Franz Brentano's classic study Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint was the most important of Brentano's works to be published in his lifetime. A new introduction by Peter Simons places Brentano's work in the context of current philosophical thought. He is able to show how Brentano has emerged since the 1970s as a key figure in both contemporary European and Anglo-Americ Franz Brentano's classic study Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint was the most important of Brentano's works to be published in his lifetime. A new introduction by Peter Simons places Brentano's work in the context of current philosophical thought. He is able to show how Brentano has emerged since the 1970s as a key figure in both contemporary European and Anglo-American traditions and crucial to any understanding the recent history of philosophy and psychology.

1. Peter Si…
2. Brentano Psychology From An Empirical Stand Point

FRANZ BRENTANO Psychology from an Standpoint. Originally published. 1 Psychology defined as the science of the soul 2.

Peter Si…

Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint Franz Brentano (1874) Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint I. The Concept and Purpose of Psychology Source: Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, (1874) Routledge & Kegan Paul, First two chapters, 'Concept and Purpose of Psychology' and 'Psychological Method with Special Reference to its Experiential Basis'. There are certain phenomena which once seemed familiar and obvious and appeared to provide an explanation for things which had been obscure.

Subsequently, however, these phenomena began to seem quite mysterious themselves and began to arouse astonishment and curiosity. These phenomena, above all others, were zealously investigated by the great thinkers of antiquity. Yet little agreement or clarity has been reached concerning them to this day. It is these phenomena which I have made my object of study.

In this work I shall attempt to sketch in general terms an accurate picture of their characteristics and laws. There is no branch of science that has borne less fruit for our knowledge of nature and life, and yet there is none which holds greater promise of satisfying our most essential needs. There is no area of knowledge, with the single exception of metaphysics, which the great mass of people look upon with greater contempt. And yet there is none to which certain individuals attribute greater value and which they hold in higher esteem. Indeed, the entire realm of truth would appear poor and contemptible to many people if it were not so defined as to include this province of knowledge. For they believe that the other sciences are only to be esteemed insofar as they lead the way to this one. The other sciences are, in fact, only the foundation; psychology is, as it were, the crowning pinnacle.

All the other sciences are a preparation for psychology; it is dependent on all of them. But it is said to exert a most powerful reciprocal influence upon them. It is supposed to renew man's entire life and hasten and assure progress.

And if, on the one hand, it appears to be the pinnacle of the towering structure of science, on the other hand, it is destined to become the basis of society and of its noblest possessions, and, by this very fast, to become the basis of all scientific endeavour as well. The word 'psychology' means science of the soul. In fact, Aristotle, who was the first to make a classification of science and to expound its separate branches in separate essays, entitled one of his works peri psychis. He meant by 'soul' the nature, or, as he preferred to express it, the form, the first activity, the first actuality of a living being. And he considers something a living being if it nourishes itself, grows and reproduces and is endowed with the faculties of sensation and thought, or if it possesses at least one of these faculties.

Even though he is far from ascribing consciousness to plants, he nevertheless considered the vegetative realm as living and endowed with souls. And thus, after establishing the concept of the soul, the oldest work on psychology goes on to discuss the most general characteristics of beings endowed with vegetative as well as sensory or intellectual faculties. This was the range of problems which psychology originally encompassed. Later on, however, its field was narrowed substantially. Psychologists no longer discussed vegetative activities. On the assumption that it lacked consciousness, the entire realm of vegetative life ceased to be considered within the scope of their investigations.

In the same way, the animal kingdom, insofar as it, like plants and inorganic things is an object of external perception, was excluded from their field of research. This exclusion was also extended to phenomena closely associated with sensory life, such as the nervous system and muscles, so that their investigation became the province of the physiologist rather than the psychologist. This narrowing of the domain of psychology was not an arbitrary one. On the contrary, it appears to be an obvious correction necessitated by the nature of the subject matter itself. In fact, only when the unification of related fields and the separation of unrelated fields is achieved can the boundaries between the sciences be correctly drawn and their classification contribute to the progress of knowledge.

And the phenomena of consciousness are related to one another to an extraordinary degree. The same mode of perception gives us all our knowledge of them, and numerous analogies relate higher and lower phenomena to one another. The things which external perception has shown us about living beings are seen as if from a different angle or even in a completely different form, and the general truths which we find here are sometimes the same principles which we see governing inorganic nature, and sometimes analogous ones. It could be said, and not without some justification, that Aristotle himself suggests this later and more correct delimitation of the boundaries of psychology.

