Historical and Philosophical Foundations of Psychology

Introduction

The importance of Wundt in the development of psychology was not confined to his own research and writing, but in the large numbers of future psychologists who were trained in his laboratory. But these students did not always merely reproduce Wundt’s ideas; they took certain aspects of his thought and changed them to fit in with their own philosophical presuppositions, which sometimes differed from those of Wundt. In this chapter I will discuss the work of one of Wundt’s former students, Edward Bradford Titchener (1867–1927), who provides a prime example of how differing philosophical presuppositions, both about the nature of the mind and the nature of science, lie behind and are manifested in individual psychologists’ approaches to their work.

The example of Titchener is particularly significant because, until recently, in textbooks there was often confusion between Wundt and Titchener. It was suggested that their approaches to psychology were basically the same and ideas and pronouncements expressed by Titchener were often thought to be expressions of Wundt’s psychology by one of his students. This, however, is far from the truth (Leahy 1981). In fact there were many important differences in their approaches.