Modern psychology

In a behavioral view, the purposes of science are primarily prediction and control. To the extent that a scientist embraces both of these as a unified and generally applicable criterion for science, certain philosophical and theoretical practices are counterproductive, including mentalism in both its metaphysical and metatheoretical forms. It is possible and often worthwhile to recast some mentalistic talk into an issue of behavior-behavior relations. When behavior-behavior relations are approached non-mechanisti-cally, however, analysis cannot stop at the level of the relations themselves. Several analytic concepts common in the behavioral community share some of the dangers of mentalism ifnot employed properly, including such concepts as self-reinforcement, response-produced stimulation, and self-rules.

Psychiatry, Depression & Anxiety

The concept of choice and free will are only relevant to Skinner's theory as a means to an end, in that he views individual differences as the direct result of consequential contingencies . Choice and freewill are not useful constructs in the manipulation of environmental stimuli such as removing your hand from a hot stove. The theory presupposes that all behavior responses are based on consequences and distinguishable discriminative stimuli in the individual's environmental experience. Skinner asks what selves are operating in the statement a person knows him or herself . Who is the knower and who is the known? This is an existential contemplation that leads him to question the concept of multiple selves and the integration of those selves. This lends itself to Freud's model of mind and personality . The dimension of purely private events that are beyond even the individual's

Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 2007

Out of the eight points of methodological criticism against contemporary psychology formulated by Watson (Psychological Bulletin 31:755-776, 1934) and put forward by Toomela in this issue, the overemphasis on prediction, the neglect of individual differences, the habit of the differences between the mental states of subjects in objective experimental conditions are particularly important. Modern cognitive psychology has began to remedy those problems, in part by proposing broad, integrative theories. It is not useful to subdivide psychology into "schools of thought" defined by their methodological practices.

In this paper I discuss (1) the nontechnical nature of the term "behavior"; (2) the need to revisit the Aristotelian concept of soul as the prime naturalistic subject matter of psychology; (3) the incompleteness of meaning when behavior is identified with movements or actions; (4) the implication of behavior in episodic and dispositional words and statements including mental terms; (5) that mental concepts are not learned by inner or outer ostension to physical properties of the speaker or of others; and (6) the concept of behavior involves a two-fold abstraction, involving speaking with terms about doing and saying, on the one hand, and speaking about those terms with which we speak, on the other.

Theory of Social Identity as referred to the Meta-Theory of Lev Vygotsky Academician V. Lektorsky, who has been the editor-in-chief of Voprosy filosofii, a journal of the Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences, since 1987, and the new editor-in-chief who is replacing him just at this time, V. Pruzhinin, conducted a joint interview with the Hungarian scientist László Garai, a theoretical psychologist and researcher in problems of social and economic psychology.

1984

I examine Skinner's objections to mentalism, concluding that his only valid objections concern the "specious explanations" that mentalism might afford, and their fostering explanations that are incomplete, circular, or faulty inother ways. Unfortunately, themere adoption of behavioristic terminology does not solve that problem. It camouflages the nature of "private events," while providing no protection from specious explanations. I argue that covert states and events are causally effective, and may be sufficiently different in their nature to deserve a name other than "behavior." To call such events "mental" does not force a dualistic metaphysics: Such a distinction can be easily assimilated by an "emergent behaviorism." Emergent behaviorism will make explicit use of theories. It will be inductive and pragmatic, and will evaluate hypothetical constructs in terms of their utility inclarifying and solving the outstanding problems of the discipline.

Psychology as a science grew out of a branch of philosophy concerned with understanding the mind. William James' Principles of Psychology (1890) defined psychology as the study of Mental Life, which includes feelings, desires, reasoning, cognition, etc. These phenomena could be studied by collecting data through verbal report and introspection. James was not so concerned with the validity of these types of data as a "window" into consciousness. He decided to leave the metaphysical question "what is consciousness?" to the philosophers. Though James realized that the problem was not solved by sweeping it under the carpet, he wished to put off empirical investigation of such metaphysical musings until a future date. By the beginning of the following century, empirical psychologists went even further than James in claiming that consciousness and mental life could not be investigated scientifically at all. Rather, they claimed that overt behavior provided the only phenomena that could be objectively studied, and that our theoretical interpretations should be concerned only with the explanation of such behavior. However, with the renewed interest in cognition in humans and animals beginning in the 1930s and 1940s with Tolman in learning theory and Koehler and (later) Gibson in Gestalt psychology, the study of mental life in general, and consciousness in particular has become fashionable again. The reason for this reintroduction of consciousness was not due to the abandonment of behaviorism, but from relaxing the strict constraints initially imposed by the early behaviorists on the investigation of observable behavior. We still agree that overt (including muscular, verbal, neuronal, sensory, etc.) behavior provides us with the only data from which to construct and test psychological theories; however, we can infer intervening variables or hypothetical constructs that are presumed to mediate input to output such that we can explain large sets of data with few variables, and can make predictions regarding the effects of intended manipulations.

2023

This multifaceted analytical paper aims at bridging the gap between philosophy and cognitive neuroscience. Specifically, the paper addresses the role of psychological concepts in the empirical sciences. The author sets off by asking why psychological concepts could be needed in philosophy when the mainstream of sciences seems to explore only physical phenomena. The author's argument focuses on three major aspects and is substantiated by a good deal of pertinent references. First, the major claim of the author is that people become aware of a mental image or memory through introspection. He states that only external behaviour of subjects and the circumstantial conditions are directly observable, while the minds of other people and their psychological processes and phenomena are not. Although the author concedes that introspection is not suited to reveal how these psychological entities arise or what they are in essence, he posits that researchers reach their insights by comparing what they observed in others with their own experiences. Accordingly, the author suggests that empirical psychologists and cognitive scientists rely on the conscious observation of their own psychological phenomena when, for example, they are judging their perception of other subjects. Second, the author highlights that humans have the concept of introspection because they have the ability to introspect. Also, the author states that the concept of introspection has a meaning and that psychological concepts are meaningful because they refer to existing psychological phenomena. In his view psychological language is necessary to describe psychological phenomena. Moreover, a person becomes aware of the meaning of a psychological concept through introspection that is supposed to result from brain activity. Third, it is emphasized by the author that we believe in the existence of other people's psychological processes because we are aware of our own psychological processes. He explains that this notion will lead to a challenging contradiction, namely that when people refer to the concept of introspection, they are talking about something that is in the world. However, the meaning of the concept of introspection is an internal psychological phenomenon within a person. Accordingly, neither is external behaviour equivalent to the meaning of psychological concepts, nor is the meaning of psychological concepts equivalent to physical brain states. Therefore, psychological concepts are useful in interpreting and explaining the behaviour of others, because we cannot directly perceive other minds, but only indirectly deduce other Qeios, CC-BY 4.0 • Review,