More on Wundt versus James in the early history of psychology

 Last week I posted about Wilhelm Wundt, and said that he was a structuralist, as distinct from a functionalist, in psychology. What does this mean? 

It means that his goal was to break down consciousness into elements, and then to suggest how the elements combine, or could have combined, to create the whole structure that we know through introspection. 

For Wundt the structure begins with sensation. At first blush a sensation is a physical fact -- light striking an eye, for example, The physical facts are much the same for us as they are for other creatures. But we are humans, with minds. So (WW's line of thought here)... we have apperception, a process that turns sensations into something different. Apperception turns sensation into intuition.  Wundt saw his laboratory's experiments were an effort at learning something about this transformation. 

One issue that troubled him was: how does the human mind acquire its intuition of space? These three dimensions of extension into which we seem to have been thrown by fate? He has a complicated passage in his Psychology in which he discusses how two "local sign systems" synthesize their results to produce a comprehension of space. There are the muscle-born sensations of movement on the one hand and the sensory data, especially of the retina, on the other. They are initially distinct but "in melting wholly away into the product which they create they become consciously indistinguishable, and the mind apprehends only their resultant, the intuition of space."  He believes, then, that both sign systems are initially spaceless.  Sensation and muscle movement both become spatial when combined. 

To James, all this seemed a dead end: structuralism in general and such a view of space in particular. James, who had been exposed to then-new debates in biology over survival of the fittest, thought we would understand the mind only if we understood its evolutionary function. How does it enhance our fitness to survive and reproduce?  Sometimes he was explicit about this, sometimes not. Even where the idea of function is only implicit, it is seldom far below the surface. 

Recall James' famous phrase "blooming, buzzing confusion." If a child experiences a blooming (visual sense) and a buzzing (auditory sense) then the child may be near a flower, and near a bee that is also attracted to the flower.  In that case the function of an ability to distinguish between those senses, to become un-confused about the inputs, is pretty clear. Bee stings hurt.  Once in a while they are even fatal.  The gene lines that avoid bees have an advantage over those that don't.  

This functional approach could make him dismissive to concerns that were to old Wundt of the greatest importance.  Consider James' discussion of the origin of space in his Psychology. Or rather, for now just consider just James' take on Wundt's take on the subject. After quoting the bit I quoted above about the two local sign systems and their merger (James gives a somewhat fuller presentation of Wundt's view than I have), he adds: 

Wundt's 'theory' is the flimsiest thing in the world. It starts by an untrue assumption and then corrects it by an unmeaning phrase. Retinal sensations are spatial; and were they not, no amount of 'synthesis' with equally spaceless motor sensations could intelligibly make them so. Wundt's theory is, in short, but an avowal of impotence, and an appeal to the inscrutable powers of the soul. 

Retinal sensations are already spatial. In broader terms, the senses provide information, for James, and although the sense report may be confusing and may need clarification -- as for our baby in proximity of the blooming flower -- the senses don't have to combine their results with one another in order to produce such basics about the world -- there is no primordial not-yet-spatial sight.