Psychology is the Science of Mind and Behavior

It is common to consider the founding year of psychology to be where psychology became a separate science. According to Hergenhahn (2009), this approach is unsatisfactory for two reasons: (1) It ignores the vast philosophical heritage that molded psychology into the type of science it eventually became; and (2) it omits important aspects of psychology that are outside the realm of science. Since the mid-19th century, psychologists have incorporated the scientific method into their work however, the work of many psychologists who did not embrace the scientific method before the mid-19th century cannot be ignored. According to Kendra Cherry, before 1879 there have been many potential contributors to the beginning of what is often called "modern science," the ideas of the French philosopher Rene Descartes are important to science but particularly to psychology. During the 17th-century, he worked to answer the question "Are the mind and body the same, or different?” and that resulted in the development of Cartesian Dualism, which is the idea that mind and body are different, but that the mind can influence the body and the body can influence the mind.

His use of controlled conditions within his studies meant that real results could be established. One of Wundt’s many published books, Principles of Physiological Psychology, “firmly established psychology as an independent laboratory science with its own problems and methods of experimentation.” (Schulz and Schulz, 2000). He measured simple mental processes like perception and sensation as he believed that experimental methods were unusable for higher mental processes (Miller, 1959). From these theories Wundt began to expand his ideas, focusing on a non-experimental psychology which he called Völkerpsychologie. Wundt maintained that experimental methods could only be used when studying the individual and that social phenomena could not be dealt with in this way (Greenwood, 2003).

The Super-Ego as Freud theorised it is the values of one's parents internalised. He went further to then explain that unhappiness in life is caused by the conflict between the Id and the SuperEgo. As stated, all of Frued's philosophy was very conflict oriented so it is not difficult to understand then how Freud applied this view macrocosmically to society as a whole. Freud addressed this in his essay, "Civilization and It's Discontents". In it, Freud claimed that civilizations are developed through the channeling of anti-social erotic and aggressive urges into constructive outlets.

The Darwinian idea that people are merely refined animals allowed Freud to delve into the human psyche and break it down into tangible parts, rather than attributing the human mind to God’s divinity. But rather than observing man as the sum total of his ancestors, Freud made a person the sum total of his experiences. In physics he especially drew upon the newly discovered principle of the “conservation of energy” when he created his “psychodynamic” approach to personality. (Thornton) The psychodynamic approach concerns the “dynamics” of psychological forces which act against each other. He assumed that people each had a fixed amount of “psychic energy,” which is expressed in emotion (Seligman).

This paper had been identified to be the “blueprint” for behaviorist psychology for the use of the terms but to ignore the questions about any phenomena associated with them (Harzem, 2004). In this publication, there is a clear sense of his methodological objections to introspection and to experimental psychology’s unified focus on consciousness, according to Watson there are researchers of his time that studied animal behavior that were often compelled to speculate how their behavioral outcomes informed an understanding of human consciousness (Madden, 2013) In Watson’s view, mental life was conceived to not simply exist with discarding the long-standing concern with conscious mental functioning as a subject matter and introspection as a method (Moore, 2011). After Watson’s departure from the world of academia, behaviorism moved from the center of attention, the debate had been replaced by theories of

Skinner's approach was drastically empiricist. Second, Skinner said that since psychology was thought to be limited to the level of behavioral observation, it had no need of being condensed to or clarified in terms of physiology (Weidman). Thirdly, for Skinner, processes of the mind or states of the mind were to be understand as behavior (Weidman). B.F. Skinner rejected re... ... middle of paper ... ...sciousness but he also thought that emotions and processes of the mind are just the consequence of the never ending sequence of stimulus and reaction which carry out no meaning (DISCovering Authors). Skinner also promoted the utilization of behavioral technology to improve society.

In addition, I will attempt to provide some additional arguments and discussions that further support Hume’s position and reveal the lack of credibility found in most chronicles of miracles. The first question one must ask is: why was Hume writing about miracles? Most people believed that people were created in God’s image. Hume was most concerned with human nature, however, and he believed that people were essentially just very intelligent animals (Craig, 2002, p. 26). His goal was to change these ideas and show that, although people are very intelligent and capable of planning and reasoning, they have much more in common with animals than they do with a divine being.

Psychology is the study of all aspects of behaviour and mental processes. The Oxford English Dictionary outlines psychology such as “the scientific study of the human and its functions especially those affecting behaviour in a given context” its backgrounds will be derived back to ancient Greece, 400 – 500 years B.C. The importance was a philosophical one, with decent theorists like philosopher impacting Plato, who successively influenced philosopher. Gradually within the mid-1800s, the scientific field of psychological science gained its independence from philosophy once researchers developed laboratories to look at and check human sensations and perceptions mistreatment scientific strategies. The first two outstanding analysis psychologists

And if animals have conscious experiences, these presumably vary widely as well.” If humans have minds, it must be possible that animals also have minds. And though no one would believe that earthworms and earwigs have thought processes like our own, it has been proven that chimps share 98% of genome with humans. Chimps have also shown that they can lie and cheat their competitors, with apes being able to recognise themselves in a mirror- this showing they are capable of self- awareness, the very thing which separates us from the animals. From this we can easily see that chimps and apes must have minds, but to a lesser capacity than that of our own. Professor David Armstrong has thrown at us the inadequacies of behaviourism- it is not to be trusted fully in establishing the ability of the mind in other animals, but it will certainly help us in finding it.

The term psychology has a long history but the psychology as an independent discipline is fairly new. Psychology started, and had a long history, as a topic within the fields of philosophy and physiology. It then became an independent field of its own through the work of the German Wilhelm Wundt, the founder of experimental psychology and structuralism. Wundt stressed the use of scientific methods in psychology, particularly through the use of introspection. In 1875, a room was set-aside for Wundt for demonstrations in what we now call sensation and perception.