Journal 01the Hictory o/ rhr Behavioral Sciences

17 (1981) 273-282.

THE MISTAKEN MIRROR:

ON WUNDT’S AND TITCHENER’S PSYCHOLOGIES
THOMAS H. LEAHEY

Most psychologists believe that Structuralism, the psychology of E. B. Titchener, was

a faithful copy of Wilhelm Wundt’s original psychology. This belief is fostered by
textbooks for history and systems and introductory psychology courses. The present
paper argues that this belief is false. Titchener rejected many of Wundt’s goals and
concepts, and should be viewed as a traditional British associationist and positivist
rather than as a follower of Wundt. Similarities of Wundt’s system and Titchener’s
system to current psychological thinking are noted.

It is widely believed by American psychologists that Edward Bradford Titchener

was a loyal pupil of Wilhelm Wundt who acted as a kind of English-speaking double for
the founder of psychology. Only recently have historians of psychology begun to cast
doubt on this belief,‘ but no one has as yet explored the systematic differences between
the psychologies of Wundt and Titchener. The present paper has a twofold purpose. The
first is historical, to demonstrate that Titchener was not Wundt’s double, and to explore
some of the sources of the modern misconception. The second is systematic, for
Titchener and Wundt represent two different metatheoretical orientations that transcend
commonly recognized psychological, and even scientific, systems. We will then find that
Titchener does have a mirror image in a most surprising place.
OF WUNDTIAN
A SKETCH PSYCHOLOGY
Wundt’s psychology was produced by a wide-ranging mind and developed over a
long lifetime, and so cannot be briefly summarized. Most important for present pur-
poses, however, was Wundt’s division of mental phenomena into inner and outer
phenomena. The distinction is most easily grasped today in the study of language, since it
resembles Chomsky’s distinction of deep and surface structure. According to Wundt, a
sentence consists of a set of visual or auditory sensations given in consciousness.
However, underlying the sentence are certain cognitive processes whose operations in the
speaker produce the sentence, or analyze it and extract the meaning for the hearer. These
processes are the inner phenomena of 1anguage.l We may note in passing that although
there is some similarity between Wundt’s distinction of inner phenomena and outer
phenomena and Chomsky’s deep and surface structures, Wundt’s formulation is more
psychological. Wundt treats a sentence as a consciously given experience produced by
general cognitive processes; Chomsky treats a sentence as embodying abstract and
specifically linguistic structures.
For Wundt the distinction of inner and outer phenomena was not limited to
language, however. In all its aspects, the mind could be viewed as a set of conscious ex-
periences produced jointly by external stimuli and various higher mental processes. The
most important of those processes was apperception, which served a number of mental
functions according to Wundt. It was responsible for attention: we apperceive those

THOMAS H.LEAHEY is associate professor ofpsychology at Virginia Commonwealth Unfversiry,

9 0 I W. Franklin St.. Richmond, VA 23284, U S A . Besides the rext. A History of Psychology
(Prentice-Hall), he has recently completed Psychology’sOccult Doubles (NeLton-Hall).a study of the

! reception of phrenology. mesmerism, and psychical research and how they illuminate science-pseudo-
science demarcation crireria.

