Titchener (1867-1927)

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Titchener (1867-1927)

• And Structuralism

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What is structuralism?

• Structuralism is an approach that seeks to
  analyze a complex reality into its components. It
  seeks to
• Find the fundamental elements upon which
  structures are built
• Understand the interrelations between elements

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Structuralism in Psychology

• It is the approach of Wundt and Titchener
• Later in psychology (second half of 20th
  century), this approach has also been used in
  cognitive psychology, especially in
  psycholinguistics and in artificial intelligence
  modeling. It also was used in a version of
  psychoanalysis that analyzed the unconscious as a
  language system.

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Some modern names in psychology's structuralism

• Jacques Lacan (French psychoanalytical
  theorist)(1901-1981)
• Jean Piaget (1896-1980)
• Donald Broadbent (1926-1993) pioneer in applying
  information processing computer models to
  psychology.
• Current concepts of symbolic architecture of the
  mind

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Structuralism in the Social Sciences

• Two "founders"
• A linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913)
  (language as a system of phonemes)
• An anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss (1908- )
  (culture and kinship systems, myth analysis)

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Structuralism vs functionalism

• Functionalism looks primarily at the role
  behaviors, thoughts etc. play.
• It does not ask the question of the composition
  of the thought, behavior etc..
• In psychology, the functionalist question often
  is how does this behavior, thought etc help the
  organism adapt?

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The Subject Matter of Psychology for Titchener

• Psychology, for Titchener is about conscious
  experience from the perspective the person who is
  actually experiencing it.
• i.e. NOT objective time, but time as it is
  experienced, and sometimes one hour seems longer
  than another, though the "objective" reality is
  the same.

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The Stimulus Error

• Confuses the mental process with the object we
  are observing.
• Psychology, says Titchener, observes the
  experience, the mental process --NOT the stimulus.

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Observing Illusions

• is a good way to differentiate between the
  "object' and the mental experience. Look for
  example at the moon illusion the moon appears
  bigger on the horizon.

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Reducing the Complex

• Titchener started w/ a complex experience, and
  tried to REDUCE it into smaller parts.
• Wundt tried to make a SYNTHESIS from smaller
  parts.

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A Mechanistic View

• Titchener thought observers could operate like
  "machines", they were like measuring instruments
• Similarly, people were viewed as machines
  elements combine automatically etc

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Titchener's System

• Titchener identified 44,500 individual sensation
  qualities, of which 32,820 were visual, and
  11,600 were auditory. Each sensation quality
  could vary in intensity, duration, clearness, and
  sometimes extensity.
• Affective states could vary in quality, intensity
  and duration.

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Toward Phenomenology

• In later years, Titchener gave up his "elements"
  to think in terms of larger dimensions.
• By 1920, he was shifting toward a more
  phenomenological approach, and that may be where
  he would have ended up, had he not died in 1927.

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Structuralism Beyond Titchener

• Titchener's structuralism was not very
  sophisticated in the sense that he was not
  reflecting upon the nature of structure itself,
  upon the relation of the terms with each other.
• Other structuralists build systems, and think
  more carefully about the relationship of the
  elements with each other.

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THE END