A Survey Of The Science Of Psychology

A SURVEY OF THE SCIENCE OF PSYCHOLOGY By J. R. KANTOR Professor of Psychology Indiana University 1933 THE PRINCIPIA PRESS, INC. BLOOMINGTON, INDIANA COPYRIGHT 1938 BY J. R. KANTOR C. E. PAULEY Co., INC. PRINTERS TO MY PREFACE The present volume offers to students an exposition of organis mic or interactional psychology. It is not, however, a simplified version of my Principles of Psychology, but a new work altogether. In this book it lias been my aim to lay before the college student or general reader the materials of psychology not as firmly settled facts and principles but as problems to be faced and worked over. This aim, I hold, does not commit the writer to a hodge-podge of indiscriminate views. I believe a student in psychology may be allowed the guidance of a viewpoint, and at the same time trusted to discover for himself how well it comports with facts. Were it possible to disregard established belief and tradition, the proper method for the psychologist would be to proceed to the description of psychological phenomena without regard to the competing conceptions current in the psychological field today. Unfortunately this is not feasible. The student of psychology who turns to the literature of the subject inevitably discovers that psychological phenomena are differently interpreted. For this rea son I must refer to other psychological conceptions. It is my pur pose, however, to reduce to a minimum the polemical character of the exposition. Accordingly, traditional viewpoints will be dis cussed only in order to throw into relief the interactional or organis mic conception. It may be well to state some of the assumptions of the organismic viewpoint. One of the first is thatpsychology has its own subject matter and is not a patchwork of physiology and philosophy as so many writers seem to believe. Organismic psychology holds that psychological phenomena are very specific interactions between or ganisms and stimulating objects. The interaction view, it is submitted, allows the student to look upon psychological phenomena remembering, reasoning, etc., as objective, natural happenings. On the other hand, the psychologist is relieved from the necessity of reducing his data to actual or hy pothetical, neural or general biological events or worse still, invent ing physiological facts to explain psychological phenomena. To do either results in a serious misinterpretation of psychological data. Psychological phenomena are, of course, always at the same time biological phenomena. In other words, physiological activities vii PREFACE always participate in psychological happenings. It is an advantage of the organismic viewpoint that it can treat the biological facts implicated in psychological, phenomena in an unbiased manner. And so the reader will find a number of chapters 21-25 devoted to man as a biological organism. Another assumption. It is no longer necessary in order to make psychology scientific to restrict our descriptions to comparatively simple activities reflexes or habits as the objective psychologist has been doing. We may then quite properly discuss such behavior as imagery and voluntary action. Furthermore, we may take ac count of the social and cultural influences upon our mentality. This we do in the concluding chapters 26, 27 devoted to the psycho logical individual as an anthropological being. Wherever possible I have attempted to indicate theexperimental treatment of the various topics. I want to point out expressly, how ever, that the laboratory studies described in this book are not in tended . to mislead the student into thinking that all or even a large part of psychological phenomena have been subjected to experi mental handling, but rather to give him an idea concerning labora tory work in psychology. The attention of the reader is also called to the purposes gov erning the selection of references at the end of the book...