History of Psychology Psychology

2. Hello!
I’m Sol
You can find me at
angelicasolomon686@gmail.com

3.  Rene Descartes ( 1596-1650)
 Isaac Newton (1642-1727)
- The Laws of Motion
 The British Empiricists:
- John Locke (1632-1704)
- George Berkeley (1685-1753)
- David Hume (1711-76)
 James Mill (1773-1836) and John Stuart Mill (1806-73)
CONTENTS

4. Are you familiar with these?

5. 01
RENE DESCARTES
(1596-1650)

6.  French philosopher of the mid -1600’s –
end of the Renaissance Period
 Greatly influenced by the works of
Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, and
Copernicus
 Also influenced by development of
mechanical toys and clocks
 Major contribution for psychology was his
focus on behavior and the mind – in the
mind-body issue
RENE DESCARTES
(1596-1650)

7. WHY IS DESCARTES KNOWN AS THE FATHER
OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY?
He was the first major figure in the philosophical
movement known as RATIONALISM, a method of
understanding the world based on the use of reason
as the means to attain knowledge.
EXAMPLE:
• Premise:
- All dogs like chewing on bones
- Lassie is a dog
• Conclusion:
- Therefore Lassie likes chewing on
bones

8. CARTESIAN DOUBT/SKEPTICISM
“That it is impossible
to doubt that you are
thinking (you must
think to doubt) thus
we can certain that a
thinking mind exists.”
Cogito, ergo sum
“I am thinking,
therefore I am
existing”

9. DUALISM
 The mind has structure, it is a thing. The mind is
quite separate from the body.
 Mind and body coordinated their activities in the brain
– pineal gland.
 Each of us is essentially a conscious being who is
capable of mental acts such as doubt and
imagination.
 The content of the mind was ideas:
 Innate ideas – such as ideas about God
and self “I think, therefore I am.”
Concepts of space, time, and motion.
 Derived ideas – come from experience
and they alter the nervous system
This model of mind-body interaction is
also called as INTERACTIONISM.
A ghost in a machine

10. “The pineal gland is also termed the common sense ...
[and] may be regarded as the central agency which
receives sensory impressions from various organs,
coordinates them, and sends out other impressions so
as to enable the adaptive functioning of the body”.

11. DUALISM
● Mind and body are separate.
● While the human body is subject to the same
mechanical laws as any other physical body, the
mind operates according to its own rules, which
come from God.
● We know our own mind directly, through
introspection. We cannot know other people's
minds directly, since we cannot observe them.
All we can observe about other people is the
state of their bodies.

12. 1. My body and objects in the environment are real. I can see, touch, hear, and taste
them. I get thirsty, feel pain, etc.
2. However, I dream and people report pain long after a limb has been amputated – these
feelings and sensations are not real
3. Therefore how do I know things really exist, maybe I shouldn’t trust my experiences as
evidence of the existence of self and objects
4. God gave us these senses, God is not deceitful, therefore we can use trust the senses
God gave us.
5. Can a machine be built that will simulate human behaviour in a way that makes its
actions indistinguishable from human behaviour?
6. Are there qualitative differences between humans and other organisms?
7. Should we be able to do whatever we want with animals in our research?
DESCARTE’S
THOUGHTS

13. Descartes as a Foundation for
Psychology
 First attempt to develop a model of the Mind-Body position – Dualism
 Methodology – breaking a large complicated problem down into
simpler individual parts (Deductive Reasoning)
 Learning and experience alter the Brain.
 The study of the laws of visual perception was an area of intense
activity during the Renaissance, and some of the discoveries of
Renaissance artists and scientists have shaped psychological
theories ever since. The artificial duck of
Jacques de Vaucanson

14. To whom you associate these pictures?

15. Sir Isaac
Newton
02

16.  He has been called “the greatest scientific
genius the English-speaking peoples have
produced“.
ISAAC NEWTON (1642-
1727)
 “Nature to him was an open book, whose
letters he could read without effort”
 An English mathematician, astronomer and
physicist.
 His famous work Principia forms the foundation of
classical physics. It also has important
implications for psychology.
Born: December 25, 1642 [January 4, 1643, New Style], Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, England
Died: March 20 [March 31], 1727, London)

19. Can Newton's Laws Be Generalized
to Psychology?
Consider the title of a paper by Kimble (1990): “Mother Nature's bag of tricks is small”, which suggests
that the same laws will hold in all areas of inquiry, whether in the natural sciences, such as physics, or in
the social sciences, such as psychology.
PHYSICS = subject matter is motion of inanimate objects.
PSYCHOLOGY = subject matter is motion of organism’s behavior

20. NEWTON’S LAW OF MOTION in
PSYCHOLOGY
1st
Law:
3rd Law:
A thing will not change its state of
motion or rest unless an external force
acts on it.
Thus the 1st law, known as the law of
inertia.
2nd
Law:
A force applied is equal to
mass times acceleration.
F=ma
For every action, there is an equal
and opposite reaction.

