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Psychology As Science

CHAPTER 1

Psychology as a Science
ALFRED H. FUCHS AND KATHARINE S. MILAR

ORIGINS OF SCIENTIFIC PSYCHOLOGY 1 The Philosophical Context 1 The Scientific Context 2 PSYCHOLOGY’S FIRST LABORATORY 3 BEYOND THE FIRST LABORATORY: EVOLUTION OF THE DISCIPLINE 6 Psychology in Germany 6 Psychology in America 6

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL LABORATORY AND THE PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPERIMENT 8 The Rise of Laboratories in America 8 The Evolution of the Laboratory Experiment 8 Defining Psychology and Its Methods 9 The Rise of Cognitive Psychology: Mentalism Revisited 19 REFERENCES 20

ORIGINS OF SCIENTIFIC PSYCHOLOGY Historical accounts of the development of scientific psychology place the origins of the discipline in Germany at about the middle of the nineteenth century. The ferment produced by British and continental philosophies of mind and the advances of research in sensory physiology provided the immediate context for the beginning of the new psychology. The pursuit of knowledge about mind and its processes has a history that is embedded in the history of philosophy. The late-eighteenth-century declaration that a true scientific study of the mind was not possible posed a challenge that was answered in the nineteenth century when the possibility of a scientific study of mind emerged within philosophy by the adoption of the experimental methods employed to study the physiology of the senses. The synergy of these nineteenthcentury developments gave impetus to the “new psychology” whose history embodies continued efforts to develop and maintain psychology as a scientific discipline and to extend the methods of science to an ever-widening field of inquiry within the discipline. The Philosophical Context Christian Wolff (1679–1754) first popularized the term psychology to designate the study of mind. Wolff divided the discipline between empirical and rational psychology. The data of mind that resulted from observing ourselves and others constituted empirical psychology; rational psychology
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