273
214 THOMAS H. LEAHEY

stimuli we want to attend to, but only incompletely apprehend others. It was responsible
for perceptual grouping: “word” is more than a collection of letters because apperception
synthesizes them into a more meaningful whole. It was also responsible, reciprocally, for
analysis: ‘‘word” can be analyzed into four letters because we can focus our attention on
each of its elements. Apperception played a similar role in sentence production and com-
prehension.
A complete understanding of the mind required study of both outer and inner men-
tal phenomena, and Wundt adopted two methods appropriate to each study. The first
method, applicable to outer phenomena, is the better known to modem psychologists. It
is Wundt’s so-called physiological psychology. For Wundt, physiological psychology was
the study of individual human consciousness by means of self-observation. I avoid the
more widely used term introspection, for as Blumenthal has pointed out, Wundt did not
ask his subjects to introspect in the commonly used Cartesian sense, in which introspec-
tion is an intensely analytical reflection on a remembered event experienced without ex-
perimental control.* Wundt harshly criticized his student Kiilpe for adopting such a
procedure.‘ Self-observation as used by Wundt was a simple report of an experience not
too different from procedures used by modern, thoroughly ‘objective,’ anti-introspective,
cognitive psychologists.6
The second method, appropriate to inner mental phenomena, is much less well-
known. It is Wundt’s V“lkerpsychologie.eWundt believed that “(we) cannot experiment
upon mind itself, but only upon its outworks, the organs of sense and movement. . .”’
However, “. . . fortunately for science there are other sources of objective psychological
knowledge which become accessible at the very point where the experimental method
fails us. These are certain products of the common mental life,” especially language,
myth, and custom, which form the subject matter of Elkerpsychologie, “our chief
source of information regarding the general psychology of the complex mental
processes.”8 These phenomena expand the range of human experience by including
historical experience, and Wundt thought that by comparing primitive and complex
societies we could trace the development of mind. A complete psychology thus had to in-
clude physiological psychology as a direct study of outer mental phenomena given in con-
sciousness, and Elkerpsychologie as an indirect study of the inner phenomena of mind.
The most important goal of psychology, given Wundt’s framework, was an ex-
planation of human consciousness. Self-observation produced a descriptive classification
of conscious experience, or outer phenomena, but this is only the first stage for psy-
chological science. The second stage would be an explanation of the facts of immediate
experience by reference to indirectly known, voluntarily controlled cognitive processes,
such as attention? Furthermore, psychological explanation was to resemble historical ex-
planation. Wundt believed that the mind was creative, which meant that reported ex-
perience could not be predicted from initial conditions, as in physics. Instead, a psy-
chologist could show that an experience, once reported, was an orderly product of sensa-
tion and the operation of cognitive processes, as the historian shows an event to be an
orderly product of a situation and human action.l0 We may note that Sigmund Freud
shared this same historical orientation.”
TITCHENER’S SYSTEM CONTRASTED WITH WUNDT’S
We may let Titchener speak for himself:
Wundt. . . accepts. . . a whole array of explanatory terms: consciousness, atten-
tion, association-perception, emotion, memory, imagination. If only he had the in-
 T H E MISTAKEN MIRROR 275
sight to throw them all away! Wundt possessed, in fact, just one clear concept, the
conce t of sensation.. . . All the rest were foggy from much ar ument.. . we
P
ourse ves are gettin rid of the the0 -ridden terms iecemeal. . . an(kit will be long
f P
before experimenta psychology is nally free o f t em.’*R
We find that Titchener was not afraid to criticize his teacher in the broadest and
harshest terms. It is clear from this passage that Titchener viewed much of Wundt’s
system as unnecessary, overspeculative, and even unscientific.
The most obvious of Titchener’s excisions is the entire Volkerpsychologie;Titchener
had nothing like it, and did little to bring it to the attention of others. He himself, like
another of Wundt’s students, Oswald Kiilpe, essayed a direct experimental attack on the
higher mental processes.1a However, and herein lies the crucial difference between
Titchener and Wundt, Titchcner did not view cognitive process& as underlying and giv-
ing rise to conscious experience, but as completely analyzable complexes of conscious
sensations to be reduced to their elemental constituents.
Titchener acknowledged his own system to be a kind of sensationism, a meaning-
free description of the elements of consciousness, in contrast to Wundt’s voluntarism.
Wundt emphasized the voluntary activity of mind, especially in the process of appercep
tion, but Titchener preferred pure sensationism. To define sensationism, he quoted, and
appeared to accept, Baldwin’s definition: “the theory that all knowledge originates in
sensations; that all cognitions, even reflective ideas and so-called intuitions, can be traced
back to the elementary sensations.””
The three original tasks expected of this sensationistic psychology were: to discover
and catalogue the simplest sensations given in consciousness; to discover how these sen-
sations were connected; and to discover, for both sensations and connections, their un-
derlying physiological processes. The method by which the first two tasks were to be ac-
complished may best be termed analytical or anatomical introspection. Unlike Wundt’s,
Titchener’s subjects did not just briefly report an experimentally controlled experience,
they had to dissect it, attempting to discover the sensation-elementsgiven at that mo-
ment in consciousness. Titchener’s analytic introspection was similar to the methods
adopted by Kulpe at Wurzburg, which Wundt himself criticized as a return to the
philosophical introspection he had abandoned. Titchener also discarded Wundt’s goal of
a psychological explanation of mind in favor of a physiological one.
Let us consider an example-attention. For Wundt, attention was one aspect of the
cognitive process of apperception, whose operation gave rise to various conscious
phenomena. Titchener, however, pleads for a “simplification of the psychology of atten-
tion,” He would rather have “a psychology of clearness-considering clearness as an at-
tribute of sensation.”” Titchener’s key move is this: It is not that some sensations are
clear because they are attended to, but that we say we have attended to some sensations
because we find them clear in our consciousness. Where Wundt had explained sensory
clarity by appealing to the process of attention, Titchener argued that “attention” is just
a descriptive label given to what we experience with clarity. Titchener’s analysis also
applies to the feelings of effort that Wundt held accompanied active attention. Titchener
writes: “When I am trying to attend I. . . find myself frowning, wrinkling my forehead
etc. All such. . . bodily sets and movements give rise to characteristic sensations. Why
should not these sensations be what we call ‘attention’.”1e Attention for Titchener is
something of a rationalization after the fact of an experience, in that it is only a label we
apply to clear sensations accompanied by certain bodily sets that indicate effort.
Titchener did away with Wundt’s distinction between inner and outer aspects of
mind. Titchener attempted to turn Wundt’s inner cognitive processes into descriptive at-
276 THOMAS H. LEAHEY

