What Im reading on 9/11/05

Bertrand Russell (1921)

I’m breaking up the readings due for next Wednesday into separate posts, because it is going to be pretty long as is.  The first reading is for Barsalou et al.’s class, and the author according to the version Monica printed for me is Bertrant Russel.  That’s not a typo on my part.  That is what I have.  It is Lecture XI in Russell’s The Analysis of Mind.  In line with the meat of the course, we will be focusing on the discussion of abstract thought.  Russell begins by laying out the history of this debate with Berkeley and Locke.  The topic of this debate is essentially a epistemological issue.  How can we, as scientists, study abstract concepts?  Clearly, the reason that Russell wrote this paper is because the psychology of the time (roughly 1900-1920) was transforming.  Watson had leveled his famous criticism against Titchener and his acolytes in 1913, and the trend in psychology was toward strict empiricism.  

Russell was the first philosopher to realize the importance of behaviorist methods, and in his book he calls for psychologists to extend the behaviorist agenda as far as possible.  He was not a complete behaviorist, because he was cognizant of the limitations of behaviorist methods to study and explain all mental phenomenon most people would argue they experience.  Memory, dreams, imagination, creativity are all mental processes that behaviorism has difficulty telling us anything about.  Russell discusses Semon’s work on memory of faces and how it may be that a person generalizes the face for a man to a sort of fuzzy composite, but he concludes that this is no abstraction.  So then, how does he relate this to language abstraction?  According to the “imageless thought” people, he wrote that they have erroneously presupposed that thinking occurs in situations where a stimulus, in this case a given social situation, and the consequent bodily movement, an utterance.  This sounds eerily close to the approach to the study of language by Skinner.  Another example of how this idea played out in psychology was Watson’s and his student Karl Lashley’s attempts at correlating subvocal speech and thought as a means to expose inner speech that is not uttered.

Despite his arguments, which clearly fall on the side of behaviorism, Russell concluded that it fails to circumvent the problem of the relativistic nature of the world.  And consequently its methods are no better than introspection.