Naming the Mind

How Psychology Found Its Language

Kurt Danziger

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 1997
• ISBN:
  9781446226001
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Intelligence, motivation, personality, learning, stimulation, behaviour and attitude are just some of the categories that map the terrain of `psychological reality?. These are the concepts which, among others, underpin theoretical and empirical work in modern psychology - and yet these concepts have only recently taken on their contemporary meanings.

This fascinating work is a persuasive explanation of how modern psychology found its language. Kurt Danziger develops an account that goes beyond the taken-for-granted quality of psychological discourse to offer a profound and broad-ranging analysis of the recent evolution of the concepts and categories on which it depends. Danziger explores this process and shows how its consequences depend on cultural contexts and the history of an emergent discipline.

1

NAMING THE MIND

Alternative psychologies

Many years ago, before Kuhnian paradigms had ever been heard of, I spent two years teaching Psychology at an Indonesian university. When I arrived to take up my duties, I discovered that a course on Psychology was already being taught by one of my Indonesian colleagues. But whereas my subject matter was identified on the timetable as Psychologi, his was identified by the Indonesian equivalent, ilmu djiwa, ‘djiwa’ meaning ‘soul’ or ‘psyche’, and ‘ilmu’ being a science or an ‘-ology’ of some kind. So there was a literal local equivalent of ‘psychology’, but I was not the one scheduled to teach it. I soon found out why. What my colleague was teaching was not Western psychology, but something based on an extensive local literature that had roots in Hindu philosophy with Javanese additions and reinterpretations. So the students had a choice of two psychologies, one Western and one Eastern.

At the time, that struck me as odd. After all, if both my Indonesian colleague and I were dealing with psychological reality, there ought to be some points of contact, even convergence, between our domains. Certainly, our ways of approaching this reality were very different, but that difference might perhaps be used constructively, if we could combine the strong features of both approaches. So I rashly suggested to my colleague that we consider offering joint seminars in which each of us would explain our approach to the same set of psychological topics, followed by an analysis of our differences. Very politely, he agreed to my proposal, and we sat down to discuss the topics we would cover in such a seminar. That is where the problems began. There seemed to be virtually no topics that were identified as such both in his and in my psychology.

For instance, I wanted to discuss the topic of motivation and was interested in hearing what theories my colleague might offer about how motives operated and developed. But he said that would be quite difficult for him, because from his point of view motivation was not really a topic. The phenomena that I quite spontaneously grouped together as ‘motivational’ seemed to him to be no more than a heterogeneous collection of things that had nothing interesting in common. This simply was not a domain he could recognize as a good candidate for a unifying theory. Of course, some of my examples of ‘motivational’ phenomena would remind him of issues that he did consider important, and he could talk about those; but then, unfortunately, he would no longer be discussing ‘motivation’. He would be forced to change the topic. He had a few topics he could suggest – how about devoting a seminar to each of them? That took me aback, for his topics were not only unfamiliar to me, I found his description of them hard to follow. They did not seem to me to constitute natural domains, and the questions to which they led seemed to be based on assumptions I could not share. Then he pointed out that I too was making a few assumptions which he found equally difficult to accept. In drawing up our list of topics and in formulating our questions about them we were both taking a lot for granted, but agreement on what was to be taken for granted proved quite elusive. It became obvious that if we were to have a joint seminar it would quickly turn into a discussion of philosophical, not psychological, issues. That was not what I had had in mind.

Perhaps motivation was a bad topic to begin with. I tried other topics: intelligence, learning, and so on. But the result was the same. My colleague would not recognize any of them as domains clearly marked off from other domains. He granted that each of them had some common features, but he regarded these features as trivial or as artificial and arbitrary. Grouping psychological phenomena in this way seemed to him to be, not only unnatural, but a sure way of avoiding all the interesting questions. Similarly, I could do nothing with the topics he proposed; in many cases I failed to see the point of asking the questions he wanted to ask. Regretfully, we reached an impasse. The seminar series never happened. If there is a way of planning and publicizing such a series without an agreed list of topics and issues, it eluded us.

Now, I must emphasize mat my Indonesian colleague’s stand was not idiosyncratic. He represented a coherent set of ideas embodied in a significant tradition of texts and practices. The latter included various forms of meditational and ascetic practice that could be employed to produce specific psychological phenomena as reliably – and perhaps more reliably – as many of our psychological experiments. The concepts of ilmu djiwa embraced these phenomena among others. This other Psychology could not be dismissed as armchair speculation; it was surely a discipline in the double sense of the term, as a body of systematic knowledge and of strictly regulated practices. Yet neither the organization of its knowledge nor the practices it favoured had much in common with their counterparts in Western psychology.