tributes of the outer, conscious, region of mind as bundles of sensations. In short,

Titchener wanted psychology primarily to describe conscious facts, not explain them.
Explanation of mental events Titchener referred to physiology, by linking conscious ex-
perience to its substrate in the material processes of the brain. In any event, terms such as
apperception were given no explanatory role.
In his latest work, Titchener’s descriptive emphasis was sharpened. He abandoned
the search for elements and their connections in consciousness in favor of
phenomenological description, and he abandoned the goal of explanation altogether, be
it physiological or psychological. In a letter to Adolf Meyer written in 1918, Titchener
declares, “I don’t explain or causally relate at all at all!. . . Causality I regard as
mythological,-if you mean by it anything more than co~relation.”~’ Titchener thus
departed even further from Wundt, but the change only strengthened existing differences.
Given Titchener’s background, that Titchener is not Wundt’s double should not sur-
prise us. After all, he was an Englishman, and Fritz Ringer has shown how great was the
intellectual gulf between English and German intellectual Zeitgeiste. Although Titchener
studied with Wundt, Titchener’s earlier grounding in philosophy in England undoubtedly
kept him from absorbing the Wundtian paradigm, and predisposed him to accept the
Machian positivism espoused by some, but not all, young German psychologists such as
Kiilpe and Ebbinghaus. The founding Gestalt psychologists, on the other hand, rejected
positivism.la So when he set out on his own, he reverted to what he knew. In his An
Outline of Psychology, Titchener wrote that “the general standpoint of the book is that
of the traditional English psychology.”1gThe differences between Titchener and Wundt
are more than a matter of historical accident, however. Titchener sought a descriptive
psychology and Wundt an explanatory psychology. This brings us to the systematic side
of our problem.
DESCRIPTIVE AND EXPLANATORY SCIENCE
In his recent study of behaviorism, Brian Mackenzie argues that the behaviorist’s
acceptance of positivism created an excessive commitment to experimental method as
the savior of psychology.” For example, John B. Watson in his famous 1913paper urged
that psychologists should temporarily avoid studies of complex mental processes, but
that “As our methods become better developed it will be possible to undertake in-
vestigations of more and more complex forms of behavior.”z1There is no mention of
better theory, only ‘refined’ method. Titchener wrote on the same topic: “We may have
absolute confidence in our method. . . there is not the slightest doubt that the patient
application of the experimental method will presently solve the problems of feeling and
attention.”22 Titchener and Watson were equally committed to good experimental
method, although to different methods, as the surety of scientific progress. If Macken-
zie’s analysis of behaviorism can be applied to Titchener, we should find evidence of
positivism in Titchener as well as Watson.
Titchener’s most extended treatment of his philosophy of science is given in the
posthumously published Systematic Psychology: Prolegomena. Titchener here affirmed
his descriptive orientation: “Institutional science. . . is descriptive and not explanatory; it
stops short of the ‘why’ of things.” Titchener “denies that science has anything to do with
explanation, with Why and Because.” He seems to reduce natural law to simple correla-
tion “expressing” “covariation among phenomena” which cannot be sharply dis-
tinguished from a “law of facts.”” This attitude is further confirmed by the letter to
Meyer printed in the 1972 edition of Systematic Psychology, quoted above. The synthesis
 THE MISTAKEN MIRROR 277
of laws into a theory “never transcends description, a shorthand description which. . .
brackets together a multitude of related facts.”u Just as terms such as “force” and
“cause” are retained by physics because they are convenient, while protesting “against
[their] mythical power of explanation,” psychology may still use “memory” and
“imagination” while disavowing ‘‘common sedse ideas as both superfluous and mis-
leading. . .
In saying all this, Titchener advocated the radical positivism of Ernst Mach and
other nineteenth-century positivist phlosophers, a tradition of which Titchener was well
aware. He cited Mach, for example, to the effect that “ ‘the grand universal laws of
physics. . . are not essentially different from descriptions’.’” Mach advocated a com-
pletely descriptive approach to physics, and rejected the use of any purely theoretical
terms, such as “atom,” on the grounds of unobservability. Mach’s positivism is more
radical than later logical positivism, which admitted theoretical terms to science as long
as they were empirically defined.
Wundt, on the other hand, was one of those German academic mandarins described
by Ringer for whom the word “positivism” was a term of opprobrium. Titchener himself
noted that Wundt was a voluntarist, not a sensationist. Wundt believed descriptive psy-
chology to be incomplete and felt that explanation was the proper goal of science. In the
explanatory psychology he sought “the chief emphasis is laid on the way in which im-
mediate experience arises in the subject, so that a variety of explanatory psychology
results which attributes to those subjective activities not referred to external objects, a
position as independent as that assigned to ideas. This variety has been called Volun-
taristic psychology, because of the importance that must be conceded to volitional
processes. . .‘’n Furthermore, in contrast to Titchener, Wundt believed in “an indepen-
dent psychical causality” compatible with, but “different from” the physical causality of
physiology. Alongside “laws of nature” there exist “laws of psychical phenomena.”m
Titchener did not “causally relate at all” beyond mere correlation, while Wundt listed six
causal laws of the mind in his Outlines of Psychology.”
The issue between Wundt and Titchener was what to do with the data of psychology.
They agreed that psychology’s data were the facts of conscious experience, but they com-
pletely disagreed on what needed to be explained. For Wundt, what we experience in con-
sciousness is the outcome of deeper mental processes not directly subject to self-
observation. The goal of psychology, therefore, was to use the data of individual
(physiological psychology) and collective (Vdlkerpsychologie) experience to discover the
hidden cognitive processes. These processes could be used to scientifically explain the
facts of experience, which in turn provide evidence for the existence and operation of the
cognitive processes.
Titchener, on the other hand, as a positivist, believed that what was not observable
was not admissable in science, including the so-called cognitive processes for which
Titchener rebuked Wundt in the passage quoted above on pages 214-275. As purely
theoretical, nonobservable terms, apperception, memory, attention, and so on were for
Titchener essentially mythical. Titchener began, like Wundt, with the facts of experience,
but instead of seeing them as evidence of the workings of mental processes, as in need of
explanation, he saw them as the rock bottom bed of science. The facts of experience were
not to be explained, held Titchener, but were to be used to explain the supposed processes
of apperception and attention. As we have seen, Wundt said a sensation is clear because
we attended to its source; the clear sensation is evidence of the process of attention. Ac-
cording to Titchner, however, people have learned to say they attended to something
278 THOMAS H. LEAHEY

