WHAT IS AN "EXPLANATION" OF BEHAVIOR?

The cognitive "revolution" in psychology introduced a new concept of explanation and somewhat novel methods of gathering and interpreting evidence. These innovations assume that it is essential to explain complex phenomena at several levels, symbolic as well as physiological: complementary, not competitive. As with the other sciences, such complementary makes possible a comprehensive and unified experimental psychology. Contemporary cognitive psychology also introduced complementary of another kind, drawing upon, and drawing together, both the behaviorist and the Gestalt traditions.     

On the theoretical foundations of Soviet psychology

Conclusion We are now in a position to examine the claim that Pavlovian physiology and Marxist-Leninist philosophy form two complementary systems.There is certainly a similarity between the Leninist theory of reflection and Pavlov's theory of higher nervous activity. Both present so-called psychic phenomena as a reaction of the organism to the stimuli of the outer world and both insist that this reflection is not a passive reception of impressions but is an active response on the part of the organism.Again both systems are monist; they are united in excluding the possibility of having recourse to a non-material substance as the basis for psychic phenomena. But for Pavlov this exclusion is a scientific axiom while for Marxism-Leninism it is founded on philosophical materialism. However, the most important difference between Pavlov's theories and Marxism-Leninism on this point is that Pavlov's approach to psychic is fundamentally mechanistic and reductionist whereas that of Marxism-Leninism is dialectical and consequently anti-reductionist and anti-mechanist. Soviet psychology is, in consequence, founded partly on a mechanist system which is not materialist in the full sense of the word, and partly on a materialist system which is definitely not mechanist. From this point of view there is a definite discrepancy between the two traditions on which Soviet psychology is founded and which goes a long way towards explaining many of the inconsistencies in Soviet psychological theory.     

A dilemma for Heideggerian cognitive science

‘Naturalizing phenomenology’ by limiting it to the ontology of the sciences is problematic on both metaphysical and phenomenological grounds. While most assessments of the prospects for a ‘naturalized phenomenology’ have focused on approaches based in Husserlian transcendental phenomenology, problems also arise for non-reductive approaches based in Heideggerian existential phenomenology. ‘Heideggerian cognitive science’ faces a dilemma. On the one hand, (i) if it is directly concerned with the nature of subjectivity, and this subjectivity is assumed to be ontologically irreducible to its physical enablers yet still metaphysically dependent on them, then Heideggerian cognitive science will either leave that metaphysical dependence an unexplained instance of supervenience, or ground it in speculation about brute metaphysical laws that have an unclear relationship to the ontology of the sciences. On the other hand, (ii) if Heideggerian cognitive science is not directly concerned with the nature of subjectivity, but is instead merely aimed at the development of a Heideggerian phenomenological psychology, then it doesn’t fully address the ontological implications of phenomenology’s transcendental approach, and so, while it might succeed in explaining the realization of psychological phenomena scientifically, the existence of subjectivity will remain inexplicable based on the ontology of the sciences. Neither strategy succeeds in ‘naturalizing phenomenology’: (i) either rejects scientific naturalism, or makes its requirements trivial, while (ii) either rejects the transcendental dimension of phenomenology, or fails to address its ontological implications.     

Pavlov in America: a heterodox approach to the study of his influence

This work presents a critical analysis of Pavlov's influence that goes beyond the conventional view: that which reduces his influence in American psychology to the behaviorism of Watson and Hull. In order to understand the nature of the Russian physiologist's influence in American psychology, we propose a distinction between three approaches to it: 1) the symbolic approach, on representing a model of the possibility of constructing an objective psychology; 2) the methodological approach, given the importance of the technique of conditional reflexes; and 3) the theoretical approach, which is derived from his theory of higher nervous activity. This perspective permits us to suggest that most of Pavlov's influence on behaviorism was of a symbolic and methodological nature--though the methodological influence also reached other authors that did not belong to the behaviorist traditions, as was the case of Mateer. As far as the theoretical influence is concerned, our work proposes that it is more visible in authors such as Gantt and Liddell, or even in authors such as Boldirev, Director of the Pavlovian Laboratory at the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan. The case of Gantt is especially interesting because, in addition to his important contributions, he played an essential role in the foundation of the Pavlovian Society, and the journal Conditional Reflex. What our work proposes is that to understand the nature of Pavlov's influence in American psychology it is necessary to take into account the very characteristics of that psychology: its pragmatic interests, its methodological rigor, the dominant systems of neo-behavioral theory and the changes that occurred after the Second World War.     