Being confronted with my own discipline’s exotic Doppelgänger was an unsettling experience. It was clearly possible to carve up the field of psychological phenomena in very different ways and still end up with a set of concepts that seemed quite natural, given the appropriate cultural context. Moreover, these different sets of concepts could each make perfect practical sense, if one was allowed to choose one’s practices. What did that imply for the objectivity of the categories with which Western psychology operated? Did my list of seminar topics represent a ‘true’ reflection of how Nature had divided up the psychological realm? In that case, my colleague’s alternative would seem to be a grossly distorted reflection, at best. He certainly did not think so, and neither did his students. To be honest, neither of us had any empirical justification for making the distinctions we did, or perhaps we both had. We could both point to certain practical results, but they were results we had produced on the basis of the preconceptions we were committed to. We knew how to identify whatever presented itself in experience because we each had a conceptual apparatus in place that enabled us to do this. The apparatus itself, however, seemed to be empirically incorrigible.

My experience in Indonesia was not unique. Some time later, I came across a book, entitled Mencius on the Mind, by the well known literary and linguistic scholar, LA. Richards (1932). In 1930 Richards had spent some time at the University of ‘Peking’ (as it was then known in the West) and had been made aware of the psychological content of some of the old Chinese texts. In particular, some writings of the philosopher Meng Tzu, quaintly westernized as ‘Mencius’, seemed to present a coherent body of psychological concepts. What intrigued Richards was the fact that these concepts had no modern equivalents. For instance, there were terms which he ended up translating as ‘mind’ and as ‘will’, yet he is quite clear about the fact that they do not represent what we mean by those terms. Another term seemed to mean both ‘feelings’ and ‘propensities’, which to us are quite different. So here was an alternative psychology that divided up its subject matter in a completely different way from our own.

That led to some serious questioning of the basis for the psychological distinctions we tend to accept without question:

Chinese thinking often gives no attention to distinctions which for Western minds are so traditional and so firmly established in thought and language, that we neither question them nor even become aware of them as distinctions. We receive and use them as though they belonged unconditionally to the constitution of things (or of thought). We forget that these distinctions have been made and maintained as part of one tradition of thinking; and that another tradition of thinking might neither find use for them nor (being comrnitted to other courses) be able to admit them. (Richards, 1932: 3–4)

Such considerations led Richards (1932: 81) to note that ‘Western psychology has unduly refrained from examining and criticizing its own basic hypotheses’. The distinctions embodied in these hypotheses are based on convention, not on undistorted observation, for we can only ‘see’ what our ‘framework of conceptions’ allows us to see.¹ It is difficult to escape such reflections when confronted with alternative frameworks for organizing psychological knowledge and experience. Certainly, while teaching in Indonesia, I could never forget that mine was only one possible psychology.

The other possible psychologies which Richards and I had encountered were both embodied in written texts, a feature that encouraged direct comparison with Western psychology. But there is no textually inscribed psychology, Western or otherwise, that has lost its links with the psychology embodied in ordinary language. Those who produce texts with a psychological content have to take most of their terms from the ordinary discourse that goes on around them. Were they not to do so, they would have nothing meaningful to communicate to those to whom their texts are addressed. Whatever the gloss put on a term within a certain literary tradition, there is a fund of commonly accepted meaning on which it must rely in order to be comprehensible. Ordinary languages may therefore embody different psychologies as much as written texts.

This insight has informed studies in a field known as ‘ethnopsychology’. Questions have been raised about the way in which members of other cultures, irrespective of literacy, conceptualize matters that to us appear to be psychological in character. At the simplest level, one can ask how their definition of psychological terms differs from ours. In this vein Wober (1974), working in Uganda, obtained reactions to a local word which dictionaries translate as ‘intelligence’. He found that one feature which was negatively linked to intelligence was speed, an interesting finding in light of the fact that a major American modification of intelligence testing makes speed all-important. He also noted that African words indicating mental ability had been reported as referring to caution and prudence, or even knowledge of etiquette, rather than intelligence in the modern Western sense.

Probing more deeply, Smith (1981) noted that the relationship between self and experience was represented quite differently in Maori culture than in the West. Instead of attributing experiences to a central ‘self’, they were seen as originating in specific ‘organs of experience’, identified by names that were untranslatable because we lack such a notion altogether. Conversely, when describing the folk psychology of Marquesans, Kirkpatrick (1985: 94) noted that they did not distinguish a domain that would correspond to our ‘cognition’.

