The Psychological Justification of Anti-realism
It is interesting, how such an understanding of consciousness—as something principally distinct from all natural phenomena—could be adopted by science. In the second half of the 19th century a new science appeared, which tried to investigate mental phenomena with experimental methods, copying natural sciences: physics, chemistry, biology.
It was experimental psychology. But how is it possible to study experimentally an object that is so unlike all natural phenomena and from a philosophical point of view (which was shared by a lot of psychologists) even constitutes other objects? An answer to this question was formulated, and it was considered as an orientation of the psychological practice.A scientist creates specific conditions in a laboratory, which afford to establish results of experimental impacts on an object of research. It is a common feature of all experimental researches in all sciences. But a psychological experiment has a specific character. A psychologist studies another person, who has consciousness. Results of experimental impacts in psychology are some changes in another person: they can be expressed in outer phenomena (actions of another person, words), and in such a case an experimenter can fix them. But these results are necessarily also changes in the states of consciousness of the person under research. The latter changes are present only to the other person, but not to the psychologist. The latter can know about these changes only with the help of words by another person who is aware of them. Consciousness is aware of itself. Introspection (self-observation) is the specific method of psychological investigations.
So scientific psychology tried to combine two positions. The first proceeds from the idea that cognition and consciousness deals with the real world, existing independently from them. It is the position of common sense.
It is as well the position of science. It is impossible to carry out an experiment or create a theory, if one doesn't presuppose that there is something real, which resists to outer impacts, something about which one can get new knowledge. Such a realist attitude is “built in” the structure of every cognitive practice: ordinary and scientific ones. It is possible to say, using Kant's phraseology, that it is the necessary condition of the possibility of knowledge. When a psychologist carries out experiments with another person, she/he deals with a specific object, really existing in space and time and having consciousness. The consciousness is understood as connected with a body and, first of all, with a nervous system and a brain (by the time of the beginning of experimental psychology a lot of facts about a connection between psychic states and activation of parts of cerebral cortex were gathered). It is a position of “the third person” in relation to another person and her/his consciousness. But there is also a position of “the first person”. It is occupied by a person who is under investigation. It is awareness of the world and of oneself, and as the world is present to a person only through the states of her/his own consciousness (from the point of view of the philosophy and psychology of that time), this position is one of self-consciousness.[CXXXII]But in such a case a paradox appears. On the one hand, one thinks that consciousness and brain exist in the world—otherwise it would be impossible to study them. On the other hand, a psychologist considers the world as a content of consciousness.
3