As psychology gained followers, the first debates emerged about the most important questions and appropriate approaches for the discipline.

Edward Titchener, an Englishman, became one of Wundt’s most influential students.

After graduating at Leipzig, Titchener became Professor of Psychology at Cornell University in the USA. Titchener was interested in using the tools of experimental psychology to understand mental processes. He was keenly aware of potential limitations of introspection, so he supplemented it with meticulous measurement and stimulus control. Take a look for yourself at the introductory sections of Titchener’s manual “Experimental Psychology: A Manual of Laboratory Practice”.

The manual makes clear that Titchener believed that extensive training was required to become an investigator in psychology and Titchener soon became “the paragon of laboratory meticulousness in American psychology.” (Roback, 1952).

This rigor in experimental work was done in service of identifying specific elements of consciousness and their distinct properties, such as intensity, or duration. Titchener came to believe that mental experience was assembled from elementary sensations and thus the job of a researcher was to elicit and measure these individual elements precisely. Titchener made a case for his “structuralist” psychology in his 1898 piece “The postulates of a structural psychology”, in which he likens the psychologist’s job to vivisection:

“We find a parallel to morphology in a very large portion of ‘experimental’ psychology. The primary aim of the experimental psychologist has been to analyze the structure of mind; to ravel out the elemental processes from the tangle of consciousness, or (if we may change the metaphor) to isolate the constituents in the given conscious formation. His task is a vivisection, but a vivisection which shall yield structural, not functional results. He tries to discover, first of all, what is there and in what quantity, not what it is there for.” (…)

As you can gather from the quote above, Titchener felt that the discovery of elements of consciousness had to precede an understanding of their function, something that he thought was the purview of functional psychology.

Functionalism or the Why of Consciousness

In the step “The Textbooks”, you had a chance to peruse through James’ “Principles of Psychology”. Did you notice how often he cited Charles Darwin and his evolutionary ideas?

As a reading of “Principles” attests, James was strongly influenced by Darwin’s ideas. One powerful consequence of evolutionary thinking is the tendency to ask about the ultimate reason for the existence of specific traits and behaviors: Why do birds have beaks? Why do humans cry?

This way of thinking about traits led psychologists to wonder about the motives and causes of human behavior and to conclude that to understand the workings of thought and behavior, psychologists would need to understand their ultimate function. James Rowland Angell, an American psychologist, was to put it most clearly in his “The province of functional psychology” (1907) that today is seen as the functionalists’ response to Titchener’s structuralism:

“We have to consider (1) functionalism conceived as the psychology of mental operations in contrast to the psychology of mental elements; or, expressed otherwise, the psychology of the how and why of consciousness as distinguished from the psychology of the what of consciousness. We have (2) functionalism which deals with the problem of mind conceived as primarily engaged in mediating between the environment and the needs of the organism. This is the psychology of the fundamental utilities of consciousness; (3) and lastly we have functionalism described as psychophysical psychology, that is the psychology which constantly recognizes and insists upon the essential significance of the mind-body relationship for any just and comprehensive appreciation of mental life itself.”

What do you think?

The quotes above by Titchener and Angell are an example of one of the first debates that took place at the turn of the 20th century about the proper focus of psychology. Interestingly, this debate is not a controversy about a specific empirical phenomenon, but rather a more general conceptual debate about what types of questions to address in psychology. Should psychologists first and foremost focus on identifying the elements of the mind or, instead, reason about proximate and ultimate functions of mental abilities and behaviors?

What do you think? Can you think of advantages or disadvantages of these approaches? Do you think these provide incompatible or complementary views?

Titchener likened the work of a psychologist to vivisection (the practice of performing operations on live animals for scientific research) because he thought that psychologists first needed to understand the elements of the mind before understanding their function.
Oil painting by Emile-Edouard Mouchy, 1832
(CC BY-SA 4.0; Wellcome Images)

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References

Angell, J. R. (1907). The province of functional psychology. Psychological Review, 14(2), 61-91. http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Angell/functional.htm

Titchener, E. B. (1898). The postulates of a structural psychology. Philosophical Review, 7, 449-465. http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Titchener/structuralism.htm

Roback, A. A. (1952). History of American psychology. Library Publishers. https://doi.org/10.1037/10800-000

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