Chapter 27 The Modem Psychology of Thinking Oswald Kiilpe
The study of thinking, which in Gennany has been nurtured primarily at the Wiirz- burger Psychological Institute, belongs to [the] developmental phase of experimental psychology.
While earlier psychology in general did not pay adequate attention to thinking, the new experimental direction was so busy bringing order into the more solid institutions of sensations, images, and feelings, that it was quite late before it could devote itself to the airy thoughts. The first mental contents to be noted in consciousness were those of pressures and punctures, tastes and smells, sounds and colors. They were the easiest to perceive, followed by their images and the pleasures and pains. That there was anything else without the palpable* constitution of these formations escaped the eye of the scientist who had not been trained to perceive it. The experience of natural science directed the researcher's attention toward sensory stimuli and sensations, after-images, contrast phenomena and fantastic variations of reality. Whatever did not have such characteristics simply did not seem to exist. And thus when the first experimental psychologists undertook experiments about the meaning of words they were able to report anything at all only if self-evident representations or their accompanying phenomena made an appearance. In many other cases, particularly when the words signified something abstract or general, they found "nothing." The fact that a word could be understood without eliciting images, that a sentence could be understood and judged even though only its sounds appeared to be present in consciousness, never gave these psychologists cause to postulate or to determine imageless as well as imageable contents.
Ibe prejudice upon which we have touched here has a long history. Aristotle declared that there were no thoughts without an image and during the scholastic period this position was held fast.
The division between perception and thinking, between objects of the senses and objects of thought, made repeatedly by Plato, had never been psychologically pursued. In modem times one found words, and nothing but words when the perceptions were missing that were supposed to give them meaning and understanding. In the pedagogy of Pestalozzi and Herbart, perception was honored as the ABC of all mental development. Kant considered concepts without images as empty, and Schopenhauer wanted to base all of mathematics upon imagery; he even wanted to ban proof from geometry. Similar conceptions were added in poetry. Poetic art could only function through images; the more it tried to follow Horace and emulate painting—to create with the brush of perception—the more completely did it seem to fulfill its mission....What finally led us in psychology to another theory was the systematic application of self-observation. Previously it was the rule not to obtain reports about all experiences that occurred during an experiment as soon as it was concluded, but only to obtain occasional reports from subjects about exceptional or abnormal occurrences. Only at the conclusion of a whole series was a general report requested about the main facts that were still remembered. In this fashion only the grossest aspects came to light. Furthermore, the commitment to the traditional concepts of sensations, feelings, and images prevented the observation or labelling of that which was neither sensation nor feeling nor image. However, as soon as persons trained in self-observation were allowed to make complete and unprejudiced reports about their experiences of an experiment immediately after its completion, the necessity for an extension of the previous concepts and definitions became obvious. We found in ourselves processes, states, directions, and acts which did not fit the schema of the older psychology. Subjects started to speak in the language of everyday life and to give images only a subordinate importance in their private world.
They knew and thought, judged and understood, apprehended meaning and interpreted connections, without receiving any real support from occasionally appearing sensory events [Versinnlichungen]. Consider the following examples. [There follow two examples, only one of which will be presented here.] The subject is asked: "Do you understand the sentence: Thinking is so extraordinarily difficult that many prefer to judge?" The protocol reads: "I knew immediately after the conclusion of the sentence what the point was. But the thought was still quite unclear. In order to gain clarity, I slowly repeated the sentence and when I was finished with that the thought was clear so that I can now repeat it: To judge here implies thoughtless speech and a dismissal of the subject matter in contrast to the searching activity of thinking. Apart from the words of the sentence that I heard and which I then reproduced, there was nothing in the way of images in my consciousness." This is not just a simple process of imageless thought. What is notable is that [subjects] stated that Imderstanding proceeded generally in this fashion with difficult sentences. It is thus not an artificial product of the laboratory, but the blossoming life of reality that has been opened up by these experiments. [There follows a string of aphorisms and sayings to demonstrate examples from daily experience that produce just such thinking, e.g., Man is noble, charitable and good: that alone differentiates him from all other known beings.] Who would experience images here and for whom would such images be the basis, the inescapable condition of comprehension? And who wants to maintain that words alone suffice to represent the meaning? No, these cases provide proof for the existence of imageless conscious contents, especially thoughts.But if thoughts differ from the images of colors and sounds, of forests and gardens, of men and animals, then this difference will also be found in their behavior, in their forms, and in their course.
