CHAPTER 1
Psychology as a Science
ALFRED H. FUCHS AND KATHARINE S. MILAR
1ORIGINS 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 20ORIGINS OF SCIENTIFIC PSYCHOLOGY
Historical accounts of the development of scientific psychol-
ogy 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 im-
mediate 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 an-
swered 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 nineteenth-
century 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
psychologyto 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
referred to the interpretation of the data of empirical psychol-
ogy through the use of reason and logic. These psychologies
were characterized as using knowledge acquired through
experience (empirical psychology) or using knowledge that
the mind possesses independent of experience (rational psy-
chology) (Murray, 1988).
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) denied the validity of any
rational psychology because, he argued, rational mental
processes must be activated by mental content derived from
experience; therefore, the study of mind must be confined to
questions appropriate to an empirical psychology (Leary,
1978). An empirical psychology of mental content could not,
Kant contended, become a proper natural science because
mental events cannot be quantified (i.e., measured or weighed),
and thus its data are neither capable of being described math-
ematically nor subject to experimental manipulation. Finally,
Kant asserted, the method of observing the mind—introspec-
tion—distorts the events observed by observing them. How-
ever, Kant suggested, psychology might improve its status as
an empirical science by adopting the methods of anthropol-
ogy to observe the activities of human beings in realistic set-
tings. This study (Leary, 1978), supplemented by drawing
upon literature, history, and biography as sources of informa-
tion about the manifestation of mind in human activity,
would base psychology upon objective observations of pub-
lic events and avoid the limitations of an empirical psychol-
ogy based solely on internal observation of private events.
Responses to Kant were not long in coming. Jakob
Friederich Fries (1773–1843) raised the status of introspection