PSYC85H3 Lecture Notes - Edward B. Titchener, Psychophysical Parallelism, Experimental Psychology
Document Summary
Was unsympathetic to psychological explanations that invoked concepts such as the unconscious . He distinguished psychology from other disciplines, such as psychics, in terms of the different point of view taken by psychologists. Human experience is embodied in the sense that it cannot exist apart from someone s nervous system: rather events in the nervous system run parallel to those in human experience but should not be seen as causing them. Psychophysical parallelism: by referring to events in the nervous system, we may be able to explain mental processes without regarding those events in the nervous system as causing mental processes. Freud: the study of abnormal psychology was a central part of psychological inquiry. Titchener- insisted on the necessity of experimentation. Structuralism-> aimed to uncover the elementary structure of the mind. Titchener tried to differentiate between structural and functional psychology. He argued that everyone admits that sensations are elementary mental processes that underlie our perceptions .