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Psychology versus Immediate Experience

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

Edward Chace Tolman
Edward Chace Tolman*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley, Calif.
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Abstract

In this paper I am going to try to indicate my notion concerning the nature and subject-matter of psychology. I am a behaviorist. I hold that psychology does not seek descriptions and intercommunications concerning immediate experience per se. Such descriptions and attempts at direct intercommunications may be left to the arts and to metaphysics. Psychology seeks, rather, the objectively stateable laws and processes governing behavior. Organisms, human and sub-human, come up against environmental stimulus situations and to these stimulus situations they, after longer or shorter intervals of time, behave. The laws and processes determining this their behavior are stateable in objective terms. Even in the cases where the organism is oneself, these determining causal factors can and must—for the purposes of psychology—be stated objectively. It is true that in these latter instances, in which the animal in question is oneself, one may in one's rôle, not of a psychologist, but of an artist or a metaphysician, attempt to describe and convey to another man one's own facts of immediate experience. But such a description and report of immediate experiences, except in so far as this report is itself a form of behavior and therefore like all other behaviors the basis for an investigation of the objective laws and processes underlying it, essentially new to the picture. Experience qua experience, while of concern and interest to the man in the street, the philosopher and the poet, does not enter as such into the laws and equations of psychology,—in so far, at any rate, as psychology is to be considered as a science.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 2 , Issue 3 , July 1935 , pp. 356 - 380
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1935

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Footnotes

1

Presented before the Kosmos Club of the University of California. February, 1934.

References

2 For a previous but less completely thought through statement of the position to be presented here see E. C. Tolman, Purposive Behavior in Animals and Men, New York, The Century Company, 1932, especially Chapters XXIV and XXV.

3 I shall throughout use the phrase “immediate experience” to designate the immediately given pre-analytical complex (to borrow Professor Loewenberg's term. Cf. J. Loewenberg, Pre-analytical and post-analytical data, J. Philos., 1927, 24, 5–14.) as this appears to the naïve man and before the subtilities of philosophical and scientific analysis have been applied to it.

4 Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy, New York, Henry Holt and Company Home University Library of Modern Knowledge. No. 35, p. 11f.

5 S. C. Pepper, Categories—Studies in the problem of relations, Univ. Calif. Publ. Philos., 1930, 13, 73–98.

6 That is, such work as that of Brunswik, Katz, Hering, Bühler, Gelb, Koffka, Kardos, Thouless, E. R. Jaensch, on the so-called problem of “Dingkonstanz.” For references, see L. Kardos, Ding und Schatten—“Eine experimentelle Untersuchung über die Grundlagen des Farbensehens.” I. Abst. Zeitschr. f. Psychologie Ergänzungeband 23, 1934, and E. Brunswik vide infra.

7 Egon Brunswik, Wahrnehmung und Gegenstandswelt—Grunglegung einer Psychologie vom Gegenstand her, Deuticke, Leipzig und Wien, 1934.

8 It is, of course, to be noted that in the case in which he perceptually “intends” an independent—the special circumstances of the latter, such as its distance, its special lighting, its plane of rotation and the like also affect the individual's sense-organs and must so to speak be taken into account by the perceptual apparatus, if the approximately true values of the independent is to be attained. But this the perceptual apparatus inevitably does, and the final product in no way presents psychologically a more “derived” character to the percipient than in the case where he is perceptually intending not the independent but the perspective.

9 L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico—Philosophicus, Kegan Paul, 1927.

10 M. Schlick, Positivismus und Realismus, Erkenntnis, 1932, 3, 1.

11 R. Carnap, Der Logische Aufbau der Welt, Weltkreis-Verlag, 1928.

12 P. W. Bridgman, The Logic of Modern Physics, Macmillan, 1927.

13 C. I. Lewis, Mind and the World Order, Scribner's, 1929.

14 H. Feigl and A. Blumberg, Logical Positivism, J. Philos., 1931, 28, 281.

15 Carnap and Feigl have, to be sure, prepared the way, but they have done it only for “molecular behaviorism” and not for “molar behaviorism.” R. Carnap, Psychologie in Physikalischer Sprache. Erkenntnis, Vol. 3, 107–142. H. Feigl, Logical analysis of the psychophysical problem. A contribution to the new positivism. Philosophy of Science, 1934, 1, 420–445. A similar point of view to that presented here but not worked out in detail for psychology seems to be that of the zoologist, Russell. Cf. E. O. Russell. The study of behaviour, Nature, 1934, 134, 835–839.

16 Cf. J. G. Yoshioka, Weber's law in the discrimination of maze distance by the white rat, Univ. Calif. Publ. Psychol., 1929, 4, 155–184.

17 Cf. E. G. Tolman and C. F. Sams, Time discrimination in white rats, J. Comp. Psychol., 1925, 5, 255–263.

18 T. L. McCullough, Performance preferentials of the white rat in force-resisting and spatial dimensions, J. Comp. Psychol., 1934, 18, 85–112.

19 M. H. Elliott, The effect of change of reward on the maze performance of rats, Univ. Calif. Publ. Psychol., 1928, 4, 19–30.

20 W. Köhler, Optischen Untersuchungen am Schimpanzen und am Haushuhn, Abh. d. Kgl. Preuss. Akad. d. Wiss., 1915, Phys-math. Kl. Nr. 3, p. 29.

W. Köhler, Ueber eine neue Methode zur psychologische Untersuchung von Menschenaffen, Psychol. Forsch., 1922, 1, 390–397.

For similar experiments indicating that hens respond to independent colors and not perspective colors see D. Katz und G. Révész, Experimentelle Studien zur vergleichenden Psychologie, Zt. f. Angew. Psychol., 1921, 18, 307–320.

21 I. Krechcvsky, “Hypotheses” versus “Chance” in the pre-solution period in sensory discrimination-learning, Univ. Calif. Publ. Psychol., 1932, 6, 27–44.

I. Krechevsky, The docile nature of “hypotheses,” J. Comp. Psychol., 1933, 15, 429–433.

I. Krechevsky, The genesis of “hypotheses” in rats, Univ. Calif. Publ. Psychol., 1932, 6, 45–64.

22 W. Brown and F. Whittell, Yerkes' multiple choice method with human adults, J. Comp. Psychol., 1923, 3, 305–326.

23 Cf. K. Lewin, “Environmental Forces”—Handbook of Child Psychology, edited by C. Murchison, 2nd rev. edit. Worcester, Clark University Press, 1933.