21. THE NATURE OF
COLOUR

22. ISAAC NEWTON’S PRISM
He puts a prism near his window.
And later Newton refracted back the projected
spectrum into a light again
The prism projected a colorful spectrum on his
wall
The prism does not create color, only refracting the
light.
The component of the color refracted, red, orange,
yellow, green, blue and violet.
Complementary Colors –
Color that are optically contrast with another
color.

23. SUMMARY

24. Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe
Projected the spectrum on a white
card.
The white card was then moved
away from the prism slowly and
steady.
After a certain distance,
GREEN was produced.
CHROMATIC WHEEL
Goethe’s chromatic wheel, as he termed it,
shows the opposition of color as perceived by
the human eye. He introduced color purple, or
magenta as it was later known. While
Newton’s theory contained only spectral
colors. Magenta is included in color wheels
today.

25. VISUAL
PERCEPTION
Newton distinguished between the stimulus for
colour and the subjective experience of colour.
Light of different wavelengths constitutes the
stimulus for colour. These stimuli produce the
visual perception of different colours.
In Today’s Psychology:
Color influences perceptions that are not obvious, such
as the taste of food. Colors have qualities that can
cause certain emotions in people. How color influences
individuals may differ depending on age, gender, and
culture.

26. BRITISH
EMPIRICISTS

27. EMPIRICISM
Empiricism should be
contrasted with the sort of
rationalism that was
characteristic of Descartes's
approach. Rather than rely
on reason to provide us with
the truth, the empiricist
trusts only the evidence
provided by our senses.
The importance of learning
through experience

28. JOHN LOCKE
Many of his philosophical ideas were the basis for our American form of
democracy
But he was also an important foundation of psychology
We develop ideas – sensations, perceptions, and abstractions through
experience
Concept of Tabula Rosa – used by Descartes, but Locke denied the idea of
innate ideas
Yes, sensory experiences maybe inaccurate at times, but we have no choice;
there is no other source of information
REFLECTION - perception of the operations of our own mind within us

29. SIMPLE AND COMPLEX
IDEAS
 Simple ideas - the basic elements of
experience because they cannot divided
or analyzed further into other ideas
 Complex ideas – combinations of simple
ideas
Mental processes operate on simple ideas to
form complex ideas
 Complex ideas have attractive forces that
bring simple ideas together
 Mutual attraction of ideas became the
basis for many learning theories
IDEAS

30. QUALITIES
- The power to produce any idea in our mind
2 TYPES OF
QUALITIES
Primary qualities- the actual
attributes of the object or event
Secondary qualities – the type of
psychological experience they
cause
A feather can tickle you, but the tickle is not in the
feather; it is only in you.

31. GEORGE BERKELEY
Berkeley argued that "unthinking things" could not "have any existence, out
of the minds of thinking things which perceive them:' His position is often
expressed by the slogan to be is to be perceived. Nothing exists apart from
our experience of it.
Born in Ireland, George Berkeley was a precocious intellect who wrote his
most important work before he was 30 years old
He argued that there were no unambiguous visual cues to the spatial
location of objects
Berkeley resolved this problem by suggesting that the sense of touch provided
the observer with an important source of information that supplemented the
visual information available.

32. David Hume
David Hume was a Scot whose ideas had a profound
effect on many subsequent thinkers. Hume made
incisive observations about such fundamental concepts
as causality and the self.
CAUSALITY
It is a general maxim in philosophy that whatever begins to exist,
must have a cause of existence.
He argued that if we look closely at any cause-effect relationship, we will “immediately perceive that,
even in the most familiar events, ... we only learn by experience the frequent conjunction of objects,
without ever being able to comprehend anything like connection between them”
Since the self would appear to be a central concept in psychology, its status is particularly important.
Hume is suggesting there is nothing that uniquely corresponds to the concept of a self. Our belief that we
possess a self is an illusion. If we honestly examine our experience, we will discover that all we really
possess is a series of impressions of one sort or another.
SELF

33. James Mill (1773-1836)
and
John Stuart Mill (1806-
73)
One of the most famous father-son combinations
in the history of psychology.

34. JAMES MILL
He distilled the British empiricism and associationism principles we have been discussing into a simple,
straightforward psychology.
In this passage, he describes how sensations are the
ultimate building blocks of the mind:
This passage is important not only because it identifies
sensations as the most basic elements of the mind, but also
because it suggests that language refers, ultimately, to our
sensations. The Father

35. John Stuart Mills -
Associationism
Interested in how sensations and ideas became associated or
combined.
The son
One of J.S. Mill's best-known conceptual innovations was what
he called mental chemistry, which treats complex ideas as the
product of a process analogous to a chemical reaction.
Example: Hydrogen + Oxygen = Water
Strong advocate for women’s rights and was anti-slavery –
all people created equal.
People who study his work and compare it to others
estimate his IQ was about 200, the highest in history.

37. REFERENCES
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-melKms8tTc
John G. Benjafield. A History of Psychology – 4th Edition pp. 44 – 60
https://mammothmemory.net/physics/newtons-laws-of-motion/how-to-remember-newtons-laws-
of-motion/newtons-laws-of-motion-mnemonic.html
https://www.jstor.org/stable/43853663
https://www.powershow.com/viewfl/87b56ZDc1Z/Rene_Descartes_powerpoint_ppt_presentation

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