The Place of Purpose (intention) and Causation in Psychology
A tradition from Aristotle through William James recognizes that behavior is purposeful rather than merely reactive. However, the only evidence for intentions was subjective. Behaviorists following Wundt, Thorndyke, Watson, and others rejected introspective reports as data for an objective science of psychology. Only observable behavior could be admitted as data.
There follows from this stance the assumption that environmental events (stimuli) cause behavioral actions (responses). This assumption persists in cognitive psychology, which interposes cognitive maps and other postulated information processing between stimulus and response, but otherwise retains the assumption of linear causation from environment to behavior.
Another, more specific reason for psychologists' rejecting notions of purpose or intention was that they could not see how a goal (a state that did not yet exist) could cause the behavior that led to it. PCT resolves these philosophical arguments about teleology because it provides a model of the functioning of organisms in which purpose has objective status without recourse to introspection, and in which causation is circular around feedback loops.
Read more about this topic: Perceptual Control Theory
Famous quotes containing the words place, purpose, causation and/or psychology:
“I want a place where I can sit back in the rocker and say, “Do you remember when we picketed the White House in 1965?””
—Barbara Gittings (b. 1932)
“Of what significance the light of day, if it is not the reflection of an inward dawn?—to what purpose is the veil of night withdrawn, if the morning reveals nothing to the soul? It is merely garish and glaring.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The very hope of experimental philosophy, its expectation of constructing the sciences into a true philosophy of nature, is based on induction, or, if you please, the a priori presumption, that physical causation is universal; that the constitution of nature is written in its actual manifestations, and needs only to be deciphered by experimental and inductive research; that it is not a latent invisible writing, to be brought out by the magic of mental anticipation or metaphysical mediation.”
—Chauncey Wright (1830–1875)
“A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of “spirit” over matter.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)