because the sensation was clear. In Titchener’s view, the myth of attention is a sort of
rationalization or label attached to clear sensation. The explanation of sensory clarity for
Titchener would come from revealing the physiology of clarity. And then, in good
positivist fashion, one observable fact, sensory clarity, would be explained by another
observable fact, a brain-process; nowhere would one need to introduce an unobservable
cognitive process of apperception or attention.
We may conclude, then, that underlying the distinct psychological systems of
Wundt and Titchener are two differentphilosophies of science. For Wundt, scientific psy-
chology should be causal and explanatory, accounting for the facts of immediate ex-
perience by showing how they depend on the operation of complex, inner mental
processes. For Titchener, on the other hand, scientific psychology should be correlational
and descriptive, accounting for the facts of immediate experience by showing how they
depend on (nonpsychological) nerve processes, or, later, by simply describing regularities
in experience. Titchener is not Wundt’s double, in method, theory, or philosophy of
science. Why then, is he so often believed to be Wundt’s double?
MISTAKING TITCHENER FOR WUNDT
As Henry Veatch has remarked, scientists are a very present-minded group,8oand
psychologists are no exception. A useful example of modern psychologists’ mis-
understanding of their own past may be found in Ulric Neisser’s recent Cognition and
Reality.81Neisser is an interesting case, for although he did much to found contemporary
information-processing cognitive psychology with his 1967 Cognitive Psychology,82he
now opposes much of what the movement has become. He is familiar with a fair amount
of very early psychological research:l and in some respects his current orientation
resembles Wundt’s.’‘ Nevertheless, in his recounting of the failures of introspective psy-
chology, he makes a number of erroneous charges. He attributes much of the failure of
early mentalistic psychology to its employment of “a special form of introspection,” in
which the mind’s activities are observed. He has in mind the analytic introspection of
Kiilpe or Titchener, not Wundt’s self-report. He also writes that “the introspectionists
had no theory of cognitive development.”” This is essentially true of Wundt’s
physiological psychology and Titchener’s system, but Neisser seems unaware of
Viilkerpsychologie, Wundt’s tool for studying cognitive development. Such conflating of
Wundt and Titohener into a single “introspective psychology” is typical of the beliefs of
psychologists today.
As is typical of the present-minded scientist, Neisser cites neither Titchener nor
Wundt, but seems to draw his information from unnamed “(t)extbooks in the history of
psychology.”” Blumenthal has already pointed to textbooks as a source of ignorance
about the true Wundt: “American textbook accounts of Wundt now present highly inac-
curate and mythological accounts of the man and his w~rk.”~’ The classic history is, of
course, E. G. Boring’s History of Experimental Psychology.’O Boring treats Wundt as
something of a British associationist. Association is given more space than apperception.
Creative synthesis is said to be “not too different” from J. S.Mill’s mental chemistry, a
passive process of association determined by the elements themselves. The Vilker-
psychologie is given no more than a mention. Titchener is described as “an Englishman
who represented the German psychological tradition in America.’*ag
More recent texts have done little to correct, and much to further distort, Boring’s
description of Wundt. Duane Schultz, for example, in his popular work, explicitly
equates Wundt and Titchener, which at least Boring did not do: “The orthodox Wund-
 THE MISTAKEN MIRROR 279
tian brand of. . . psychology was transplanted to the United States by Wundt’s most
