Functionalism - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

1 / 34
About This Presentation
Title:

Functionalism

Description:

adaptation & a good and happy life. the entwining of science & morals ... a relief as to get them gratified; and where disappointment is incessant and the ... – PowerPoint PPT presentation

Number of Views:51
Avg rating:3.0/5.0
Slides: 35
Provided by: psychology6
Category:

less

Transcript and Presenter's Notes

Title: Functionalism


1
Functionalism American Psychology
  • Structure of lecture
  • 1. Brief characterisation
  • 2. Background in C19 thinking
  • 3. William James and John Dewey as examples
  • 4. Cultural conditions the nature of
    functionalism
  • 5. The legacy of functionalism
  • And so?
  • adaptation a good and happy life
  • the entwining of science morals
    philosophy psychology?

2
A brief characterisation of functionalism
  • Central intellectual concern
  • the purposes of psychological abilities and
    properties
  • . And what they allowed people to do
  • E.g.
  • How does the mind mediate between the
    environment the needs of the organism? (Angell,
    1907)functions not structures
  • EVOLUTIONARY in tone

3
Roots
  • Place of C19 moral mental philosophy
  • Producing an appropriate social elite
  • e.g. Richards (1995, 2004)
  • Noah Porter and James McCosh

4
Noah Porter (1811-1892)
  • Philosopher
  • President of Yale 1871-1886
  • Author of The Human Intellect (1868) amongst
    other works

5
Porters Psychology
  • A science of the soul requiring
  • exact observation, precise definition, fixed
    terminology, classified arrangement and
    rational explanation (1868).
  • Phenomena apprehended by consciousness
  • Emphasized the importance of mental operations,
    individual character and the habit of
    self-knowledge

6
  • If we would know our fellow-men to do them
    good, we must first know ourselves. This
    suggests the important service which psychology
    may render to teachers of every class.
  • (Porter, The Human Intellect, 1868)
  • Self knowledge - Other knowledge
  • Protestant moral project of self scrutiny and
    this project as effortful

7
Porters psychology
  • A coming together of
  • scientific aims to know and
  • religious aims to know
  • in order to be a better person and to lead a
    better life
  • Richards (1995)
  • this approach gave psychology an explicitly
    moral dimension

8
Porters legacy
  • Psychological knowledge as having moral dimension
  • Influential on his students
  • e.g. G. T. Ladd
  • Yale Professor of mental moral philosophy
    1881
  • Taught physiological psyc from 1884
  • Wrote early, popular American texts on
  • Physiological Psychology
  • shared Ps religious leanings and the moral
    aspects of psychology
  • Also concerned with practical benefits of
    psychology
  • not an uncommon pattern

9
Some functionalist views on Psychology
  • William James (1842-1910).
  • New England, wealthy, scholarly family
  • UG at Harvard medicine
  • Early 1870s starts to recover from emotional
    problems
  • 1875 course in Physiological psychology at
    Harvard

10
Some major works
  • 1890 Principles of Psychology
  • Wundt (allegedly) Its literature, its
    beautiful, but its not Psychology
  • The Will to Believe
  • 1899 Talks to Teachers on Psychology
  • 1902 Varieties of Religious Experience
  • 1907 Pragmatism

11
Consciousness and free will
  • consciousness grows the more complex intense
    the higher we rise in the animal kingdom. it
    seems an organ, superadded to the other organs
    which maintain the animal in the struggle for
    existence the presumption is that it helps
    him in some way in the struggle.
  • consciousness helps regulate a complex nervous
    system it has adaptive value

12
  • Much of the functional value of consciousness
    came through the possession of free will.
  • James chose to believe in free will
  • opposing determinism idea that complete
    knowledge of the present allows perfect
    prediction of the future
  • BUT free will operates under constraint

13
James on emotion
  • stimuli evoke reaction experience emotion
  • stimulus behaviour experience
  • bear on path freeze fear
  • bear on path run fear
  • bear in zoo gaze admiration emotions
    differ
  • idea of emotion as embodied and action-based
    not simply mental and passive
  • Smith (1997) functionalism also embedded a
    general tendency to focus on what people do
    rather than on what they think

14
James on the self
  • Self as multi-faceted
  • known an object of knowledge empirical ego or
    me
  • material self
  • social self . itself a variety of selves
  • spiritual self
  • Self as knower transcendental ego or I
  • which cannot be the object of investigation
  • but which is the essence of personal identity
    and (illusory) sense of continuity

15
Self self-esteem
  • Self-esteem a ratio of success to pretensions
  • I, who for the time have staked my all on being a
    psychologist, am mortified if others know much
    more psychology than I. But I am contented to
    wallow in the grossest ignorance of Greek. My
    deficiencies there give me no sense of personal
    humiliation at all. Had I 'pretensions' to be a
    linguist, it would have been just the reverse. So
    we have the paradox of a man shamed to death
    because he is only the second pugilist or the
    second oarsman in the world. That he is able to
    beat the whole population of the globe minus one
    is nothing he has 'pitted' himself to beat that
    one and as long as he doesn't do that nothing
    else counts. He is to his own regard as if he
    were not, indeed he is not.

16
  • Yonder puny fellow, however, whom every one can
    beat, suffers no chagrin about it, for he has
    long ago abandoned the attempt to 'carry that
    line,' as the merchants say, of self at all. With
    no attempt there can be no failure with no
    failure no humiliation. So our self-feeling in
    this world depends entirely on what we back
    ourselves to be and do. It is determined by the
    ratio of our actualities to our supposed
    potentialities a fraction of which our
    pretensions are the denominator and the numerator
    our success thus, Self-esteem Success /
    Pretensions. Such a fraction may be increased as
    well by diminishing the denominator as by
    increasing the numerator. To give up pretensions
    is as blessed a relief as to get them gratified
    and where disappointment is incessant and the
    struggle unending, this is what men will always
    do. The history of evangelical theology, with its
    conviction of sin, its self-despair, and its
    abandonment of salvation by works, is the deepest
    of possible examples, but we meet others in every
    walk of life.

