1 For an interesting reading of James’s theory of truth in an emergentist sense, see Pihlström 2007.Ģ The philosophical psychology of William James is, in this perspective, seminal for the development of the reflection on the concept of the emergent in both psychology and sociology.Secondly, given the original proximity of psychology and sociology, this reconstruction is propaedeutic to showing that the reflections on emergence, particularly in authors such as Durkheim and Parsons, have played a crucial antireductionist role by disengaging the science of social phenomena from psychology. On the one hand, he aims to reconstruct the history of the conception of emergentism, starting with the works of Comte, Durkheim, James and Lewes as well as German organicists, to show how some of their insights have profoundly influenced the formation of contemporary cognitive sciences and philosophy of mind. Experience physically alters the structure and function of the brain.1 In an interesting work in which he reconstructs the history of the concept of the emergent in psychology and sociology, R. Keith Sawyer (2002) identifies for psychology four schools of investigation: the so-called British emergentism, Gestalt psychology, American Pragmatism (until the 30s) and the recent philosophy of mind and cognitive sciences (1970s-90s).We constantly modify our behavior, beliefs, and attitudes according to what we perceive about the people around us.We are consciously aware of only a small part of our mental activity. The mind is a product of a physical machine, the brain.We will repeatedly encounter four important principles of psychology:.Critical thinking and skepticism have dismantled and refuted many long-held psychological myths.Nevertheless, women like Margaret Floy Washburn, Mary Whiton Calkins, Mary Cover Jones, and Mamie Phipps Clark made important contributions to the new field.ġ.3 Psychological Myths and Four Principles of Psychology Until recently, prevalent social attitudes largely excluded women and minorities from most scientific fields, including psychology.The resulting “cognitive revolution” influenced every area of psychology and encouraged the growth of neuroscience to directly monitor brain activities underlying behavior.In the dawn of computers, cognitive psychologists also rejected behaviorism’s restrictive vision, demonstrating that human information processing could be understood by carefully controlling sensory information, asking the participants to perform some mental task, and then noting their behavioral output, to discern processes at work in the mind. Gestalt psychologists, including Max Wertheimer and Wolfgang Köhler, studied perception, noting that our perception of any observed scene was more than just the sum of its parts, thus demonstrating that mental functions that could not be directly observed could nevertheless be studied.Skinner, further emphasized the careful measurement of behavior, specifically when organisms are learning, and rejected the study of any mental phenomena, like emotions and consciousness, that could not be directly observed. In America, William James and his colleagues rejected purely introspective investigation and formed functionalism, the school of psychology emphasizing the adaptive function of behavior and the careful measurement of the behavior of other people and animals.He and his students formed the structuralist school of psychology, using introspection to discover the structure of the mind. Wilhelm Wundt established the first laboratory for psychology research in Leipzig, Germany, in 1879.The largely German field of psychophysics in the nineteenth century strove to measure the limits of human sensory detection, demonstrating the power of careful measurement of human behavior.Charles Darwin and his followers proposed that behaviors evolved by natural selection and that the behavior of animals offered important insights into the human mind.Empiricist philosophers like John Locke insisted that we get vital information from our senses, and posited that a person’s mind at birth is a tabula rasa that experience can mold to support a wide range of behavior.Philosophers like Plato and René Descartes believed the senses offered an unreliable understanding of the world and believed knowledge should be based on logic and reason.Some researchers have speculated that the human brain can only manage social relations with about 150 people. Early humans had to know enough about the behavior of other people to remain safely in the group.
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