answers totally different from those recorded in the articles in
question. Titchener quotes an opinion of Wundt on these investigations,
which appears to me thoroughly justified. "These experiments," he says,
"are not experiments at all in the sense of a scientific methodology;
they are counterfeit experiments, that seem methodical simply because
they are ordinarily performed in a psychological laboratory, and involve
the co-operation of two persons, who purport to be experimenter and
observer. In reality, they are as unmethodical as possible; they possess
none of the special features by which we distinguish the introspections
of experimental psychology from the casual introspections of everyday
life."* Titchener, of course, dissents from this opinion, but I cannot
see that his reasons for dissent are adequate. My doubts are only
increased by the fact that Buhler at any rate used trained psychologists
as his subjects. A trained psychologist is, of course, supposed to have
acquired the habit of observation, but he is at least equally likely to
have acquired a habit of seeing what his theories require. We may take
Buhler's "Uber Gedanken" to illustrate the kind of results arrived at
by such methods. Buhler says (p. 303): "We ask ourselves the general
question: 'WHAT DO WE EXPERIENCE WHEN WE THINK?' Then we do not at all
attempt a preliminary determination of the concept 'thought,' but choose
for analysis only such processes as everyone would describe as
processes of thought." The most important thing in thinking, he says, is
"awareness that..." (Bewusstheit dass), which he calls a thought. It
is, he says, thoughts in this sense that are essential to thinking.
Thinking, he maintains, does not need language or sensuous
presentations. "I assert rather that in principle every object can be
thought (meant) distinctly, without any help from sensuous presentation
(Anschauungshilfen). Every individual shade of blue colour on the
picture that hangs in my room I can think with complete distinctness
unsensuously (unanschaulich), provided it is possible that the object
should be given to me in another manner than by the help of sensations.
How that is possible we shall see later." What he calls a thought
(Gedanke) cannot be reduced, according to him, to other psychic
occurrences. He maintains that thoughts consist for the most part of
known rules (p. 342). It is clearly essential to the interest of this
theory that the thought or rule alluded to by Buhler should not need to
be expressed in words, for if it is expressed in words it is immediately
capable of being dealt with on the lines with which the behaviourists
have familiarized us. It is clear also that the supposed absence of
words rests solely upon the introspective testimony of the persons
experimented upon. I cannot think that there is sufficient certainty
of their reliability in this negative observation to make us accept a
difficult and revolutionary view of thought, merely because they have
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