We know what Iawfuhess governs images. Everybody speaks of association and reproduction, of the appearance of an image, of its elicitation by others, of its connection with other images. We Ieam a poem or a new vocabulary. Here knowledge of content, knowledge of meaning is not sufficient; we must Ieam one word after another so that we can later faithfully reproduce the whole. We develop strong associations between the succeeding or coordinated members of a poem or a list of words, and for this we need a long period of time and a large number of repetitions. If thoughts are nothing but images, then the same tediousness should govern their memorization. Any reflection about the manner in which we assimilate the meaning of a poem shows immediately that the state of affairs is different here. One attentive reading is frequently sufficient to reproduce the thought content. And thus we progress through sheer mental exposure to such comprehensive feats as the reproduction of the thoughts contained in a sermon, a lecture, a dramatic production, a novel, a scientific work, or a long conversation. We not infrequently find to our sorrow how independent we are of the actual words. Sometimes we would like very much to be able to reproduce faithfully a striking expression, the pregnant form of a sentence, or an attractive picture.The Modem Psychology of Thinking 195 But even though the sense of what has been said is quite available to us, we cannot reproduce its form.
[There follows a discussion of some of Buhler's experiments.] It is notable that one of the first results of our psychology of thought was negative: The old conceptual notions that experimental psychology had provided for descriptions of sensation, feeling, and imagination, and their relations, did not permit comprehension or definition of intellectual processes. But similarly the new concept of dispositions of consciousness [Bewus- stseinslage] which was pressed upon us by factual observation, was not sufficient and only made possible circumscription rather than description.
Even the study of primitive processes of thinking soon showed that the imageless can be known. Self-observation, in contrast to observations of nature, can perceive the presence and definite characteristics of what is neither color nor sound, of what may be given without image or feeling. The meaning of abstract and general expressions can be shown to exist in consciousness when nothing perceptual may be discovered apart from the words, and these meanings may be experienced and realized even without words or other signs. The new concept of conscious knowing [Bewusstheit] gave expression to these facts. And thus the inflexible schema of the previously accepted elements of mental life was extended in an important direction.Experimental psychology is thus confronted with new problems which disclose many and varied perspectives. Not only do imageless states include known, meant, and thought objects with all their characteristics and relations, and states of affairs that can be expressed in judgments, but also the many actions whereby we take a position toward a given conscious content, whereby we order, classify, recognize or reject it. Although one once could use sensations and images to construct a mosaic of mental life and an automatic lawfulness of the coming and going of conscious elements, such a simplification and dependence upon chemical analogies has now lost its footing. Perceptual [anschaulich] contents could only persist as artificial abstractions, as arbitrarily isolated and separated components. Within a complete consciousness, however, they have become partial phenomena, dependent upon a variety of different conceptions, and it was only when they were placed in a complex of mental processes that they gained meaning and value for the experiencing subject. Just as perception could not be characterized as a mere having of sensation, no less could thinking be conceived as the associative course of images. Association psychology, as it had been founded by Hume, lost its hegemony.
The fact that thoughts are independent of the signs in which they are expressed, and that they have peculiar and fluid interrelations, uninfluenced by the laws of the association of images, demonstrated their autonomy as a special class of conscious contents. As a result, the area of self-observation has been extended to a considerable degree. Not only images and sensations and their characteristics and colorations belong to our mental life, but we can also include thought and knowledge, in which we can perceive neither color nor form, neither pleasure nor unpleasure. We know from daily experience that we have at our disposal a great spontaneity in our search for objects, their registration and comprehension, in our activity with and our actions upon them. Psychology has taken little notice of this activity of the mind. F. A. Lange coined the phrase about the scientific psychology without a soul, a psychology in which sensations and images and their feeling tones are the sole contents of consciousness. Such a psychology had to be watchful that no mystical force such as the ego should insinuate itself into this psychological world. More exactly, one had to say: "Thinking occurs," but not: 'T think," and the process of such thinking consisted in nothing but the coming and going of images regulated by the laws of association. Even today there are psychologists who
have not risen above this point of view. Their psychology can rightly be accused of unreality, of moving in an abstract region where it neither seeks nor finds entry to full experience. These are the psychologists who offer stones instead of bread to those representatives of the humanities [Geistesioissenschaften] who are asking for psychological justification; nor can these psychologists advise or help a biology that is seeking a connection with psychology....