Those who are acquainted with him know how frequently, while expounding a less advanced doctrine, he sets forth the rudiments of a different and more correct viewpoint. His metaphysics as well as his logic and ethics provides examples of this. In the third book of his treatise On the Soul, where he deals with voluntary actions, he dismisses the thought of investigating the organs that serve as intermediaries between a desire and the part of the body toward whose movement the desire is directed.

For, he says, sounding exactly like a modern psychologist, such an investigation is not the province of one who studies the soul, but of one who studies the body. I say this only in passing so as perhaps to make it easier to convince some of the enthusiastic followers of Aristotle who still exist even in our own times. We have seen how the field of psychology became circumscribed. At the same time, and in quite an analogous manner, the concept of life was also narrowed, or, if not this concept - for scientists still ordinarily use this term in its broad original sense - at least the concept of the soul. In modern terminology the word 'soul' refers to the substantial bearer of presentations and other activities which are based upon presentations and which, like presentations, are only perceivable through inner perception. Thus we usually call soul the substance which has sensations such as fantasy images, acts of memory, acts of hope or fear, desire or aversion.

Brentano Psychology From An Empirical Stand Point

We, too, use the word 'soul' in this sense. In spite of the modification in the concept, then, there seems to be nothing to prevent us from defining psychology in the terms in which Aristotle once defined it, namely as the science of the soul. So it appears that just as the natural sciences study the properties and laws of physical bodies, which are the objects of our external perception, psychology is the science which studies the properties and laws of the soul, which we discover within ourselves directly by means of inner perception, and which we infer, by analogy, to exist in others.

Thus delimited, psychology and the natural sciences appear to divide the entire field of the empirical sciences between them, and to be distinguished from one another by a clearly defined boundary. But this first claim, at least, is not true. There are facts which can be demonstrated in the same way in the domain of inner perception or external perception. And precisely because they are wider in scope, these more comprehensive principles belong exclusively neither to the natural sciences nor to psychology.

The fact that they can be ascribed just as well to the one science as to the other shows that it is better to ascribe them to neither. They are, however, numerous and important enough for there to be a special field of study devoted to them. It is this field of study which, under the name metaphysics, we must distinguish from both the natural sciences and psychology. Moreover, even the distinction between the two less general of these three great branches of knowledge is not an absolute one. As always happens when two sciences touch upon one another, here too borderline cases between the natural and mental sciences are inevitable. For the facts which the physiologist investigates and those which the psychologist investigates are most intimately correlated, despite their great differences in character. We find physical and mental properties united in one and the same group.

Not only may physical states be aroused by physical states and mental states by mental, but it is also the case that physical states have mental consequences and mental states have physical consequences. Some thinkers have distinguished a separate science which is supposed to deal with these questions. One in particular is Fechner, who named this branch of science 'psychophysics' and called the famous law which he established in this connection the 'Psychophysical Law.' Others have named it, less appropriately, 'physiological psychology.' Such a science is supposed to eliminate all boundary disputes between psychology and physiology.

But would not new and even more numerous disputes arise in their place between psychology and psychophysics on the one hand and between psychophysics and physiology on the other? Ort is it not obviously the task of the psychologist to ascertain the basic elements of mental phenomena? Yet the psychophysicist must study them too, because sensations are aroused by physical stimuli. Is it not the task of the physiologist to trace voluntary as well as reflex actions back to the origins through an uninterrupted causal chain?

Yet the psychophysicist, too, will have to investigate the first physical effects of mental causes. Let us not, then, be unduly disturbed by the inevitable encroachment of physiology upon psychology and vice versa. These encroachments will be no greater than those which we observe, for example, between physics and chemistry. They do nothing to refute the correctness of the boundary line we have established; they only show that, justified as it is, this distinction, like every other distinction between sciences, is somewhat artificial. Nor will it be in any way necessary to treat the whole range of so-called psychophysical questions twice, i.e. Once in physiology and once in psychology.

In the case of each of these problems we can easily show which field contains the essential difficulty. Once this difficulty is solved, the problem itself is as good as solved.

