Philosophy

• Philosophy of psychology is the field which explains how biological processes and natural phenomenon work, and is present in our everyday life.
• Philosophy of science is a branch of philosophy that investigates philosophical questions that arise from reflecting on science.
• The principal tasks of philosophy of science are to analyze methods of inquiry used in science, question assumptions that scientists take for granted, and assess the justification of scientific knowledge.
• In scientific experimentation, scientists may take for granted some results that can be different, so philosophical science focuses on why assume that things will be the same.
• A theory is a set of ideas, statements about an objectual universe, language, and behavioral change occurs as a function of the consequence of behavior.
• Theories compared are different theories competing to explain the same phenomenon, the likelihood of each being true is not assessed on the basis of how theoretical each is.
• Axioms are statements which are regarded as being established, accepted or self-evidently true, they do not need to be proven, and are taken for granted.
• Logical consequence/entailment is a relationship between a set of premises and a conclusion, when the conclusion follows from the premises.
• Wundt created a vocabulary about features of knowledge about representations to train people in introspection.
• Psychology should use experiments to investigate mental processes because it is an experimental science and mental processes happen all the time.
• Observation should be used in social psychology, which deals with collective mental processes that are unapproachable by means of experiments as their formation process can’t be recreated.
• Pure observation is sufficient for studying the features of an organ as a constant object.
• Experiments are necessary to investigate mental processes.
• There are psychical objects which are permanent over time, they thought undergo processes of evolution, but they maintain the same features for a long period of time.
• Individual psychology, which is interested in the content of consciousness, is all about experimentation.
• Observation is sufficient for studying the shape of a natural object that is constant in time.
• Experimentation is necessary to investigate the shapes of objects over time.
• Social psychology, which deals with collective objects, can use observation.
• The study of natural processes linked to the normal development of an organ requires experiments to analyse and elicit these phenomena under the experimenter’s control.
• Psychology, which deals with mental processes that can only be investigated through experiments, is an experimental science.
• Symmetry vs asymmetry between explanation and justification: In the Aristotelian science, they held a symmetrical relation between their relationships, which changes depending on the kind of science being dealt with.
• In formal sciences, such as mathematics, there is no distinction between explanation and justification.
• Mathematical science holds a symmetrical relation between explanation and justification, meaning that the two go in the same directions.
• Natural sciences provide an ideal of science, to which any other discipline must conform.
• Historicism and hermeneutics are ways of understanding human beings, where historicism states that human beings are historical beings and their activities and products are inherently historical in character, while hermeneutics states that human beings are to be understood by interpreting the conditions within which they act.
• Every scientific discipline must progress from a theological stage to a metaphysical stage to a positive stage.
• The anti-positivists also attacked the positivist view of explanation, stating that explanation deals with natural phenomena, which are explained by means of laws (causal laws), while understanding deals with historical events, which must be explained by understanding them, namely, by tracing them back to the values they express.
• Methodological monism states that there is only one scientific method, which fits for all scientific disciplines, despite the differences in the object of interest.
• The illuministic ideal of unlimited progress of science states that science is the tool which human beings can reach everything.
• Final explanations are unscientific or need to be transformed into causal explanations.
• Nomothetic science employs general laws and explains natural events by subsuming singular events under general laws, while ideographic sciences aim to grasp the uniqueness of events.
• The scientific explanation is a causal explanation, which is achieved by subsuming individual cases under general laws of nature.
• The anti-positivist philosophy: hermeneutics was developed as a reaction to positivism, supporting a methodological pluralism (dualism) and recognizing that human sciences are interested in very different objects, requiring the development of different kinds of methods.
• Wundt is considered as one of the founding father of modern psychology, he founded and directed the first laboratory of psychology at the university of Leipzig, Germany.
• The distinction between outer and inner experiences is not inherent to objects, but a matter of different points of view.
• The science of inner experience is defined as the study of psychical processes known through introspection, or the inner sense, which is counterposed to outer sense.
• Every concrete experience can be divided into two factors: a content, what is presented to us, and our apprehension of the content, which deals with the experiencing subject.
• The direction of natural sciences concerns the objects of experience, thought of as independent of the subject.
• Both definitions of psychology are unsatisfactory as they refer to the metaphysical stage of the discipline and promote the idea that psychology deals with a totally different kind of objects than those that can be grasped with outer sense.
• Wundt analyzed two definitions of psychology: The science of mind and The science of inner experience.