The Analysis of Mind by Bertrand Russell (best large ereader .txt) 📖
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memory-image of the different appearances presented by the negro
on different occasions, but no memory-image of any one of the
single appearances. In that case your image would be vague. If,
on the other hand, you have, in addition to the generalized
image, particular images of the several appearances, sufficiently
clear to be recognized as different, and as instances of the
generalized picture, you will then not feel the generalized
picture to be adequate to any one particular appearance, and you
will be able to make it function as a general idea rather than a
vague idea. If this view is correct, no new general content needs
to be added to the generalized image. What needs to be added is
particular images compared and contrasted with the generalized
image. So far as I can judge by introspection, this does occur in
practice. Take for example Semon’s instance of a friend’s face.
Unless we make some special effort of recollection, the face is
likely to come before us with an average expression, very blurred
and vague, but we can at will recall how our friend looked on
some special occasion when he was pleased or angry or unhappy,
and this enables us to realize the generalized character of the
vague image.
There is, however, another way of distinguishing between the
vague, the particular and the general, and this is not by their
content, but by the reaction which they produce. A word, for
example, may be said to be vague when it is applicable to a
number of different individuals, but to each as individuals; the
name Smith, for example, is vague: it is always meant to apply to
one man, but there are many men to each of whom it applies.* The
word “man,” on the other hand, is general. We say, “This is
Smith,” but we do not say “This is man,” but “This is a man.”
Thus we may say that a word embodies a vague idea when its
effects are appropriate to an individual, but are the same for
various similar individuals, while a word embodies a general idea
when its effects are different from those appropriate to
individuals. In what this difference consists it is, however, not
easy to say. I am inclined to think that it consists merely in
the knowledge that no one individual is represented, so that what
distinguishes a general idea from a vague idea is merely the
presence of a certain accompanying belief. If this view is
correct, a general idea differs from a vague one in a way
analogous to that in which a memory-image differs from an
imagination-image. There also we found that the difference
consists merely of the fact that a memory-image is accompanied by
a belief, in this case as to the past.
* “Smith” would only be a quite satisfactory representation of
vague words if we failed to discriminate between different people
called Smith.
It should also be said that our images even of quite particular
occurrences have always a greater or a less degree of vagueness.
That is to say, the occurrence might have varied within certain
limits without causing our image to vary recognizably. To arrive
at the general it is necessary that we should be able to contrast
it with a number of relatively precise images or words for
particular occurrences; so long as all our images and words are
vague, we cannot arrive at the contrast by which the general is
defined. This is the justification for the view which I quoted on
p. 184 from Ribot (op. cit., p. 32), viz. that intelligence
progresses from the indefinite to the definite, and that the
vague appears earlier than either the particular or the general.
I think the view which I have been advocating, to the effect that
a general idea is distinguished from a vague one by the presence
of a judgment, is also that intended by Ribot when he says (op.
cit., p. 92): “The generic image is never, the concept is always,
a judgment. We know that for logicians (formerly at any rate) the
concept is the simple and primitive element; next comes the
judgment, uniting two or several concepts; then ratiocination,
combining two or several judgments. For the psychologists, on the
contrary, affirmation is the fundamental act; the concept is the
result of judgment (explicit or implicit), of similarities with
exclusion of differences.”
A great deal of work professing to be experimental has been done
in recent years on the psychology of thought. A good summary of
such work up to the year agog is contained in Titchener’s
“Lectures on the Experimental Psychology of the Thought
Processes” (1909). Three articles in the “Archiv fur die gesammte
Psychologie” by Watt,* Messer** and Buhler*** contain a great
deal of the material amassed by the methods which Titchener calls
experimental.
* Henry J. Watt, “Experimentelle Beitrage zu einer Theorie des
Denkens,” vol. iv (1905) pp. 289-436.
** August Messer, “Experimentell-psychologische Untersuchu gen
uber das Denken,” vol. iii (1906), pp. 1-224.
