Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [86]
A smaller group of studies explored association—not the high-level kind discussed by the English associationists, but the elemental building blocks of association. In a typical study the assistant would call out single-syllable words and the subject would press a key the instant he identified each; this measured “apperception time.” Then the assistant would utter similar words and the subject would press the key as soon as each word awakened an associated idea. This took longer. Subtracting the apperception time from the total time yielded a measure of what Wundt called “association time”—how long it took the mind to locate a word associated with a heard and recognized word—which, for the average person, is about three quarters of a second.21
As the British physicist Lord Kelvin, a contemporary of Wundt’s, used to say, “When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind.” The data generated in Wundt’s laboratory definitely met this criterion of knowledge, at least concerning the elementary components of mental processes.
Wundtian Psychology
Wundt saw himself as much more than an experimentalist. In his books and articles he assumed the role of the systematist of psychology and architect of its master plan. But his system has proven difficult to explicate, and summaries of it differ widely as to its main features.
One reason, according to Boring, is that Wundt’s system is a classification scheme that cannot be experimentally proved or disproved.22 Rather than being the outgrowth of a testable grand theory, it is an orderly pedagogical arrangement of topics based on middle-range theories, many of which could not be explored by the methods used in the Leipzig laboratory.
An even greater obstacle to summarizing Wundt’s system is that he constantly revised it and added to it, so that it is not one thing but many. Indeed, in his time critics could hardly find fault with any part of the system before he either changed it in a new edition of one of his works or moved on to some other topic. William James, though he admired Wundt’s laboratory work, complained that his profusion of writings and viewpoints made him unassailable as a theorist:
Whilst [other psychologists] make mincemeat of some of his views by their criticisms, he is meanwhile writing another book on an entirely different subject. Cut him up like a worm, and each fragment crawls; there is no noeud vital in his mental medulla oblongata, so that you can’t kill him all at once.23
Yet if no central theme is visible in Wundt’s psychology, it is possible to name some of its recurring themes.
One is psychic parallelism. Although Wundt has often been labeled a dualist, he did not believe that anything called mind existed apart from the body. He did say that the phenomena of consciousness parallel the processes of the nervous system, but he considered the former to be based on combinations of actual neural events.24
Another theme is his view of psychology as a science. At first he proclaimed that it was, or could be, a Naturwissenschaft (natural science), but later said that it was largely a Geisteswissenschaft (science of the spirit—spirit not in the sense of incorporeal soul but of higher mental activity). He said that only the experimental study of immediate experience was a Naturwissenschaft; the rest was Geisteswissenschaft. He wrote at length about individual and social psychology and related social sciences, but descriptively and without admitting or even recognizing that rigorous experimental methods could be developed in these fields.25
The most nearly central doctrine of Wundtian psychology is