14 Jan 08 – Orth, Imageless Thought and the Non-Revolutionary Nature of Cognitive Psychology

14 January 2008 

On this day in 1847, Johannes Orth was born.  Orth was among the members of the Wurzburg school involved in what has come to be known as the “imageless thought controversy.”  Some background is necessary to set the stage for this.  Wundt (who appears to pop up rather regularly in my blogs – you know, the “Father of Psychology” by some people’s estimation) had two well known students: Titchener and Kulpe.  Both Titchener and Kulpe disagreed with the restrictions that Wundt placed on experimentation. 

Kulpe, for his part, founded the Wurzburg school.  Two of his students, including Orth, developed some experiments to extend the scope of introspective experimental methods in order to study thought.  Orth and his colleague Meyer performed a word association experiment where the participants (including Meyer and Orth themselves – which, by the way, was common practice at the time) were asked to report everything that came to their mind between hearing the word and giving their response.  Orth and Meyer found that the participants frequently indicated that thoughts came to their consciousness that were not quite definite images nor were they acts of will.  These indescribable non-sensory events were called “states of consciousness” by the researchers.   

Wundt refused to accept the new methods that the Wurzburg school used in these investigations because they were retrospective – looking back and thinking about what had occurred between the word presentation and the response given.  This led to the “imageless thought controversy” (though, Wundt was more concerned with the problem of method than the problem of thought content).    

Titchener – not Wundt – was at odds with the results (even though, as indicated above, he felt that Wundt’s methods were too restrictive): he did not believe that “imageless thought” was a reality.  Instead, he felt that the participants were merely poorly trained and demonstrated a “stimulus error” (reporting what the thoughts signified not what they actually were).  So, he trained his own investigators as participants and, lo and behold, the results of his own investigations confirmed his own beliefs: there were no reports of imageless thought when participants were properly trained to avoid the stimulus error. 

Looking back, we can clearly see that neither of these schools had objective results.  Still, probably what we should realize is these results are clear exemplars of the fact that no experiment is completely objective.  These researchers, just as modern day researchers, have a particular perspective and expectation of results of experimentation.  Though we do take pains today to control for other possibilities entering into the results, we cannot control for everything.  One of the most difficult things to control for, especially as they are not made explicit in most experiments, are the experimenter’s own biases.  In fact, many analyses indicate that the role of experimenter bias is great (especially in terms of what are referred to as allegiance effects and sponsorship effects – look back in my blog and you will find some mention of these). 

What I’d like to turn to, briefly, is a point regarding the imageless thought controversy and the so-called “cognitive revolution.”  Many, such as Leahy, for example, have argued that the cognitive revolution was not a revolution because, among other reasons, it was slow in development, initiated outside of the field, did not occur internationally, and followed a similar logic as did behaviorism (e.g., it was based on a linear deterministic model with stimulus preceding response – it merely smuggled in the observer in the middle – this was also discussed by Slife…you can see my website under the “controversial issues in psychology” link for more on this).  Still, I think there is another reason why it was not revolutionary: it was merely a regression to the days that preceded behaviorism. 

Behaviorism, looking back at history, was a response to the controversy regarding the imageless thought experiments.  The final determination, if there was one, was that neither side had a legitimate response to the controversy.  Unable to explain the phenomenon, the behaviorists (like Watson, specifically) dismissed thought as a variable (even though Watson, in response to Dunlap’s presentation with the problems of thoughts before Watson’s development of his behavioral perspective indicated that he believed that thoughts were quite significant).  In other words, he left thoughts unaccounted for. 

Cognitive theory was merely a return to attempting to account for thought, though using a different method (in fact, this is in the name “cognitive” = “thought”).  This was similarly attempted by the Gestalt theorists in response to the imageless thought controversy – Gestalt theory just did not catch on with the prevalent behavioral theory that was ascendant at the time.  Cognitive therapy, then, was merely a reversion to what was attempting to be accomplished in Wundt’s experiments and in the Wurzburg school: understanding of thought processes.  If anything, the cognitive psychology recognized an unscientific pursuit: the discounting and not accounting for a phenomenon of significance to psychology (even if they discounted its nonmaterial nature in the process). 

Fuel for thought, I guess… head to my website GivingPsychologyAway.net for more fuel for thought regarding psychology.