Other Unusual Problems Arosen in Scientific Psychology

The famous Russian psychologist, the founder of experimental psychology in Russia, G. Chelpanov wrote about them at the beginning of the 20th century. His views were very similar to the theoretical attitudes of other leading psychologists of that time.

Everyone perceives objects in the world as existing in space and time, as colored and often sounding. Meanwhile physics shows that objective correlates of sub­jective colors and sounds are very dissimilar to them: they are different lengths of light and sound waves. In addition physiological study of structures and functions of sense organs (by the beginning of the 20th century psychology worked in close alliance with physiology: the founder of experimental psychology V. Wundt wrote about “physiological psychology”) discovered its limitations: humans don't per­ceive certain light and sound waves, which can be perceived by other living beings. The very idea about a difference between subjective feelings of colors and sounds and real processes in the world was formulated long before G. Chelpanov and V.Wundt. It is an old problem about “primary and secondary qualities”, which was discussed in 17th and 18th centuries by Locke and other philosophers. But G. Chelpanov, using results of physiological psychology of the beginning of the 20th century, wrote that not only colors and sounds in their subjective appearance don't exist in the objective world, but that also so called “primary qualities” are not objective. Space forms which a human being perceives, G. Chelpanov wrote, are connected with specific features of human visual and tactile sensory systems. Other living beings perceive space in other ways. Only physics and mathematics can say what really space is, although they don't have a definite answer to this question till now: it is possible that space has not 3 dimensions, but a lot of them.

But in such a case one faces the following situation. Sciences study natural phenomena (including a neuronal system and a brain) using data of experience. The latter is presented in forms of naive realism. For example, in our experience a brain is white, grey and blue colored. It has a space structure. But from the point of view of physics and physiology in the interpretation of G. Chelpanov colors and space exist only in consciousness. So science denies presuppositions from which it pro­ceeds. But if G. Chelpanov had written only that, his position could be understood as a kind of scientific realism: science gives a genuine image of reality, ordinary knowledge is situated in a sphere of illusions. But G. Chelpanov made an addition to the idea about the opposition between science and naive realism: he asserted that the very distinction between consciousness and objective reality is appearance: only the content of consciousness is certain, and scientific theories of objective reality are constructions of consciousness. (Chelpanov 1912, pp. 250-300). So his position is essentially subjectivism: psychophysiology of the human being prevents one from getting the objective reality, but the very scientific knowledge of a nervous system deals not with something real, but with phenomena of consciousness, which are only certain.

Psychology in its development refused some old ideas, in particular that of separate sensations: they were understood in old psychology as expressing not objective stimuli, but specific features of sensor systems.

For example, the same picture can be perceived either as an image of a rabbit or as an image of a duck. Transition from a certain mode of perception to another one (“gestalt-switch”) doesn't depend on what is going on in an objective situation, but is connected, as gestalt-psychologists think, with processes within the nervous system of the perceiver. It was supposed that the latter determines existing types of gestalts. So it is senseless to say what gestalt corresponds to a real situation.

There is a later approach to understanding perception, which is shared now by a lot of psychologists and specialists in cognitive science. It has been elaborated by a famous psychologist R. Gregory on the base of investigating visual perception (Gregory 1970).

According to R. Gregory in this process perceptual etalons (“object hypotheses”) are put on sensory information. This work of the brain can be interpreted as hypo­thetical attempts of human reason to answer the question “what is it?”. Hypotheses that are suggested by reason (they are unconscious) can correspond or not corre­spond to a real situation. In the latter case an illusion arises: one perceives what doesn't exist. In contemporary psychology a number of such illusions have been demonstrated. For example, “Ames room”: a person observing the interior of a room through a narrow hole perceives people in a room with dimensions which completely don't correspond to the real ones known to a perceiver.

But if a cognizing human being is closed in the world of one's own represen­tations, what are the reasons for saying something about the objective world?

In our time another conception appeared which, using some contemporary sci­entific ideas, is trying to justify philosophical solipsism. It was formulated in the framework of an inter-disciplinary movement, which spread primarily in Germany and Austria for the last 30 years. It was called “radical epistemological construc­tivism”. Its founders are some specialists in biology, neurocybernetics, psychology, system theory: E. von Glasarsfeld, H. von Forster, G. Roth etc. Main ideas of this movement have been elaborated in a theory of autopoiesis by U. Maturana and

F. Varela. According to their theory the specific feature of autopoetic systems is that their elements produce certain functions, and these functions produce elements, which produce functions etc. ad infinitum. Living systems are understood as self-producing and self-referential. Outer impacts on such systems play the role of an impulse for creating inner structural changes, which serve for the self-sustaining of the system.

G. Berkeley as their philosophical forerunner and think that they can be called epistemological solipsists (Glasarsfeld 2001, pp. 31-43).

One of the leading theoreticians of the contemporary inter-disciplinary move­ment, called cognitive science—the philosopher J. Fodor—formulated the idea of methodological solipsism as a strategy of cognitive research (Fodor 1980, pp. 63-73). According to him the only fruitful way of investigating cognitive processes (they were understood in cognitive science as determining all mental phenomena, including emotions and the will) must be based on understanding them as a computational processing of information by the brain. The character of this processing is determined by interrelations between inner mental states—syntactic features of structures, written on the inborn “language of thought”—and doesn't dependent on relations of these states to the outer reality, in other words doesn't depend on the semantics of these structures. So from this point of view a researcher of cognitive processes must not take into account whether these processes corre­spond to the world outer of a brain and what this world is.

4