Cognitive Biases and Emotional Wisdom in the Evolution of Conflict Between the Sexes

Two recent theories within evolutionary psychology have produced novel insights into conflict between the sexes. According to error management theory (EMT), asymmetries over evolutionary time in the cost-benefit consequences of specific social inferences have produced predictable cognitive biases. Women, for example, appear to underinfer commitment in response to signals of resource display. Men often overinfer a woman's sexual desire when she merely smiles at or casually touches them. These inferential biases, according to EMT, represent functional adaptations rather than markers of irrationality in information processing. According to strategic interference theory , certain "negative emotions" function to motivate action to reduce conflict produced by impediments to preferred social strategies. Emotions such as jealousy and anger, rather than reducing rationality, may embody inherited ancestral wisdom functional in dealing with interference inflicted by other individuals. These evolution-based theories have produced novel empirical discoveries and challenge traditional theories anchored in the premise that cognitive biases and negative emotions necessarily lead to irrationality.     

Individual-Centred Cognitive Counselling for Study Problems

An argument is developed for basing study counselling more closely on relevant principles of the cognitive psychology of studying. This can and should take into account the inter-relationships between study processes and the student's emotional state, and offer help with both in an integrated way. Finally, the advantages of an individual-centred approach are emphasised. A good grounding in relevant cognitive principles enables the counsellor to apply these to the problems of the individual student, rather than merely to offer standard advice on studying.     

心理学中实验法的方法论地位重估

认知心理学以实验法为其方法论基础,着力对人类的认识过程进行模型建构。然而,早在20世纪70年代初,其创立者奈塞尔就对心理学的实验范式感到不满,转而寻求心理学的生态学效度。心理学中对实验法的推崇源于自然科学特别是物理学的成功。而实际上,物理学在20世纪初遭遇了实验法所带来的困境。受制于实验法的种种局限,当代认知科学逐渐放弃了方法论的沙文主义立场,接纳了来自语言学、哲学、神经科学等多领域、多视角的研究策略。心理学在一定程度上具有人文科学的性质,因此同样需要采用多重研究手段和方法,而不是一味地笃信实验法的权威性。     

Pavlov and the demise of the influence of Gestalt psychology in the Soviet Union

Summary The demise of the influence of the classical Gestalt psychology in the Soviet Union has been linked to I.P. Pavlov's negative stance toward Gestalt tenets. Actually, Pavlov's attitude toward Gestalt psychology was by no means uniform. Pavlov was receptive to, as well as critical of a number of substantive issues. He acknowledged the Gestalt interpretation of transposition, but criticized the Gestalt rejection of association and learning by trial and error. Pavlov's strongest objection to Gestalt psychology centered on the philosophical issues of causality, methodology, and on the problem of mind and body. Despite these objections, no direct evidence links Pavlov's criticism of Gestalt theses to the weakening of their influence on Soviet psychology. Instead, the demise of classical Gestalt psychology in the Soviet Union should be attributed to political exigency. Soviet authorities, in a period of political crises, were intent upon the elimination of all traces of bourgeois psychologies.     

Definition and the Question of “Woman”

Within recent feminist philosophy, controversy has developed over the desirability, and indeed, the possibility of defining the central terms of its analysis—"woman,”“femininity,” etc. The controversy results largely from the undertheorization of the notion of definition; feminists have uncritically adopted an Aristotelian treatment of definition as entailing metaphysical, rather than merely linguistic, commitments. A “discursive” approach to definition, by contrast, allows us to define our terms, while avoiding the dangers of essentialism and universalism.     

A Down-to-Earth Approach to the Psychology of Spirituality a Century After James's Varieties

Spirituality has recently become a mushrooming topic in psychological circles but, taking its cue from the religions, psychology tends to define spirituality in terms of relationship with God or other similarly conceived, metaphysical, nonhuman entities. Such emphasis on the otherworldly and the extraordinary confuses the psychological enterprise by introducing into it nonfalsifiable, intractable, and incompatible presuppositions. In the spirit of William James and humanistic psychology, this article calls for a more down-to-earth approach to the matter. Building on Bernard Lonergan's analysis of human consciousness or spirit, this article suggests an approach that might account for spiritual phenomena apart from appeal to gratuitous metaphysical presuppositions; potentially ground universally applicable, normative, core beliefs and ethics; and be open to theist extrapolation and other religious applications. Consideration of the implications of such an enterprise draws out the methodological challenges, inherent in a psychology of spirituality, that the field has yet to acknowledge.     

