16 Jan 08 – Brentano – Opposition to Wundt’s Physical Reductionism?

16 January 2008

On this day in 1838, Franz Brentano was born.  Brentano is known as the founder of “act psychology.”  Act psychology focused on what the mind does (its activities) rather than what is contained within it.  That is, Brentano felt that psychology should be focused on experiences as an activity rather than as a structure.  Brentano, for example, felt that physics was a secondary science, focused on the noumenal experience that physicists could only know through questioning their or others’ phenomenal experience.  In other words, physics gained knowledge indirectly – from description of experiences.  Alternatively, act psychology was focused on gaining knowledge directly: from the phenomenal experience of individuals.  Brentano’s student, Edmund Husserl, merely furthered this position in his own phenomenology movement.

The history of psychology has painted Brentano in opposition to Wundt.  Unfortunately, as I hope to describe here adequately, this is a false polemic (controversial argument).   This polemic – honestly, I do not feel it is nearly as controversial as it should be – paints Wundt as a physical reductionist and Brentano as a more holistic theorist. 

Unfortunately for this polemic, as noted in one of my prior blogs, Wundt was not a physical reductionistic.  Instead, he was more of a mind/body dualist, believing that humans possessed both a mind and a body.  In fact, he refused to reduce the one to the other.  It was his student Titchener who focused on the reductionistic nature of Wundt’s methods and Titchener’s protege Boring who framed Wundt in reductionistic terms in his very influential history of psychology. 

In fact, Wundt’s portrayal of Brentano was such that Wundt perceived that Brentano was reductionistic, and that this was the fault of Brentano’s position:

           The psychology based on self-observation, which preferred to designate itself empirical 
           [i.e., Brentano's] psychology, must therefore limit itself to an unsystematic juxtaposition
           of the facts of the consciousness; and, since it is unable to discover an inner connection
           between these facts, it splits up those components which belong together into a larger
           number of dissociated details.

As can be seen from this quote from Wundt, Wundt, in fact, saw himself as a holist and Brentano as a reductionist.  Or, more appropriately, Wundt saw Brentano’s epistemology (belief regarding knowledge development) as reductionistic and his own as holistic.  Wundt believed that he was confronting, in his methods, the mind directly.  Furthermore, he was reluctant to reduce peoples’ character to natural causes (“We cannot therefore decide immediately and empirically that personality in its inmost nature…is itself subject to natural causality.”).  Finally, he was reluctant to reduce mind to body (“…the assumption of a mental substance different from the various manifestations of mental life…involves the unjustifiable transference of a mode of thought necessary for investigation of external nature to a sphere in which it is wholly inapplicable; it implies a kind of unconscious materialism…What can this ’substance’ do for us, a substance devoid of will, of feeling, and of thought, and having no part in the constitution of our personality?”).  Hence, Wundt was improperly designated as a physical reductionist…as such, Brentano had nothing to oppose on this position. 

In fact, both Brentano and Wundt believed that reality was present “in mind.”  Hence, by both Brentano and Wundt’s estimation, psychology was a different kind of science that made possible the direct understanding of experience (whereas, as noted above, other sciences, like physics, dealt with experience indirectly – using their “objective data” to form indirect meaning merely as they spur on and lead to specific reactions in human beings – the Kantian distinction between the noumena – the reality “out there” - and the phenomena – the reality as perceived, which is all that we have access to in reality). 

Brentano, then, felt that the physicist had to deal with assumed realities – realities that were assumed to be objective (in the noumena) but all the physicist really had to go on was his or her phenomenological data reported to him or her by a person.  Similarly, Wundt felt that not only must the physicist formulate a concept of reality in order to know objective reality, but the physicist must also, necessarily, depend on the indirect evidence (phenomenal evidence) provided by other individuals to the physicist about this or that datum.  Here, then, we see virtually identical beliefs about the difference between the frame of reference of psychological investigation versus other scientific investigation: psychology provided a direct route to understanding experience.

Still, there is a component of Wundt’s scientific outlook that would sensibly lead to a reductionistic perspective…the component which Titchener took from him and that Boring portrayed in his history of psychology.  As a psychophysical parallelist (mind/body dualist), Wundt felt that there was a distinction between what could be scientifically known, in the pursuit of objective fact, and philosophical exploration of grounding issues/questions.  Wundt understood that this led to conceptual problems that are intrinsic to mind/body formulations.  As long as there was evidence for this mind/body dualism, however, Wundt felt that we could proceed on the basis of those observations, without concern to the conceptual problems that plagued such formulations.  Though he believed that the investigation of such questions complemented empirical pursuits, he did not feel they needed to be a part of them.  So, when Titchener took Wundt’s empirical method and did not accept his philosophical formulation, Wundt’s belief that, in a sense, the empiricist leading the way with the philosopher clarifying the reported results, was adapated so that all that there was was the empiricist, without any philosophical clarification.  This, ultimately, meant that all questions of mind were reduced to the physical…allowing for Boring to paint Wundt, falsely, as a physical reductionist in opposition to Brentano’s holisitc position.

In the end, however, Wundt was not a physical reductionist; though, it is probably also not appropriate to paint him as a holist, either.  Still, it wasn’t this opposition (dualism versus holism) that is descriptive of the major differences between Brentano and Wundt.  Instead, it was the methods that they chose to use.   Brentano was more open to considering the philosophical questions in his method, whereas Wundt believed and made efforts to separate empirical investigation from philosophical questioning.

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