Animal intelligence: Experimental studiesThorndike, Edward L. (Edward Lee)
Science
Animal intelligence: Experimental studies
Thorndike, Edward L. (Edward Lee)
Animal intelligence; Psychology, Comparative
responses to qualities irrespective of their concrete accompaniments,
and to the power of making such responses. ‘Reasoning’ may be said
to be present when certain sorts of consciousness, or when certain
sorts of behavior, are present. An account of ‘the will’ is an account
of consciousness as related to action or an account of the actions
themselves.
Not only in psychological judgments and psychological terms, but also
in the work of individual psychologists, this twofold content is seen.
Amongst writers in this country, for example, Titchener has busied
himself almost exclusively with consciousness ‘as such’; Stanley Hall,
with behavior; and James, with both. In England Stout, Galton and Lloyd
Morgan have represented the same division and union of interests.
On the whole, the psychological work of the last quarter of the
nineteenth century emphasized the study of consciousness to the
neglect of the total life of intellect and character. There was a
tendency to an unwise, if not bigoted, attempt to make the science
of human nature synonymous with the science of facts revealed by
introspection. It was, for example, pretended that the only value of all
the measurements of reaction-times was as a means to insight into the
reaction-consciousness,—that the measurements of the amount of objective
difference in the length, brightness or weight of two objects that men
could judge with an assigned degree of correctness were of value only so
far as they allowed one to infer something about the difference between
two corresponding consciousnesses. It was affirmed that experimental
methods were not to aid the experimenter to know what the subject did,
but to aid the subject to know what he experienced.
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