For example, it will definitely be the task of the psychologist to ascertain the first mental phenomena which are aroused by a physical stimulus, even if he cannot dispense with looking at physiological facts in so doing. By the same token, in the case of voluntary movements of the body, the psychologist will have to establish the ultimate and immediate mental antecedents of the whole series of physical changes which are connected with them, but it will be the task of the physiologist to investigate the ultimate and immediate physical causes of sensation, even though in so doing he must obviously also look at the mental phenomenon. Likewise, with reference to movements that have mental causes, the physiologist must establish within his own field their ultimate and proximate effects.

Concerning the demonstration that there is a proportional relationship between increases in physical and mental causes and effects, i.e. The investigation of the so-called 'Psychophysical Law,' it seems to me that the problem has two parts, one of which pertains to the physiologist, while the other is the task of the psychologist. The first is to determine which relative differences in the intensity of physical stimuli correspond to the smallest noticeable differences in the intensity of mental phenomena. The second consists in trying to discover the relations which these smallest noticeable differences bear to one another.

But is not the answer to the latter question immediately and completely evident? Is it not clear that all the smallest noticeable differences must be considered equal to one another?

This is the view which has been generally accepted. Wundt himself, in his Physiological Psychology (p. 295), offers the following argument: 'A difference in intensity which is just barely noticeable is.

A psychic value of constant magnitude. In fact, if one just noticeable difference were greater or smaller than another, then it would be greater or smaller than the just noticeable, which is a contradiction.'

Wundt does not realize that this is a circular argument. If someone doubts that all differences which are just noticeable are equal, then as far as he is concerned, being 'just noticeable' is no longer a characteristic property of a constant magnitude. The only thing that is correct and evident a priori is that all just noticeable differences are equally noticeable, but not that they are equal. If that were so, every increase which is equal would have to be equally noticeable and every increase which is equally noticeable would have to be equal. But this remains to be investigated, and the investigation of this question, which is the job of the psychologist because it deals with laws of comparative judgement, could yield a result quite different from what was expected. The moon does seem to change position more noticeably when it is nearer the horizon than when it is high in the sky, when in fact it changes the same amount in the same amount of time in either case. On the other hand, the first task mentioned above undoubtedly belongs to the physiologist.

Physical observations have more extensive application here. And it is certainly no coincidence that we have to thank a physiologist of the first rank such as E. Weber for paving the way for this law, and a philosophically trained physicist such as Fechner for establishing it in a more extended sphere.

So the definition of psychology which was given above appears to be justified, and its position among its neighbouring sciences to have been clarified. Nevertheless, not all psychologists would agree to defining psychology as the science of the soul, in the sense indicated above. Some define it, rather, as the science of mental phenomena, thereby placing it on the same level as its sister sciences. Similarly, in their opinion, natural science is to be defined as the science of physical phenomena, rather than as the science of bodies. Let us clarify the basis of this objection. What is meant by 'science of mental phenomena' or 'science of physical phenomena'?

The words 'phenomenon' or 'appearance' are often used in opposition to 'things which really and truly exist.' We say, for example, that the objects of our senses, as revealed in sensation, are merely phenomena; colour and sound, warmth and taste do not really and truly exist outside of our sensations, even though they may point to objects which do so exist. John Locke once conducted an experiment in which, after having warmed one of his hands and cooled the other, he immersed both of them simultaneously in the same basin of water.

He experienced warmth in one hand and cold in the other, and thus proved that neither warmth nor cold really existed in the water. Likewise, we know that pressure on the eye can arouse the same visual phenomena as would be caused by rays emanating from a so-called colored object. And with regard to determinations of spatial location, those who take appearances for true reality can easily be convinced of their error in a similar way.

From the same distance away, things which are in different locations can appear to be in the same location, and from different distances away, things which are in the same location can appear to be in different locations. A related point is that movement may appear as rest and rest as movement. These facts prove beyond doubt that the objects of sensory experience are deceptive. But even if this could not be established so clearly, we would still have to doubt their veracity because there would be no guarantee for them as long as the assumption that there is a world that exists in reality which causes our sensations and to which their content bears certain analogies, would be sufficient to account for the phenomena. We have no right, therefore, to believe that the objects of so-called external perception really exist as they appear to us. Indeed, they demonstrably do not exist outside of us. In contrast to that which really and truly exists, they are mere phenomena.