*** Karl Buhler, “Uber Gedanken,” vol. ix (1907), pp. 297-365.
For my part I am unable to attach as much importance to this work
as many psychologists do. The method employed appears to me
hardly to fulfil the conditions of scientific experiment. Broadly
speaking, what is done is, that a set of questions are asked of
various people, their answers are recorded, and likewise their
own accounts, based upon introspection, of the processes of
thought which led them to give those answers. Much too much
reliance seems to me to be placed upon the correctness of their
introspection. On introspection as a method I have spoken earlier
(Lecture VI). I am not prepared, like Professor Watson, to reject
it wholly, but I do consider that it is exceedingly fallible and
quite peculiarly liable to falsification in accordance with
preconceived theory. It is like depending upon the report of a
shortsighted person as to whom he sees coming along the road at a
moment when he is firmly convinced that Jones is sure to come. If
everybody were shortsighted and obsessed with beliefs as to what
was going to be visible, we might have to make the best of such
testimony, but we should need to correct its errors by taking
care to collect the simultaneous evidence of people with the most
divergent expectations. There is no evidence that this was done
in the experiments in question, nor indeed that the influence of
theory in falsifying the introspection was at all adequately
recognized. I feel convinced that if Professor Watson had been
one of the subjects of the questionnaires, he would have given
answers totally different from those recorded in the articles in
question. Titchener quotes an opinion of Wundt on these
investigations, which appears to me thoroughly justified. “These
experiments,” he says, “are not experiments at all in the sense
of a scientific methodology; they are counterfeit experiments,
that seem methodical simply because they are ordinarily performed
in a psychological laboratory, and involve the co-operation of
two persons, who purport to be experimenter and observer. In
reality, they are as unmethodical as possible; they possess none
of the special features by which we distinguish the
introspections of experimental psychology from the casual
introspections of everyday life.”* Titchener, of course, dissents
from this opinion, but I cannot see that his reasons for dissent
are adequate. My doubts are only increased by the fact that
Buhler at any rate used trained psychologists as his subjects. A
trained psychologist is, of course, supposed to have acquired the
habit of observation, but he is at least equally likely to have
acquired a habit of seeing what his theories require. We may take
Buhler’s “Uber Gedanken” to illustrate the kind of results
arrived at by such methods. Buhler says (p. 303): “We ask
ourselves the general question: ‘WHAT DO WE EXPERIENCE WHEN WE
THINK?’ Then we do not at all attempt a preliminary determination
of the concept ‘thought,’ but choose for analysis only such
processes as everyone would describe as processes of thought.”
The most important thing in thinking, he says, is “awareness
that…” (Bewusstheit dass), which he calls a thought. It is, he
says, thoughts in this sense that are essential to thinking.
Thinking, he maintains, does not need language or sensuous
presentations. “I assert rather that in principle every object
can be thought (meant) distinctly, without any help from sensuous
presentation (Anschauungshilfen). Every individual shade of blue
colour on the picture that hangs in my room I can think with
complete distinctness unsensuously (unanschaulich), provided it
is possible that the object should be given to me in another
manner than by the help of sensations. How that is possible we
shall see later.” What he calls a thought (Gedanke) cannot be
reduced, according to him, to other psychic occurrences. He
maintains that thoughts consist for the most part of known rules
(p. 342). It is clearly essential to the interest of this theory
that the thought or rule alluded to by Buhler should not need to
be expressed in words, for if it is expressed in words it is
immediately capable of being dealt with on the lines with which
the behaviourists have familiarized us. It is clear also that the
supposed absence of words rests solely upon the introspective
testimony of the persons experimented upon. I cannot think that
there is sufficient certainty of their reliability in this
negative observation to make us accept a difficult and
revolutionary view of thought, merely because they have failed to
observe the presence of words or their equivalent in their
thinking. I think it far more likely, especially in view of the
fact that the persons concerned were highly educated, that we are
concerned with telescoped processes, in which habit has caused a
great many intermediate terms to be elided or to be passed over
so quickly as to escape observation.
* Titchener, op. cit., p. 79.
I am inclined to think that similar remarks apply to the general
idea of “imageless thinking,” concerning which there has been
much controversy. The advocates of imageless thinking are not
contending merely that there can be thinking which is purely
verbal; they are contending that there can be thinking which
proceeds neither in words nor in images. My own feeling is that
they have rashly assumed the presence of thinking in cases where
habit has rendered thinking unnecessary. When Thorndike
experimented with animals in cages, he found that the
associations established were between a sensory stimulus and a
bodily movement (not the idea of it), without the need of
supposing any non-physiological intermediary (op. cit., p. 100
ff.). The same thing, it seems to me, applies to ourselves. A
certain sensory situation produces in us a certain bodily
movement. Sometimes this movement consists in uttering words.
Prejudice leads us to suppose that between the sensory stimulus
and the utterance of the words a process of thought must have
intervened, but there seems no good reason for such a
supposition. Any habitual action, such as eating or dressing, may
be performed on the appropriate occasion, without any need of
thought, and the same seems to be true of a painfully large
proportion of our talk. What applies to uttered speech applies of
course equally to the internal speech which is not uttered. I
remain, therefore, entirely unconvinced that there is any such
phenomenon as thinking which consists neither of images nor of
words, or that “ideas” have to be added to sensations and images
as part of the material out of which mental phenomena are built.
The question of the nature of our consciousness of the universal
is much affected by our view as to the general nature of the
relation of consciousness to its object. If we adopt the view of
Brentano, according to which all mental
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