devoted pupil, E. B. Titchener, and underwent its fullest development at his hands.”
Schultz’s presentation of Wundt closely follows Boring, and he writes that “A knowledge
of Wundt’s psychology provides a reasonably accurate picture of Titchener’s ~ystern”‘~
although the two are not identical. In his text, William Sahakian titles his section on
Titchener, “Titchener: Wundt in America.”“ He too fails to go beyond Boring in his
brief consideration of Wundt’s system, and describes the Volkerpsychologie only on the
basis of the Elemenrs of Folk Psychology“ which has little in common with the
developed Volkerpsychologie. Daniel Robinson gives neither Wundt nor Titchener their
own sections in his text. His presentation of Wundt is sketchy, not even mentioning the
Volkerpsychologie, while his treatment of Titchener is almost nonexistent. He does say
that Titchener’s system was “not far removed from” Wundt’s. Both are criticized for
having “no theory worth the name.”u This is true of Titchener, though given his descrip
tive orientation he would not find it troubling, but it is certainly untrue of Wundt. His
theory of attention, for example, is a worthy rival to any modern account, as I have
argued earlier.’‘ Watson’s Great Psychologists treats Wundt at some length, unlike other
texts after Boring, but it shares the same difficulties as the others.‘6 The most extreme
equation of Wundt and Titchener is found in Fred Keller’s Definition of Psychology:
“Titchener’s system was so close to Wundt’s and so much easier to describe, that we shall
not here dwell on. . . Wundt. , . .”‘O The thinking reader should be left wondering how
two things can be identical but one be “much simpler” than the other.
To the extent that working psychologists know Wundt only through textbook ac-
counts, as Neisser seems to, they will confuse Titchener with Wundt, as the texts do.
With Blumenthal, I believe that textual distortions of Wundt’s psychology are the major
reason for Wundt’s low status today. A contributing factor is the lack of translations of
Wundt’s volumes on Vlkerpsychologie. Enough of his works on individual psychology
are available in English that Americans can get an accurate picture of that side of
Wundt’s work, but until Blumenthal’s Language and Psychology none of the important
Volkerpsychologie was available. Finally, the rise of American behaviorism made un-
acceptable any form of mentalistic psychology, to the point where differences among
mentalists became blurred. This blurring has been continued by behaviorism’s anti-
historical bias. Behaviorism was launched in a fervor of optimism that the past could be
forgotten in pursuit of the utopian future, so that accurate historical scholarship was
deemed irrelevant:‘’ history was not taught at Walden Two.“
STRANGE BEDFELLOWS IN DESCRIPTION
TitchenCr is not Wundt’s mirror-image: he does not accurately reflect Wundt’s psy-
chology. However, we should bear in mind that a mirror image has a peculiar
characteristic: every detail of the original is faithfully reflected, but the whole scene is
reversed. If we look, we may find a living psychologist who Is Titchener’s mirror double.
This psychologist espouses a system which, unlike methodological behaviorism,
does not rule mental events out of psychology, but like Titchener on attention, writes that
“what one feels or introspectively observes are conditions of one’s own body,” not ex-
planatory cognitive processes. As Titchener optimistically and directly studied the higher
mental processes, so today this writer’s psychology “does. . . not reject any. . . ‘higher
mental processes’;’’ but it has taken the lead in investigating their conditions. Like
Titchener, he cites Ernst Mach favorably, writing that science is a search for “lawful
relations among the events in nature.” Like Titchener, he reduces cause to correlation
280 THOMAS H. LEAHEY