What has been said about the objects of external perception does not, however, apply in the same way to objects of inner perception. In their case, no one has ever shown that someone who considers these phenomena to be true would thereby become involved in contradictions. On the contrary, of their existence we have that clear knowledge and complete certainty which is provided by immediate insight. Consequently, no one can really doubt that a mental state which he perceives in himself exists, and that it exists just as he perceives it. Anyone who could push his doubt this far would reach a state of absolute doubt, a scepticism which would certainly destroy itself, because it would have destroyed any firm basis upon which it could endeavour to attack knowledge.

Windows xp skin pack. Defining psychology as the science of mental phenomena in order to make natural science and mental science resemble each other in this respect, then, has no reasonable justification. There is another, quite different reason which generally motivates those who advocate such a definition, however. These people do not deny that thinking and willing really exist. And they use the expression 'mental phenomena' or 'mental appearances' as completely synonymous with 'mental states', 'mental processes,' and 'mental events,' as inner perception reveals them to us.

Nevertheless, their objection to the old definition, too, is related to the fact that on such a definition the limits of knowledge are misunderstood. If someone says that natural science is the science of bodies, and he means by 'body' a substance which acts on our sense organs and produces presentations of physical phenomena, he assumes that substances are the cause of external appearances. Likewise, if someone says that psychology is the science of the soul, and means by 'soul' the substantial bearer of mental states, then he is expressing his conviction that mental events are to be considered properties of a substance. But what entitles us to assume that there are such substances?

It has been said that such substances are not objects of experience; neither sense perception nor inner experience reveal substances to us. Just as in sense perception we encounter phenomena such as warmth, colour and sound, in inner perception we encounter manifestations of thinking, feeling and willing. But we never encounter that something of which these things are properties. It is a fiction to which no reality of any sort corresponds, or whose existence could not possibly be proved, even if it did exist. Obviously, then, it is not an object of science. Hence natural science may not be defined as the science of bodies nor may psychology be defined as the science of the soul. Rather, the former should be thought of simply as the science of physical phenomena, and the latter, analogously, as the science of mental phenomena.

There is no such thing as the soul, at least not as far as we are concerned, but psychology can and should exist nonetheless, although, to use Albert Lange's paradoxical expression, it will be a psychology without a soul. We see that the idea is not as absurd as the expression makes it seem. Even viewed in this way psychology still retains a wide area for investigation. A glance at natural science makes this clear. For all the facts and laws which this branch of inquiry investigates when it is conceived of as the science of bodies will continue to be investigated by it when it is viewed only as the science of physical phenomena. This is how it is actually viewed at present by many famous natural scientists who have formed opinions about philosophical questions, thanks to the noteworthy trend which is now bringing philosophy and the natural sciences closer together. In so doing, they in no way restrict the domain of the natural sciences.

All of the laws of coexistence and succession which these sciences encompass according to others, fall within their domain according to these thinkers, too. The same thing is true of psychology.

The phenomena revealed by inner perception are also subject to laws. Anyone who has engaged m scientific psychological research recognises this and even the layman can easily and quickly find confirmation for it in his own inner experience.

The laws of the coexistence and succession of mental phenomena remain the object of investigation even for those who deny to psychology any knowledge of the soul. And with them comes a vast range of important problems for the psychologist, most of which still await solution.

In order to make more intelligible the nature of psychology as he conceived it, John Stuart Mill, one of the most decisive and influential advocates of this point of view, has given in his System of Logic synopsis of the problems with which psychology must be concerned. In general, according to Mill, psychology investigates the laws which govern the succession of our mental states, i.e. The laws according to which one of these states produces another. In his opinion, some of these laws are general, others more special. A general law, for example, would be the law according to which, 'whenever any state of consciousness has once been excited in us, no matter by what cause. A state of consciousness resembling the former but inferior in intensity, is capable of being reproduced in us, without the presence of any such cause as excited it at first.' Every impression, he says, using the language of Hume, has its idea.

Similarly, there would also be certain general laws which determine the actual appearance of such an idea. He mentions three such Laws of Association of Ideas. The first is the Law of Similarity: 'Similar ideas tend to excite one another.' The second is the Law of Contiguity: 'When two impressions have been frequently experienced.

Either simultaneously or in immediate succession, then when one of these impressions, or the idea of it recurs, it tends to excite the idea of the other.' The third is the Law of Intensity: 'Greater intensity in either or both of the impressions, is equivalent, in rendering them excitable by one another, to a greater frequency of conjunction.' The further task of psychology, according to Mill, is to derive from these general and elementary laws of mental phenomena more specific and more complex laws of thought.