Franz Joseph Gall's non-cortical faculties and their organs

Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828) is remembered for his claims that behavior results from a large number of independent mental faculties, and that these faculties are associated with cortical organs. Apart from the 26 faculties he localized in the cerebrum, he also recognized one faculty (reproductive drive) in the cerebellum. This picture, however, is based on Gall's presentations in his well-known later works, his four volume Anatomie et Physiologie. These books reflect the outcomes of Gall's thinking. They were steered by the observations and feedback he received in Vienna and while presenting his theories in the German states and neighboring countries between 1805 and 1807. Examining his lists before what he published in Paris shows how his faculties were changing. Notably, and as shown here, he had previously included several faculties associated with brainstem structures, in addition to the cerebellum, which he would continue to associate with some reproductive behaviors.     

Inhibition and the control of behavior. From Gall to Freud via Phineas Gage and the frontal lobes.

In his On the Functions of the Brain and Each of Its Parts, Franz Joseph Gall proposed that significant behaviors resulted from certain independent, irreducible, and fundamental faculties or propensities. There seems to be nothing in his system for explaining how two or more faculties interact, especially how one comes to predominate over another, other than the implicit notion that the stronger will be manifested. This peculiarity of Gall's system is consistent with the predominately "excitatory" physiology of his time in which there was no place for an independent inhibitory process. Despite the experimental demonstration of inhibitory phenonema, the sensory-motor physiological theories in the last three quarters of the 19th century were similarly deficient. The lack is seen most clearly in the experimental and clinical literature on frontal lobe function, especially in relation to the kinds of changes seen in the Gage case. The deficiencies of sensory-motor physiology are also to be found in Freud's model of the mental apparatus and in his concept of inhibition via a lateral cathexis. In the paper an attempt is made to trace the historical sequence of these ideas and to make their experimental and theorectical basis explicit.     

The faculty psychology of Thomas Reid

Contradictory versions of Reid's faculty psychology have been presented. A reexamination of Reid's writings suggests that the term, faculty, was used not as a classificatory device but rather to refer to innate, universal, and active mental powers. Being active, the faculties are one of the basic causes of observable psychological phenomena. The relation of the faculties to other mental powers is considered. A new listing and classification of such powers is compared with that presented in 1936 by H. D. Spoerl which has been used as the basis for much of the subsequent analysis of Reid's faculty psychology.     

Laws and constrained kinds: a lesson from motor neuroscience

In this paper, I want to explore the question of whether or not there are laws in psychology. Jaegwon Kim has argued (Supervenience and mind. MIT press, Cambridge; 1993; Mind in a physical world. MIT press, Cambridge 1998) that there are no laws in psychology that contain reference to multiply realized kinds, because statements about such kinds fail to be projectible. After reviewing Kim??s argument for this claim, I show how his conclusion hinges on a hidden assumption: that a kind can only feature in a projectible statement if it is defined by an internal physical property. This assumption, however, is false: constrained kinds can feature in projectible statements, and yet they are not defined by any set of internal physical properties. I suggest that many mental terms actually refer to constrained kinds, and give an example from motor neuroscience of a constrained kind that is multiply realizable and ??projectible??: the intention to move voluntarily in a specific direction.     

Where did the ventricular localization of mental faculties come from?

During the Middle Ages it was widely believed that the various mental faculties-sensation, cognition, memory, and so forth-were each located in a specific part of the three ventricles that were thought to be housed in the brain. The origin of this scheme was commonly attributed to the ancient scholars, but it was rare for a specific individual to be identified as the originator. Modern researchers sometimes attribute it to Galen, but Galen was clear in his contention that the mental faculties were located in the substance of the brain rather than in the ventricles. It was only later scholars who, using Galen's anatomy as their basis, placed the mental faculties in the ventricles themselves. The system came together piece by piece over a period of centuries, probably not appearing fully in the form known to the Medieval world until the Middle Ages themselves. This article traces the development of the theory of ventricular localization of the mental faculties from the Ancient world to the early part of the Middle Ages.     

The Scientist and the Artist: adaptive dissociation within the HIV-positive population

This paper reports on the findings of two independent qualitative studies which were conducted with HIV-positive cohort over a period of 2010–2012. Although the original studies used different qualitative designs (IPA and Grounded Theory), the authors have nevertheless sought to explore the combined utility of their findings by using a broad stance of phenomenological enquiry. The authors argue that evidence of a particular dissociative pattern in their accounts of an HIV-related experience is present in the contributors' narrative. Dissociation in this context occurred not in personality but between different or discrete mental faculties such as memory, emotions, perceptions and thought. It was suggested that it serves adaptive function and therefore could be utilised in clinical work when appropriate.     