between independent and dependent variables: “The old ‘cause-and-effect connection’

becomes a ‘functional relation’.” In short, although this psychologist admits that we can
talk about attention, memory, and other mental processes, he considers them myths that
explain nothing, and adopts an essentially descriptive stance.
Space limitations preclude further exposition of the similarities between Titchener’s
system and this new one. Some readers may have guessed Titchener’s double, B. F.
Skinner, the father of radical behaviori~m.~~ I believe that Titchener and Skinner do
stand in a true mirror-image relation: both adopt the same descriptive, Machian,
phi4osophy of science and both adopt the same view of conscious phenomena, as sen-
sations which we learn to label in different ways. The emphases in each system, however,
are entirely different. Skinner cannot deny the possibility of a mentalistic psychology like
Titchener’s, but he certainly denies its scientificstatus, since it cannot predict and control
behavior.&OTitchener did not want psychology to be useful; Skinner does. Nevertheless,
each adopts a radically positivist approach to science, as something that has as little to
do with theory as possible.&’On the contrary, both think that psychology should deal in
exact objective description. It is an attitude equally applicable to mentalism or
behaviorism.
Finally, we may note a personal similarity between the two. In 1914, Titchener,
whose system was shortly to be erased by behaviorism, wrote at the end of his reply to
Watson: “. . . introspective psychology.. . will go quietly about its task. . . declining,
with the mild persistence natural to matters of fact-either to be eliminated or i g
nored.”62In 1963, after hearing the death-knell of behaviorism pronounced by Sigmund
Koch” Skinner said that he finds trends in psychology “still running away from me,” but
that nevertheless his “science of behavior is moving very rapidly and powerfully. . , it
justifies itself by its success in dealing with the subject matter.*’64Whether Skinner’s
dogged optimism will prove any more justified than Titchener’s remains to be seen.
Positivism, however, is a philosophy of science that has been tried and found want-
ing. Mach’s radical positivism, which motivated both Titchener’s and Skinner’s descrip-
tive psychologies, was long ago superseded by logical positivism, which in turn has been
rejected by contemporary philosophers of science.6’ Studies by N. R. Hanson and
Thomas Kuhn have shown that no scientific system can be theory-free even if the effort is
made,6eand Edwin Burtt has observed that “there is an exceedingly subtle and insidious
danger in positivism,’*for in trying to avoid theoretical “metaphysics,” which is impossi-
ble, the positivist’s “metaphysics will be held uncritically because it is unconscious.**67
Secret theory replaces explicit theory. Titchener and Skinner both accepted positivism
and sought theory-free descriptive psychologies. Titchener’s failed, and it is now only an
historical curiosity. The cognitive revolt against behaviorism may give radical
behaviorism the same fate.08

NOTES

I . Arthur Blumenthal, “A Reappraisal of Wilhclm Wundt,” American Psychologist 30 (1975): 1081-1088.

2. See the fragment of Wundt’s Yalkerpsychologie translated by Arthur Blumenthal in his Lungguage und
Psychology (New York: Wiley, 1970), pp. 20-3 I , and Blumcnthal’s preceding commentary.
3. Blumenthal, speaking in a discussion session on “European Influence Upon American Psychology,” in
The Roots ofAmerican Psychology, ed. R. W. Rieber and K. Salzingcr (Annuls of the New York Acudemy of
Sciences 291 [1977]: 1-394), pp. 66-73. The best English discussion of Wundt’s strictures on proper experimen-
tal method is Wilhelm Wundt, Principles of Physiologicul Psychology Vol. 1. trans. E. B. Titchener (London:
 THE MISTAKEN MIRROR 28 1