17
truth
  • James Pragmatism (1907)
  • Ideas (which themselves are just part of our
    experience) become true just in so far as they
    help us get into satisfactory relations with
    other parts of our experience.
  • truth is found through instrumental means
    truth is instrumental

18
What was Jamess Principles of Psychology about?
  • Richards (1996)
  • Principles of Psychology is at heart really
    about how to stay sane and honest

19
again a set of instructions a theory
psychology and the good life
  • Refuse to vent a passion and it dies. Count ten
    before venting your anger, and its occasion seems
    ridiculous. Whistling to keep up courage is no
    mere figure of speech. On the other hand, sit
    all day in a moping posture, sigh, and reply to
    everything in a dismal voice, and your melancholy
    lingers. There is no more valuable precept in
    moral education than this.....if we wish to
    conquer undesirable emotional tendencies in
    ourselves, we must assiduously, and in the first
    instance cold-bloodedly, go through the outward
    movements of those contrary dispositions which we
    prefer to cultivate. The reward of persistency
    will infallibly come, in the fading out of
    sullenness or depression, and the advent of real
    cheerfulness and kindliness in their stead.
    Smooth the brow, brighten the eye, contract the
    dorsal rather than the ventral aspect of the
    frame, and speak in a major key, pass the genial
    compliment, and your heart must be frigid indeed
    if it do not gradually thaw!

20
James is revealing instructing
  • On how to
  • live our lives
  • he lived his life
  • Through using
  • autobiography
  • psychological knowledge
  • moral and ethical injunctions

21
Another functionalist John Dewey (1859-1952)
  • Philosophy at Johns Hopkins
  • PhD with Hall
  • Chair in Psy Phil at Chicago
  • then Columbia
  • Education

22
Deweys most famous paper The Reflex Arc (1896)
  • Background
  • reflex stimulus-links-response
  • three stages each causing next
  • Dewey this is wrong!

23
  • Stimulus - association - response
  • are not separable psychic entities
  • they are differing functions within an integrated
    whole and one does not cause the other in any
    simple sense
  • Analogy
  • watch cat through a peephole
  • conclude whiskers cause tails

24
The S R account
Response
Stimulus
Stimulus
Response
25
Reflex arc
  • NOT
  • see candle-grasp-burn-withdraw hand
  • (stimulus-response-stimulus-response) but
  • act of looking, of seeing, reaching and pain
  • Activities obtain their significance only as part
    of the whole
  • so not see reach grasp
  • but an integrated system (see also Charles
    Sherrington)

26
Dewey as functionalist
  • Perception-action as adaptive
  • Mind was representational allowed organism to
    guide organism and allow it to adapt and
    anticipate
  • Mind is an actor on the world
  • knowledge of it becomes a means of understanding
    and then changing the world

27
Back to the cultural context
  • Summary so far
  • Broadly what functionalism is
  • Intellectual roots in moral philosophy
  • .. Psychological knowledge for improvement of
    self, others society
  • Examples of functionalist style
  • William James John Dewey

28
Where from ..?
  • Moral philosophy as discussed
  • More widely in US culture
  • Religion
  • Enlightenment project
  • Education

29
Religion
  • Centrality of religion
  • moral imperatives
  • Religious belief common among psychologists
  • compatible with science
  • allying knowledge and values
  • beware anachronistic thinking

30
Enlightenment project
  • Crudely
  • to understand the nature of the world through
    human effort the application of rational
    enquiry
  • and beliefs in the importance of direct
    experience, progress and egalitarianism.
  • Criticism in late C19 Europe
  • Germany elites fear of Enlightenment
    (Harrington, 1996)
  • But in USA more persistent Constitution ..
    Social values

31
  • Roger Smith writes of Cattell
  • Cattell, like many in his generation, believed
    in expertise as the means to make America modern,
    civilized and democratic. His interest in
    science was an interest in the occupations that
    he believed would contribute to social advance
    he was not interested in the development of an
    academic discipline for the sake of learning. It
    was precisely because these values were widely
    shared that psychology gained an academic base so
    quickly in the US in the 1890s.
    Smith (1997, p. 523)
  • my emphasis

32
Education
  • Equiping immigrants for life in America
  • Education allows exploitation of opportunity and
    to attain individual fulfilment.
  • Education a site for inculcating the right morals
    and the right values.
  • Expertise in child development and in the process
    of education was worthwhile (Baldwin, Dewey, Hall)

33
  • The project of moral training of providing a
    conventional morality in a pluralistic society
  • a. no longer solely the provinces of philosophy
    and religion but has been taken on by the New
    Psychology
  • b. it is no longer solely a programme for the
    elite - it is a moral project for the population

34
Legacies of functionalism
  • Attitude rather than specific theories
  • notion of expertise becomes central loaded.
    E.g. testing (week 4)
  • Values knowledge is of value for its own sake?
  • or for the benefit of society? Or the
    individual life?
  • Recurrent themes adaptiveness, action, Dewey and
    reflex arc, role of free will, consciousness,
    improvement
  • Are we all functionalists now?
  • Most of all how notions of values, science, and
    purposes of psychology can become inseparable?
    Discuss..
Write a Comment
User Comments (0)
About PowerShow.com