Psychology Returns to the Nature of the Mind

"In his Introduction to Psychology, the father of psychology as a scientific discipline, Wihlem Wundt, wrote that "This science has to investigate the facts of consciousness, its combinations and relations, so that it may ultimately discover the laws which govern these relations and combinations." However, his use of introspection, or "internal perception," lacked the tools for observing, reproducing, or experimentally modulating these internal perceptions, and the field of psychology was on the brink of collapse."

"In a coup, a school of researchers who rejected any ambition of empirically studying the mind came to dominate the field with behaviorism. In the generations that followed, psychology, the study of the mind, became a misnomer. While psychology departments continue to exist in academia today, laboratories are largely focused on behavioral or clinical neuroscience. Is it possible to study the mind? Various metaphysical assumptions must first be addressed. For one, whether the mind is actually any different than the physical."

"Or is it the mind, and not the physical, which is the fundamental nature of reality (idealism)? Or are the mind and body like branches from the same tree (dual-aspect monism)? For Edmund Husserl (an idealist), phenomenology was the answer to study the mind-a first-person "science" where all things outside of the mind should be bracketed off, suspending belief about the outside natural world entirely."

Psychology originally aimed to investigate conscious experience and discover laws governing combinations and relations of consciousness. Early introspective methods lacked reliable tools for observing, reproducing, or experimentally modulating internal perception, leading to a methodological crisis. Behaviorism rejected empirical study of inner experience and shifted the discipline toward observable behavior and neuroscience. Core metaphysical options include physicalism, idealism, and dual-aspect monism, each posing different problems for explaining subjective experience. A first-person phenomenological method brackets external assumptions, while a third-person heterophenomenological approach treats first-person reports as data. Contemporary work seeks to bridge these approaches with new empirical methods.

Read at Psychology Today