“The king of France is bald” reconsidered: a case against Yablo

Stephen Yablo has argued for metaontological antirealism: he believes that the sentences claiming or denying the existence of numbers (or other abstract entities or mereological sums) are inapt for truth valuation, because the reference failure of a numerical singular term (or a singular term for an abstract entity or a mereological sum) would not produce a truth value gap in any sentence containing that term. At the same time, Yablo believes that nothing similar applies to singular terms that aim to refer to an entity whose existence or non-existence is a factual matter, e.g. ‘the king of France’: the failure of the presupposition that there is a unique French king makes some sentences with the term ‘the king of France’, in particular “The king of France is bald”, gappy. In this paper I will show that the sentence “The king of France is bald” must be false, and not gappy, according to Yablo’s own criteria and that, furthermore, the presupposition that the term ‘the king of France’ refers presents a fail-safe mechanism in the same way Yablo thinks abstract presuppositions do—this undermines his argument for metaontological antirealism.     

Distinguishing Between Sex and Gender: History, Current Conceptualizations, and Implications

Many psychologists, particularly feminist psychologists, have drawn a distinction between the term sex and the term gender. The purposes of this paper were to review the history of this distinction and to illustrate the varied and inconsistent ways in which these terms are used. Historically, this distinction began with John Money and his colleagues in the 1950s (Money et al. 1955a, b, 1957); they used the term sex to refer to individuals?? physical characteristics and the term gender to refer to individuals?? psychological characteristics and behavior. Two decades later, Rhoda Unger (1979) argued that the widespread use of the term sex implies biological causes and promotes the idea that differences between women and men are natural and immutable. She proposed the use of the term gender to refer to traits that are culturally assumed to be appropriate for women and men. Her work was influential in prompting a widespread shift from the use of the term sex to the use of the term gender in psychological texts. Nevertheless, current definitions of sex and gender vary widely. Some authors use the terms interchangeably. Of those who distinguish between the terms, most construe gender as more related to cultural influences and sex as more related to biology. There are numerous inconsistencies in authors?? definitions, however. Additionally, in some cases, there appears to be a mismatch between how researchers define sex or gender and how they measure it. It seems likely that the distinction between the term sex and the term gender may become less meaningful and important over time.     

Theism, Evolutionary Epistemology, and Two Theories of Truth

In Michael Ruse's recent publications, such as Taking Darwin Seriously (1998) and Evolutionary Naturalism (1995), he has advocated a certain sort of evolutionary epistemology and has argued that it implies a rejection of metaphysical realism (MR) in favor of a position that he calls "internal realism" (IR). Additionally, he has maintained that, insofar as his evolutionary epistemology implies a rejection of MR in favor of IR, it escapes the kind of argument against naturalism that Alvin Plantinga makes in his Warrant and Proper Function (1993). In this article I explain the relevant views and arguments of Ruse and Plantinga, and I critically engage with Ruse's views, arguing that (1) his case for rejecting MR has no essential connection to evolutionary considerations; (2) his case for rejecting MR depends upon internalist assumptions about the nature of knowledge that are in need of some kind of defense; and (3) given his implicit internalism and his commitment to IR, his argument for rejecting MR can be used against his IR.     

The science of language and the evolution of mind: Max Müller's quarrel with Darwinism

For Darwinism to succeed as a general theory of the development of life, it had to account for at least the rudiments of all human characteristics. Thus Darwin and his colleague G. J. Romanes had to make "mental evolution" the basis for scientific psychology. F. Max Müller, Oxford's professor of comparative philology, drew on Kant's work, Romantic Naturphilosophie, and his views on the history of language and the relation of language to thought to maintain that language showed a difference not in degree but in kind between man and the lower primates. In his debate with Romanes, he argued that the study of language, not Darwinist natural history, should be the basis for a science of human psychology. However, the two authors had such different definitions of the key terms in their discussion that their differences were not only unresolved but irresolvable.     

Hermann von Helmholtz and the empiricist vision.

The philosophical convictions of Hermann von Helmholtz and the empiricist psychology he developed have been extensively discussed in historical literature. This literature has not usually emphasized the tacti assumptions about human physiology that underlaid these convictions nor the way in which Helmholtz's epistemology served as a methodological directive in his research. Helmholtz assumed nerve transmission between sense organs and the mind to be a passive process. Distortion in stimulus patterns occurs physically in the sense organs, which can therefore be treated through mechanical analogies. Stimuli become converted to the perceptions of consciousness through mental processes that are essentially analogous to conscious, inductive inference and that are therefore susceptible, in principle, to introspective investigation. This view of mental function reflected Helmholtz's intellectual debt to German idealism, especially to the philosophical views of J.G. Fichte.     