[The psychology of] thinking unlocked the door to the true internal world, and it was no mysticism that led us there, but the abandoning of a prejudice. Bacon already knew that the road to truth is paved with prejudices. In the present instance they happen to derive from the exact natural sciences, for whom in the last decades sensory observation meant everything and for whom concepts were only an expedient used to represent, in the simplest possible fashion, facts based on sensory experience. But now thoughts became not only signs for sensations but independent structures and values that could be ascertained with certainty just as any sensory impression. They were even more faithful, lasting, and freer than the pictures with which our memory and fantasy otherwise operate. But they did not, of course, admit to the same immediate observation as perceptual objects. The discovery was made that the ego could not be divided. To think with a certain devotion and depth and to observe the thoughts at the same time—that could not be done. First one and then the other, that was the watchword of the young psychology of thought. And it succeeded surprisingly well. Once a mental task was solved, the process that had been experienced became in all its phases an object of intensive determination by the retrospective observer. Comparison of several subjects and of several results from the same subject demonstrated that the procedure was unobjectionable. The pronounced agreement of our studies in the psychology of thought, whereby one could be built upon another, was a beautiful confirmation of our results. Once again it became clear why the previously used methods of observation could not find any thinking or other expressions of our conscious activity. Observation itself is a particular act, a committed activity of the ego. No other activity can be executed next to it at the same time. Our mental efficiency is limited, our personality is a unitary whole. But observation can take place after the completion of a function and can make it the object of self-perception. And now many acts were recognized which previously had not existed for psychology: attending and recognizing, willing and rejecting, comparing and differentiating, and many more. All of them were lacking the perceptual [anschaulich] character of sensations, images, and feelings, even though these phenomena could accompany the newly found actions. It is characteristic of the helplessness of the previous psychology that it thought it could define these acts through their symptoms. Attention was considered as a group of tension and muscle sensations, because so-called strained attention gives rise to such sensations. Similarly, willing was dissolved into images of motions because they usually precede an external act of the will. These constructions, whose artificiality immediately becomes apparent, were left without a leg to stand on as soon as the existence of special psychic acts was recognized, thus robbing sensations and images of their sole dominion in consciousness.
With the recognition of these acts another important innovation came to the fore. The center of gravity of mental life had to be moved. Previously one could say: We are attentive because our eyes are fixed on a particular point in the visual field and the muscles that keep the eyes in that position are tensed. It now became clear that this conception inverted the real state of affairs and that what it should rather say is: We direct our eyes toward a certain point and strain our muscles because we want to observe it. Activity became the central focus, receptivity and the mechanism of images secondary....
The actions of the ego are always subject to points of view and tasks [Aufgaben] and through them are moved to activity. One could also say that they serve a purpose, either self-generated or set by others. The thinking of the theoretician is no more nor less aimless than that of the practitioner. Psychologists are used to taking this into consideration. The subject receives a task, a direction or instruction as to the point of view which he must adopt toward the presented stimulus. He may have to compare two light intensities one with another, to execute a movement upon a pressure or a sound, to reply quickly to a called-out word with the first word that he can think of, to understand a sentence, to draw a conclusion, and so forth. All such tasks, if they are willingly undertaken and remembered, exercise a great determining force upon the behavior of the subject. This force is called the determining tendency. In a sense the ego contains an unlimited variety of response possibilities. If one of these is to come to the fore to the exclusion of all others, then a determination, a selection, is needed.
The independence of the task and the determining tendency that was derived fi*om it was also fateful for association psychology. Such a task is not some ordinary type of reproductive motive. It must be accepted, the subject must support it, and it gives his activity a certain direction. Sensations, feelings, and images are not given tasks; a task is set for a subject, whose mental character does not dissolve into these contents, but whose spontaneity alone can adopt the instructions and execute them. Since in all thinking such determining viewpoints play a role, since abstraction and combination, judgment and conclusion, comparison and differentiation, the finding and construction of relations, all become carriers of determining tendencies, the psychology of the task became an essential part of the modem investigation of thinking. And even the psychology of the task proved to have an importance that significantly transcended the narrower area in which it was developed. No psychological experiments are imaginable without tasks! The tasks must, therefore, be considered just as important an experimental condition as the apparatus and the stimuli that it presents. A variation in the task is at least as important an experimental procedure as a change in external experimental conditions.
This importance of the task and its effects on the structure and course of mental events could not be explained with the tools of association psychology. Rather, Ach was able to show that even associations of considerable strength could be overcome with a counteracting task The force with which a determining tendency acts is not only greater than the familiar reproductive tendencies, it also derives from a different source and its effectiveness is not tied to associative relations.
Notes
* Transhtors' note: In facing the troublesome problem of translating "anschaulich" and "unanschaulich,” we have generally translated the latter as "imageless" in keeping with traditional usage. However, the word "anschaulich" seemed more amenable to a variety of translations such as "palpable," "self-evident," "perceptual," and "specifiable." We have used these words in keeping with the context and have also, at times, substituted such choices as "non-perceptual" or "impalpable" for "unanschaulich" in order to point up the generality of the notion which relieves it from the suggestion of the visual that "imageless" implies.