person has no parts, in particular, a person is not a union of a mind and a body. However, while persons have no parts, each person, though a singularity, has a vast array of attributes. Some are material attributes and some are mental capacities, powers and dispositions. Though people are sometimes acted on by outside forces they always retain their status as ultimate agents, at least in principle. Personal agency, we might say, is the default position when we are studying what people do. When people lose their powers to think, act, feel and perceive the world around them and the condition of their own bodies, we take them to be in need of care and perhaps of cure. For example, in the law courts we consider the accused responsible for his or her actions, unless there is a successful plea of insanity. For more than four centuries psychology was led away from the most fruitful research domain by the widespread assumption that we should treat the material attributes of persons as properties of the human body, a material substance, and the mental attributes of persons as properties of a parallel stuff, the human mind. Persons were taken to be ‘miraculous’ conglomerates of bodies and minds, a material thing somehow joined to an immaterial thing. In the 20th century this duality assumption subtly influenced the thinking of the majority of psychologists. Even those who rejected the idea of the mental aspects of a human being as attributes of a substantival mind, nevertheless still implicitly subscribed to the distinction between mind and body even and especially when they declared that the way human beings think, act, feel and perceive can be understood in material terms. We believe that the next step in the development of psychology, as a human science for the third millennium, will be achieved when the very distinction between minds and bodies is abandoned.