William James and the unconscious: redressing a century-old misunderstanding

Contrary to received wisdom in psychology, William James did not oppose postulating unconscious processes. This mistaken belief stems from a misreading of a passage in his Principles concerned with disproving the metaphysical notion that mental states are composed of elementary mental units. The term unconscious had been co-opted by individuals who supported this position. Unconscious did not mean then what it means now. Analysis of the rest of the Principles , his later works, and his reactions to the works of others reveals that James actually supported what we would now term unconscious processes. He even contributed to their study with his notions of the "fringe,""habit," and "subconscious incubation." Causes and effects of this misunderstanding are discussed.     

Conditioning,learning and psychopathology

The total of all conditioning and learning may be summed up as part of the adaptive patterns for survival. Adaptive learning is the person's way of discovering how to live successfully. He is not just sick or well. In one fashion or another, he learnshow to be sick orhow to be well within a certain milieu. Personality function signifies the integrant of this learning as the individual tries to realize his potentials, live effectively, and achieve gratification. Should his learning be deficient or distorted in any area proportionate difficulties in his total function will afflict him. Such areas of insufficiency or distress expose the psychopathologic process.

The ever-changing patterns of conditioning and adaptive learning continually modify mental function and create a feedback; the learning is used adaptively and adaptation, doubling back, adds to the learning. As the person adapts according to what he is and what he has learned, his ensuing patterns, still in the process of being conditioned, further change him and make him what he will be.

     

Determinants of object choice in adulthood: a test case of object-relations theory

A clinical example of the effects of the absence of the father during the early childhood of a male analysand and its consequences for his later object choice is presented. This patient's biological father left the household when the patient was only a few months old, and his mother did not remarry until he was five years of age. Unconscious fantasies of the lost father, with whom the patient had no contact in reality, and longing for him organized the patient's drives and determined his self-identity as well as his later object choice. The patient developed both a positive and negative identification with the lost father. The identification was with a fantasy object not a real one. The case highlights the need to use a precise term in talking of the object, namely the mental representation of the object which may or may not be built up out of experiences with the real object.     

Acquisition, learning, or development of language? Skinner's "Verbal Behavior" revisited

In 1957, Skinner, in his "Verbal Behavior", proposed an explanation on how a language is learned. In 1959, Chomsky strongly argued the non-learnability of language, establishing in the field of developmental psycholinguistics the substitution of the term "learning" for that of "acquisition". Currently, the constructivist models describe language acquisition as a process of ontogenetic, gradual, complex, and adaptive change. This new theoretical framework has been especially useful for rereading Verbal Behavior because it facilitates recovering the Skinnerian learning mechanisms. This can be observed in the recent research trends that recapture reinforcement and imitation (echoic responses), although they are now located in the initial phases of the process and are included in a cognitive dynamic that, by gradually increasing its complexity, can achieve grammar. The new constructivist theoretical framework, by retrieving the functional and referential aspects of language, can also take advantage of the classic Skinnerian proposal about the pragmatic types of verbal behavior, providing it with new meaning.     

Cardiac preoccupations

The origins and development of mental representations of internal bodily organs are, in general, difficult to discern. This is so even in the case of an internal bodily organ such as the heart, which is more readily perceived than most other body organs since its beating can be felt and heard. It is even true in the case of individuals in whose psyche the heart comes to play an inordinately prominent role. It was so in the case presented in this paper, the case of a man who was preoccupied with the idea that he was going to die of a heart attack, as his father had. It required a great deal of analytic work to uncover some of the underlying conflict-laden factors which lay behind his cardiac preoccupations. Those conflicts and fantasies that were uncovered derived from many developmental layers, but seemed to be organized around a central bisexual conflict resulting from the threat of castration for both positive and negative oedipal wishes. The two main unconscious mental representations of the heart in his case were as an erect, pulsating penis and as a blood-filled vagina, although other representations such as a bloody anus also existed. A relatively accurate, realistic mental representation of the heart probably evolves slowly during the development of any individual and is probably always distorted somewhat by infantile unconscious concepts along the way. In a situation where a parent has had a cardiac illness, and particularly when this illness occurred during the individual's childhood, the mental representation of the heart can be even more distorted than usual by the developmental conflicts that are intensified by the parental illness.     

Seventeen-month-olds appeal to false beliefs to interpret others' referential communication

Recent studies have demonstrated infants' pragmatic abilities for resolving the referential ambiguity of non-verbal communicative gestures, and for inferring the intended meaning of a communicator's utterances. These abilities are difficult to reconcile with the view that it is not until around 4 years that children can reason about the internal mental states of others. In the current study, we tested whether 17-month-old infants are able to track the status of a communicator's epistemic state and use this to infer what she intends to refer to. Our results show that manipulating whether or not a communicator has a false belief leads infants to different interpretations of the same communicative act, and demonstrate early mental state attribution in a pragmatic context.