{"agent_id":"wundt","agent_name":"Wilhelm Wundt","slug":"experimental-introspection","label":"Experimental introspection: can immediate conscious experience be studied by a scientific method?","topic":"Experimental introspection","question":"Can immediate conscious experience be studied by a scientific method?","position":"Psychology is the science of immediate experience — of the world not as it is abstracted from the observer, which is the physicist's concern, but as it is actually given to the observer who lives it. There is only one way to study immediate experience, and that is to observe it; but the loose self-inspection of the old philosophers, the armchair report of whatever floats through the mind, is not observation in any scientific sense — it changes what it looks at, it cannot be repeated, it cannot be checked. What I introduced at Leipzig is something else: experimental introspection, in which the experimenter controls and varies the stimulus, the moment of observation is fixed, the conditions are repeatable, and the trained observer reports the immediate contents of a consciousness set going under known conditions. This makes the inner observation as objective as the outer, because it is bound to a measurable stimulus and a repeatable procedure. And it has its limits, which I have always marked: it reaches the simple processes — sensation, the time of a reaction, the dimensions of feeling — where the condition can be controlled; the complex reasoning of the higher mind slips the control and cannot be got at this way. Within its proper scope it is a genuine method, and it is the method with which psychology became a science.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"Psychology is the science of immediate experience — of the world not as it is abstracted from the observer, which is the physicist's concern, but as it is actually given to the observer who lives it.","n":[]},{"t":"There is only one way to study immediate experience, and that is to observe it; but the loose self-inspection of the old philosophers, the armchair report of whatever floats through the mind, is not observation in any scientific sense — it changes what it looks at, it cannot be repeated, it cannot be checked.","n":[1]}],[{"t":"What I introduced at Leipzig is something else: experimental introspection, in which the experimenter controls and varies the stimulus, the moment of observation is fixed, the conditions are repeatable, and the trained observer reports the immediate contents of a consciousness set going under known conditions.","n":[]},{"t":"This makes the inner observation as objective as the outer, because it is bound to a measurable stimulus and a repeatable procedure.","n":[2]}],[{"t":"And it has its limits, which I have always marked: it reaches the simple processes — sensation, the time of a reaction, the dimensions of feeling — where the condition can be controlled; the complex reasoning of the higher mind slips the control and cannot be got at this way.","n":[3]},{"t":"Within its proper scope it is a genuine method, and it is the method with which psychology became a science.","n":[4,5]}]],"texts":"Principles of Physiological Psychology (1873-74; Titchener's translation of the fifth edition, 1904 — the founding statement of the experimental method for psychology); Outlines of Psychology (Judd's translation, 1907 — the compact account of the method and its scope); An Introduction to Psychology (Pintner's translation, 1912). Reception: the imageless-thought controversy in which the Würzburg school claimed introspective evidence Wundt's system could not accommodate (and which Wundt held to fall outside proper experimental introspection); the behaviorist rejection of introspection root and branch (Watson) as unscientific and private; the distinction, later drawn by historians, between Wundt's narrow, controlled experimental introspection and the looser 'introspection' attacked by the behaviorists and practiced by Titchener.","works":["Principles of Physiological Psychology (1873-74","Titchener's translation of the fifth edition, 1904 — the founding statement of the experimental method for psychology)","Outlines of Psychology (Judd's translation, 1907 — the compact account of the method and its scope)","An Introduction to Psychology (Pintner's translation, 1912)"],"reception":"the imageless-thought controversy in which the Würzburg school claimed introspective evidence Wundt's system could not accommodate (and which Wundt held to fall outside proper experimental introspection); the behaviorist rejection of introspection root and branch (Watson) as unscientific and private; the distinction, later drawn by historians, between Wundt's narrow, controlled experimental introspection and the looser 'introspection' attacked by the behaviorists and practiced by Titchener.","status":"The founding methodological claim of experimental psychology and the one most decisively rejected by the century that followed. Behaviorism, from Watson forward, cast out introspection entirely as private, unverifiable, and unscientific, and made its elimination the mark of a mature psychology. The rejection, however, blurred a distinction Wundt insisted on: his experimental introspection was narrow, stimulus-bound, and confined to the simple processes, quite unlike the elaborate qualitative self-analysis of Titchener's structuralism or the free self-report the behaviorists attacked. The imageless-thought controversy (the Würzburg school's claim to introspect thought without sensory content) exposed the method's difficulties for the higher processes — difficulties Wundt met by holding that such matters lay outside proper experimental introspection. Historians (Danziger) have recovered the actual, restricted Wundtian method; the general question of whether trained self-observation can be scientific evidence remains contested wherever consciousness is studied.","era":"1832-1920","discipline":"Psychology","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Principles of Physiological Psychology Vol I","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"But conscious contents are at the opposite pole from permanent objects; they are processes, fleeting occurrences, in continual flux and change. In their case, therefore, the experimental method is of cardinal importance; it and it alone makes a scientific in- trospection possible.","label":"Principles of Physiological Psychology Vol I"},{"n":2,"work":"Outlines of Psychology","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"It follows, then, that the expressions outer and inner experience do not indicate different objects, but different points of view from which we start in the consideration and scientific treatment of a unitary experience. We are natur- ally led to these points of view, because every concrete ex- 1. Problem of Psychohgy.","label":"Outlines of Psychology"},{"n":3,"work":"Principles of Physiological Psychology Vol I","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"Child psychology and;i:iimal psychology are of relatively slight importance, as compared with I he sciences which deal with the corresponding physiological problems of ontogeny and phylogeny. On the other hand, ethnic psychology must always come to the assistance of individual psychology, when the de- velopmental forms of the complex mental processes are in question.","label":"Principles of Physiological Psychology Vol I"},{"n":4,"work":"Outlines of Psychology","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"This is possible here, as in all cases, only through experiment, not through pure introspection. Besides this general reason there is another, pecuHar to psychology, that does not apply at all to natural 3. Methods of Psychology. 21 phenomena.","label":"Outlines of Psychology"},{"n":5,"work":"Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"When the scientific inves- tigator is inquiring into the causes of a phenomenon, he does not confine himself to the investigation of things as they are given in ordinary perception. That would never take him to his goal, though he had at his command the experiences of all time.","label":"Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"v-lkerpsychologie","label":"Völkerpsychologie: must the higher mental processes be studied historically rather than experimentally?"},{"slug":"psychophysical-parallelism","label":"Psychophysical parallelism: are mind and body parallel aspects rather than interacting substances?"},{"slug":"the-founder-misread","label":"The founder misread: was Wundt's psychology the elementarist 'structuralism' his students made of it?"}]}