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Psychology from a biologist's point of view.
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Herrick, Christopher J. |
| Copyright Year | 1955 |
| Abstract | A student of the philosophy of science might be tempted to say there are as many biologies as there are biologists, if account is taken only of the men whose exceptional insight and productiveness have guided the growth of the science. The same may be true of psychology, and perhaps we can do no better than accept Cattell's characteristic definition—"Psychology is what the psychologist is interested in qua psychologist." There are, however, some general principles about which biologists and psychologists are in substantial agreement. One of these principles is that no factual findings have scientific significance until they are fitted into the appropriate niche in the integrated system of knowledge. The neurologist finds this orientation especially difficult because almost all experiences and activities of men and other animals involve nervous functions and his field has no boundaries. The human brain is the most important thing in the world, for, as Gibbs (1) expresses it, "Human history is a history of the brain activity of the human race" (p. 1SOS). This relationship ties neurology closely with psychology and also with psychiatry, sociology, and every other human interest. But when the neurologist tries to find out just where his findings tie in with psychology he is puzzled. There are so many psychologies that one wonders what it is all about. The interested spectator who sits on the fence watching the game sees two opposing teams and, on the side lines, a goodly number of other psychologists who do not join either faction. In one team the partisans of traditional dualism contend for a sharp separation of the conscious, or "spiritual," activities from the unconscious, or "physical," thus splitting the world as we experience it into two universes, one of which has been characterized as "spiritual reality" or "ideational reality" and the other as "physical reality." Opposed to these radical spiritists are the mechanists, who insist that, since the search in both science and philosophy is for unifying principles, and since it has not been possible to explain how a nonphysical agency can act upon a physical structure so as to influence human conduct, we must search for physicalistic principles of sufficiently wide import to embrace all the known phenomena. The more radical members of the second group, apparently accepting the traditional doctrine that anything "spiritual" is ipso facto nonphysical, take the easy way out and deny that conscious experience of any kind has scientific or operational significance. This despite the fact that the very denial is a conscious act. This exclusion of everything mentalistic from psychology is obviously a defense reaction against the primitive animistic mythologies which still survive in every human culture. But even though mind is called an epiphenomenon, it is nonetheless a phenomenon, a natural event, and a place in the system of nature must be found for every natural event. The spiritists' quest for a psychology released from the limitations imposed by the laws of the physical world, and the objective psychologists' insistence that only observable physical processes |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| DOI | 10.1037/h0042628 |
| PubMed reference number | 13254971 |
| Journal | Medline |
| Volume Number | 62 |
| Issue Number | 5 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://www.newdualism.org/papers/J.Herrick/Herrick-PR1955.pdf |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://doi.org/10.1037/h0042628 |
| Journal | Psychological review |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