Swan Sonnenschein; New York: Macmillan, 1910). pp. 4-6.Wundt’s views on manod, description. and ex-
planation have been discussed by Theodore Mischel, “Wundt and the Conceptual Foundations of Psychology.”
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 3 I (1900): 1-26.But Mischel persists in identifying, incorrectly,
Wundt’s and Titchener’s views on introspection (p. 13); for a corrective, see Kurt Danziger, “The Positivist
Repudiation of Wundt,” Journal of rhe Hkrory of rhe Behavioral Sciences I5 (1979): 205-230.
4. Good English accounts of Wundt’s criticisms of Kalpe may be found in the first edition of Robcrt W.
Woodworth, Experimenral Psychology (New York: Holt, 1938),pp. 784-786and in George Humphrey, Think-
ing (New York: Science Editions, 1963), pp. 106-132.
5. See, for example, George Sperling, “The Information Available in Brief Visual Presentation,”
Psychological Monographs 74, whole number 498 (1960)which usca one of Wundt’s own visual apperception
tasks; or E. Colin Cherry, “Some Experiments on the Recognition of Speech, with One and Two Ears,” Jour-
nal of the Acousric Society ofAmerica 26 (1953):554-559,which asks subjects to attend and describe auditory
information.
6. Wilhelm Wundt, Mlkerpsychologie, 10 vols. (Lcipzig: Englemann, 1900-1920).
7. Wundt, Lecrures on Human and Animal Psychology (London: Swan Sonnenschein; New York: Mac-
millan, 1894), p. 10.
8. Wundt. Principles of Physiological Psychology, p. 4.
9. Wundt, Outlines of Psychology, trans. Charles Judd (Leiprig: Englemann; London: Williams and
Norgate; New York: Gustav E. Stechert, 1897;reprint ed., St. Clair Shores, Mich.: Scholarly Press), pp. 11-
15.
10. Wundt, fnrroducrion ro Psychology, trans. Rudolph Pintner (London: Allen, 1912; reprint ed.. New
York: Arno, 1973), pp. 166-167.
I I . Sigmund Freud, “The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman,” in Collecred Papers
(London: Hogarth Press, 1953). pp. 202-231;see pp. 226-227.
12. Edward Bradford Titchener, “Experimental Psychology: A Retrospect,” American Journal of
Psychology 36 (1925): 313-323,p. 318.
13. Titchener, Lecrures on rhe Elementary Psychology of rhe Thought Processes (New York: Macmillan,
1909;reprint ed.. New York: Arno, 1973).
14. Ibid.. p. 23.
IS. Titchener, Lectures on rhe Elementary Psychology of Feeling und Arrenrion (New York: Macmillan;
reprint ed., New York: Arno, 1973), p. 209.
16. Titchener, Experimental Psychology, vol. I (New York: Macmillan, 1901). p. 109.
17. Titchener. in Appendix to reprint edition of Sysremaric Psychology: Prolegomena (New York: Mac-
millan, 1929;reprint ed., lthaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1972), p. 273.See also Rand B. Evans,
“E. B. Titchener and His Lost System,” Journal of rhe Hirrory ofrhe BehavioralSciencu 1 I (1972):334-341.
18. For the comparison of English and German intellectual environments, see Fritz K. Ringer, The Decline of
rhe German Mandarins (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969); for the appeal of positivism to
Titchener and others. see Danziger, “The Positivist Repudiation of Wundt;” on the Gestalt psychologists, see
Michael Wertheimer, “Max Wertheimer: Gestalt Prophet.” Presidential address to Division 26, annual
meeting of the American Psychological Association, Toronto, Ontario, August 31, 1978.
19. Edward Bradford Titchener, An Outline of Psychology (New York: Macmillan, 1897), p. vi.
20. Brian Mackenzie, Behaviorism and rhe Limirs ofscientific Merhod (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1977).
21. John B. Watson, “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It,” PsychologicalReview 20 (1913): 158-176,p.
175.
22. Titchener, Lecrures on Feeling and Artenrion, p. 317.
23. Titchener, Prolegomena, pp. 65, 56, and 61.
24. Ibid., p. 63.
25. [bid., pp. 57-58.
26. Ibid., p. 63.
27. Wundt, Ourlines, p. 12.
28. Ibid., p. 320.
29. Ibid., pp. 321-328.A shorter list is given in his Inrroduction, pp. 154-198.
30. Henry B. Veatch, “Science and Humanism” in Theories in Contemporary Psychology, 2nd ed., ed.
Melvin Marx and Felix Goodson (New York: Macmillan, 1976), pp. 61-66.
31. Ulric Neisser, Cognirion and Realiry (San Francisco: Freeman, 1976).
32. Neisser. Cognitive Psychology (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1967).
282 THOMAS H. LEAHEY