Experimental psychology and the courtroom

Experimental social and cognitive psychology cover a range of topics such as attitudes, attribution, decision making, perception, memory, comprehension, and reasoning. The relevance of these topics to the law is apparent in such domains as jury selection, jury behavior, plea bargaining, eyewitness testimony, sentencing, and police investigation strategies. Despite early attempts to apply experimental psychology to law (circa 1900–1920), it was not until the mid 1970s that a robust law-relevant literature in experimental psychology began to unfold. The experimental psychology/law interface continues to experience some problems in (1) generalizing from specific research experiments to real-world conditions, and (2) identifying solutions rather than just problems.     

Théodule Ribot's ambiguous positivism: philosophical and epistemological strategies in the founding of French scientific psychology

Théodule Ribot (1839-1916) is regarded by many historians of psychology as the "father" of the discipline in France. Ribot contributed to the development of a "new psychology" independent from philosophy, relying on the methods of the natural sciences. However, such an epistemological transition encountered fierce opposition from both the champions of the old-fashioned metaphysical psychology and the representatives of the "scientific spirit." This article focuses on the objections raised by the latter, and especially philosophers of science, against the possibility of a scientific psychology. For instance, according to Auguste Comte, psychology does not satisfy certain basic methodological requirements. To overcome these objections, Ribot, in his La Psychologie Anglaise Contemporaine (1870/1914), devised an epistemological strategy that amounted to invoking criticisms of Comte's views made by other representatives of the positivist school, such as John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer.     

The Cognitive Psychology of Delusions: A Review

Delusions have for a long time been regarded as one of the major signs of mental disorder. Above all else they are cognitive phenomena in that they purport to express ideas about the world or the self. Despite this it is only relatively recently that the ideas and methods of cognitive psychology have been used in the study of delusions, at least in any systematic way. This paper reviews the work carried out so far, which is starting to yield some consistent trends. These include an excessively self-seeking bias in judgments made by people with delusions and a tendency to make judgments on the basis of rather less evidence than controls.     

Pavlov and associationism

Pavlov's contribution to experimental psychology was to invent a technique that allowed him to undertake a prolonged and systematic series of well-controlled experiments that, astonishingly enough, uncovered many if not most of the phenomena of what is rightly called pavlovian conditioning. It was not for another 30 years or more that English-speaking psychologists began to match that achievement. Of course there have been new developments and discoveries since his time. Two examples are discussed: the important role of variable associability or attention even in simple conditioning, and the rigorous application of associative learning theory to the behavior of adult humans.     

Method Decisions: Quantitative and Qualitative Inquiry in the Study of Religious Phenomena

The conceptual and procedural differences between quantitative and qualitative methods have led many researchers to realize that some methodologies are better suited for studying some phenomena over other phenomena. However, practical guidelines for making these method decisions have yet to be developed. The primary purpose of this paper is to begin to provide such guidelines, especially in the study of religious phenomena. We first discuss the common mistake in Western psychology of considering methods as mere procedures rather than as the outcomes of different interpretations of the world. We then compare five features of a general quantitative interpretation with five features of a general qualitative interpretation. From this comparison, the advantages and disadvantages of each method strategy are discussed. Knowledge of these advantages and disadvantages allows methods to be better matched to the religious phenomena being studied.     

Les représentations philosophiques de la relation entre l’« esprit » et le cerveau des enseignants-chercheurs de psychologie : quelques implications

The history of psychology has been marked by strong methodological, theoretical and epistemological controversies. In this paper, we evaluate the hypothesis that these well-known controversies are often implicitly supported by philosophical, metaphysical and probably religious oppositions. The focus of our investigation concerns the classical opposition in philosophy between dualism and physicalism, more specifically the complex relationship between the brain and the mind. One hundred and sixty-six teachers and researchers (30 in clinical psychology, 37 in cognitive psychology, 31 in development psychology, 38 in social psychology and 30 in neurosciences) from 8 French universities have accepted to participate in this survey by responding to a questionnaire made of 17 questions. Data were analyzed using factor analysis technique and the results of the principal component analysis (PCA) revealed four main factors that are more likely to define accurately the philosophical profile of each sub-discipline. The main result of this survey is that philosophical and metaphysical positions, at the foundations of psychology, clearly distinguish and oppose the five studied sub-disciplines. At one extreme, there are cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists who are strongly physicalist. To the contrary, clinical and social psychologists exhibit more dualistic representation. Developmental psychologists occupy an intermediate position between these two extremes. Finally, we analyzed the implications of the participants’ philosophical representation differences, from an epistemological and clinical/practical point of view. The important point is that these philosophical and metaphysical oppositions are largely implicit. Indeed, inside our community, it is very rare, if not exceptional, that they are explicitly involved in the theoretical or epistemological conflicts, which exist inside our discipline. However, it is probable that they play a massive role in our debates, a role all the more important, as we are largely unconscious of them. The current study is the first to tackle such an important topic by describing more accurately the philosophical representation of scholars in major sub-fields of psychology. By revealing such deep metaphysical oppositions, we hope to shed a new light on the origins of these persisting conflicts in psychology.     