More generally, ethnopsychological studies have produced a mass of converging evidence on the non-universality of some basic distinctions that form the conceptual skeleton for our own conventions of psychological classification. One of these distinctions – amounting to an opposition – is that between what belongs inside the individual and what belongs to a social sphere entirely outside the individual. Such a distinction is implied, not only in the concept of ‘social stimulation’, but in the notion of ‘personality’ as a set of individual attributes that exist separately from any social situation and can be described by abstracting from such situations. Yet, against the background of a great deal of evidence from non-Western societies (Markus and Kitayama, 1991; Kitayama and Markus, 1994), this way of posing the individual-society relationship appears as culturally specific. More usually, descriptions of persons and their characteristics are not separated from descriptions of social situations (e.g. Shweder and Bourne, 1984). In contrast to our psychological vocabulary of intra-personal essences, we find lexicons of interpersonal terms whose meaning cannot be conveyed without elaborate explanation (e.g. Rosaldo, 1980; White, 1985, 1994).²

Another taken for granted distinction that underlies our classification of psychological phenomena is that between the rational and the irrational, the cognitive and the affective. Separating a category of events labelled ‘emotions’ from another category of events identified as ‘cognitions’ expresses this distinction. However, this does not correspond to the way in which emotion words are used in everyday life, either in our own or in other cultures (Averill, 1985; Lutz, 1988). Rather, such words are used to talk about particularly meaningful, culturally defined, situations and problems. That is why there is so much variation in the vocabulary of emotions across cultures (Heelas, 1986; Russell, 1991). Moreover, because each emotion word embodies a cognitive scenario, it cannot be assumed that such words reflect universal psychological states that do not vary from one culture to another (Wierzbicka, 1995).

In short, there is a substantial body of cross-cultural evidence which throws doubt on the universal validity of many of the categories with which the discipline of Psychology has been operating. Contrary to common belief, these categories do not occupy some rarefied place above culture but are embedded in a particular professional sub-culture. There is a certain arrogance in taking it for granted that, alone among a myriad alternative ways of speaking about individual action and experience, the language of twentieth-century American Psychology accurately reflects the natural and universal structure of the phenomena we call ‘psychological’. If such arrogance is to be avoided, a closer examination of this language has to be undertaken.

The categories of Psychology

Do the categories that are currently popular among us, categories like cognition, emotion, learning, motivation, personality, attitude, intelligence etc., represent natural kinds? Are we the people who happen to have hit on a nomological net that genuinely reflects the natural, the objective, divisions among classes of psychological events? Perhaps. But if we are, it is not because of our superior methods of empirical investigation. For the categories in question were not invented as a consequence of empirical investigation – they were there before anyone used them to identify the objects of empirical studies. Psychologists did not invent the concept of ‘emotion’, for example, to account for certain empirical findings; they obtained certain empirical findings because of their desire to investigate a set of events which their culture had taught them to distinguish as ‘emotional’.

The objects of a science are usually taken to refer to some distinct aspect of a reality that is thought to exist independently of the science whose objects they are. When we claim that psychological science adds to our knowledge of attitudes, motives, personalities and so on, we assume that psychological reality divides up along the lines indicated by this received network of categories. A sensation is not an attitude and a motive is not a memory, though of course there may be relationships between them. Similarly, psychological theory commonly builds hypotheses about the structure of attitudes or the laws of learning, but does not question that ‘attitude’ and learning’ describe distinct kinds that each require their own theoretical constructs. In other words, psychological theory operates on the basis of some pre-understanding of that which it is a theory of.

Traditionally, psychologists have felt justified in ignoring this problem by adopting a kind of conventionalism. On this account, the naming of psychological categories is really quite arbitrary. Psychological measuring devices yield certain products to which names are attached. Most of the time, terms in common use are employed for this purpose, but in the last analysis it is solely the operation of measurement that defines the scientific meaning of the term. Whether this scientific meaning corresponds to the everyday meaning of the term is an empirical matter, to be resolved by establishing the ‘external validity’ of the procedure.

The trouble with this way of disposing of the matter is that it conflates the sense of a term with its reference. Saying that intelligence is what intelligence tests measure, for example, establishes a particular reference for the term ‘intelligence’ but does not establish its sense. The act of categorizing a phenomenon always involves two decisions. First, we decide that there really is a phenomenon of sufficient distinctness and stability to warrant giving it a name. The phenomenon will now give whatever name we choose a reference. But the name should also be the right name. So we now have to decide which of the myriad names at our disposal is the appropriate one to use. In making that decision w...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Naming the Mind
• 2 The Ancients
• 3 The Great Transformation
• 4 The Physiological Background
• 5 Putting Intelligence on the Map
• 6 Behaviour and Learning
• 7 Motivation and Personality
• 8 Attitudes
• 9 Metalanguage: The Technological Framework
• 10 The Nature of Psychological Kinds
• References
• Index