In the prologue, Heft begins by describing the dominant perspective, the Cartesian perspective, that has guided psychology theories and methods for the past centuries. By highlighting some of its glaring weaknesses, Heft sets the stage for the more attractive, albeit unintuitive, philosophical alternative of radical empiricism developed by William James. Then, in the first part of Chapter One, we turn our attention to the counterintuitive argument that psychological behaviourism, despite rejecting any notions of the mental and nonphysical, actually played a significant role in keeping the Cartesian tradition alive. This serves to underscore the need for a radically different approach to studying psychological phenomena, one that avoids the same pitfalls as faced by a dualistic framework.
Psychology's Cartesian roots
As alluded to in the previous post, Heft points out that psychology as a discipline takes a Cartesian approach to the study of human behaviour. By the Cartesian perspective, Heft highlights how this is not limited to Descartes' ideas of substance dualism or contributions to scientific thought. Rather, it is a general label for an approach to the sciences that seeks to uncover abstract and universal laws that explain everyday phenomena. Some of the enduring successes of the Cartesian perspective can be found in physics and classical mechanics, with the discovery of laws of motion setting the stage for further discovery and subsequent scientific progress.
When applied to psychology, the Cartesian perspective divides the world into two distinct domains, namely the environment and the organism. This runs parallel with the dualism between physical and mental substances/properties. In this case, while the environment and the organism (i.e., the body) may be construed physically, the organism (i.e., the mind) possesses additional nonphysical and mental properties that enable psychological phenomena such as perception, cognition, and consciousness to occur.
The problem with such a view is that it treats the environment and the organism as independent entities, which is problematic once we recognise that, in psychology, we are in the business of studying animate beings and not inanimate things. Darwin's historic theory of evolution provides some insights into why this might be the case, highlighting the closely knit, functional relation between an organism and its environment. This requires a functional analysis between the environment and organism, which Heft defines as one which focuses on the ongoing transactions between the two.
One simple example of such transactions is that between information structured by the environment and an organism's intentional actions. Here, the organism detects the structured information and uses it to guide goal-directed actions, which then reveal even more meaningful information either through changes in perspective or changes to the environment itself. This information is then used again to guide their movements, and the cycle continues, creating a perception-action loop where perception is for action, and action is for perception. Given this ongoing organism-environment reciprocity, it seems inappropriate to consider them in isolation as we would from a Cartesian perspective.
The hidden dualism in behaviourism
Another major difficulty faced by the Cartesian perspective is the causal gap between the environment and the organism. If the environment and body are physical, whereas the mind is nonphysical, how do we expect causality to be established? For instance, how can a physical environmental light stimulation on the physical retina cause a nonphysical experience of seeing something? Likewise, how can a nonphysical desire to move your arm cause the physical neural impulses that lead to physical arm movement?
One solution to this causal gap was psychological behaviourism in the early 1900s. Here, behaviourists argued that psychology should be solely concerned with physical things that could be empirically observed. This immediately excludes any unobservable and mental entities. The argument then follows that, since physically observable behaviour is all that is being measured, the causal gap is solved because we now have a (physical) basis to causally link the organism to its environment.
Aside from suffering from an extremely limited scope (e.g., James believed that the observable should include anything experienced by an organism), Heft argues that, because behaviourism was largely defined with respect to what it was not (i.e., the mental/nonphysical), this inadvertently kept Cartesian dualism alive. My reading of this section is that, it is not the case that behaviourists outrightly deny the existence of the mental. Rather, their argument is simply that for psychology to be considered a natural science, psychologists have to concern themselves only with that which is physically observable. In other words, while the mental does exist, it is a domain which a behaviourist psychology has no room for.
I might be using some inaccurate terms here, but it seems that behaviourists only solved the causal gap from an empirical standpoint, yet neglected it from a metaphysical perspective. While not covered extensively by Heft, my understanding is that after behaviourism, other theories of mind emerged, such as type identity theory and functionalism. While they are qualitatively different from the original substance dualism conceived by Descartes, they still retain and inherit the physical-mental dualism from the Cartesian tradition, and hence suffer from similar weaknesses as already discussed.
James's alternative
At this point, the only way around the issue of dualism is to find a way to not create one in the first place! But how might this look like? This is what I'll discuss in the next post, where I'll complete the rest of Chapter One and attempt to articulate James's philosophy of radical empiricism.
References
Heft, H. (2001). Ecological Psychology in Context: James Gibson, Roger Barker, and the Legacy of William James’s Radical Empiricism. Psychology Press.
No comments:
Post a Comment