kube%cogsci.Berkeley.EDU@UCBVAX.BERKELEY.EDU (Paul Kube) (01/23/87)
>From: hester@ai.cel.fmc.com (Tom Hester): >Finally, R.J. Faichney is absolutely correct. It was not Freud that >side tracked psychology from introspection. Rather it was the "dust >bowl empiricists" that rode behaviorism to fame and fortune that did it. On the chance that it's worth arguing about the intellectual history of phsychology on AIList: The behaviorists didn't just sidetrack introspection; they sidetracked mentalism---engine, car, and caboose, so to speak. Introspection was already demoted from the position it had had as infallible source of psychological truth by James (he called his Principles of Psychology "little more than a collection of illustrations of the difficulty of discovering by direct introspection exactly what our feelings and their relations are"). But James believed there are not any unconscious mental states; Freud should get some credit for further demoting introspection by arguing so influentially that there are. Mentalism is back on track now in the post-behaviorist era, but a principled skepticism about introspection remains. A fascinating contemporary survey on the topic is Nisbett & Ross, "Telling more than we can know: verbal reports on mental processes", Psych. Rev. May 1977. From the abstract: "Evidence is reviewed which suggests that there may be little or no direct introspective access to higher order cognitive processes." --Paul Kube kube@cogsci.berkeley.edu, ...!ucbvax!kube