The impact of Pavlov on the psychology of learning in English-speaking countries

The translation of Pavlov's lectures (Pavlov, 1927) provided English-speaking psychologists with access to the full scope of Pavlov's research and theoretical ideas. The impact this had on their study of the psychology of learning can be assessed by examining influential books in this area. This reveals that Watson (1924) had been highly effective in promoting the misleading idea that Pavlov was a fellow S-R theorist. This assumption was not questioned by Tolman (1932), Hilgard and Marquis (1940) or by Hull (1943). However, this mistake was not made by Skinner (1938), who also provided the strongest arguments against Pavlov's belief that behavioral effects required explanation in terms of physiological processes. Post-1927 most learning research in the English-speaking countries continued to use instrumental, rather than Pavlovian, conditioning procedures. Nevertheless, many of the issues addressed by this research were ones that Pavlov had been the first to raise, so that his major influence can be seen as that of defining a research program for subsequent students of learning.     

Inside the Black Box, with apologies to Pandora. A review of Ulric Neisser's Cognitive Psychology

It behooves us, as good citizens of the science of psychology, to shirk no area of psychology as long as we can apply scientific method to it. The research in cognitive psychology is certainly interesting, on the whole well executed, and very challenging. It is well within the scope of a behavioristic approach. It merely awaits more attention from behaviorists.     

Notes towards a description of Social Representations

The theory of social representations occupies a place apart in social psychology both by the problems it raises and the scale of the phenomena with which it deals. This provokes many a criticism and misunderstanding. Such a theory may not correspond with the model of social psychology as it is defined at present. One attempts however to show that it answers important social and scientific questions, in what it differs from the classical conception of collective representations and, from the very beginning, adopts a constructivist perspective which has spread in social psychology since. Several trends of research have confirmed its vision of the relations between social and cognitive phenomena, communication and thought. More detailed remarks aim at outlining the nature of social representations, their capacity to create information, their function which is to familiarize us with the strange, according to the categories of our culture. Going farther, one insists on the diversity of methodological approaches. If the experimental method is useful to understand how people should think, higher mental and social processes must be approached by different methods, including linguistic analysis and observation of how people think. No doubt, social representations have a relation with the more recent field of social cognition. But inasmuch as the former depend on content and context, i.e. subjectivity and sociability of people, they approach the phenomena differently from the latter. Referring to child psychology and anthropology, one can contend, despite appearances, that it is also a more scientific approach. There is however much to be learned from criticisms and there is still a long way to go before we arrive at a satisfactory theory of social thinking and communication.     

Pavlov and the foundation of behavior therapy

The foundation, achievements, and proliferation of behavior therapy have largely been fueled by the movement's foundation in behavioral principles and theories. Although behavioral accounts of the genesis and treatment of psychopathology differ in the extent to which they emphasize classical or operant conditioning, the mediation of cognitive factors, and the role of biological variables, Pavlov's discovery of conditioning principles was essential to the founding of behavior therapy in the 1950s, and continues to be central to modern behavior therapy. Pavlov's reliance on a physiological model of the nervous system, sensible in the context of an early science of neurology, has had an implication for behavior therapists interested in the study of personality types. However, Pavlov's major legacy to behavior therapy was his discovery of "experimental neuroses," shown by his students Eroféeva and Shenger-Krestovnikova, to be produced and eliminated through the principles of conditioning and counter-conditioning. This discovery laid the foundation for the first empirically-validated behavior therapy procedure, systematic desensitization, pioneered by Wolpe. The Pavlovian origins of behavior therapy are analyzed in this paper, and the relevance of conditioning principles to modern behavior therapy is demonstrated. It is shown that Pavlovian conditioning represents far more than a systematic basic learning paradigm. It is also an essential theoretical foundation for the theory and practice of behavior therapy.