33. Elizabeth Spelke, William Hirst, and Neisser, “Skills of Divided Attention,” Cognition 4 (1976): 215-
230.
34. Thomas H. Leahey, “Something Old, Something New: Wundt and Contemporary Theories of Atten-
tion,” Journal of the Hisrory of the Behavioral Sciences 15 (1979): 242-252.
35. Neisser, Cognition and Realiry, pp. 1-3.
36. Ibid., p. 2.
37. Blumenthal, Language and Psychology, p. 11.
38. Edwin G. Boring, Hisrory of Experimenral Psychology, 2nd ed. (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts,
1950).
39. Ibid., p. 410.
40. Duane Schultz, A Hisrory of Modern Psychology, 2nd ed. (New York: Academic Press, 1975), both
quotes p. 83.
41. William Sahakian, Hisrory and Sysrems of Psychology (New York: Schenkman, 1975), p. 352.
42. Wilhelm Wundt, Elements of Folk Psychology (London: George Allen, 1916).
43. Daniel Robinson, An Inrellecrual Hisrory of Psychology (New York: Macmillan. 1976), pp. 329-333.
44. Leahey, “Something Old, Something New.”
45. Robert Watson, The Great Psychologisrs, 3rd ed. (New York: Lippincott, 1971). The most recent, fourth
edition (1978) contains an improved presentation of Wundt’s psychology, but still calls Titchener “Wundt’s
most faithful pupil,” who “in most respects. . . held to the tradition of Wundt.; giving his “master’s’’ ideas “a
systematic explictness” (pp. 413-414).
46. Fred S. Keller, The Definition of Psychology, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. 1973), p. 19.
47. Joseph R. Royce, “Pebble Picking vs. Boulder Building,” Psychological Reports 16 (1965): 447-450.
48. Reinforcement history is not the same as history as usually understood. Reinforcement creates a certain
present state in the organism that disposes it to respond in a certain way. Ideally, this state could be known
without knowing the actual reinforcement history (i.e.. through neurophysiological statedescription or
behavioral testing). In this context, history is not seen as a developmental process but only as a means of chang-
ing an organism’s (or a society’s) momentary state.
49. The first two quotes came from Burrhus F. Skinner, Abour Behaviohm (New York: Knopf, 1974), pp.
216 and 223; the second two came from Skinner, Science and Human Behavior (New York: Macmillan, 1953),
pp. 13 and 23.
50. Skinner, Abour Behaviorism p. 165.
51. Compare Skinner’s “Are Theories of Learning Necessary‘?“ Psychological Review 57 (1950): 193-216, to
Titchener’s comments on Wundt’s “theory ridden terms” quoted above (see note 12).
52. Titchener. “On Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It,” Proceedings of rhe American Philosophicd
Society 53 (1914): 1-17, p. 17.
53. Sigmund Koch, “Psychology and Emerging Conceptions of Knowledge as Unitary,” in Behaviorism and
Phenomenology, ed. T. W. Wann (Chicago: University of Chicago Prcss, 1964).
54. Skinner, Speaking in the “Discussion of Koch” (note 53), in Behaviorism and Phenomenology, p. 42.
55. Frederick Suppe, “The Search for Philosophic Understanding of Scientific Theories,” in The Srrucrure of
Scienrifc Theories, ed. F. Suppe (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1974), pp. 3-254. Scc also Peter
Achinstein. Conceprs of Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1968) for a rigorous analysis of positivism.
56. Norwood Russell Hanson, Parrernr of Discovery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958) and
Observation ond Explanation (New York: Harper Torchbooks. 1971). Thomas S. Kuhn, The Srrucrure of
Scienrifc Revolurions, enl. ed., (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).
57. Edwin A. Burtt. The Metaphysical Foundarionr of Modern Science, rev. ed., (1932; reprint ed., Garden
City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1954), p. 229.
58. An extended analysis of the effects of positivism on psychology will be given in my “The Myth of
Operationism.” Journal of Mind and Behavior, in press. The question of whether cognitive psychology
represents a real revolt against behaviorism and positivism is explored at length in my A Hisrory ofPsyrhology
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. 1980), chap. 13, esp. pp. 371-376 and chap. 15, esp. pp. 392-394.