A Beginner's Psychology

by Edward Bradford Titchener

Not necessarily. A science cannot free itself, offhand, from its own history; and, historically, psychology has been much concerned with meaning. Moreover, meaning is of very great practical importance; we communicate meanings, we apprehend meanings, we act upon meanings; and although science is not bound to treat only of what is practically important, yet it can hardly neglect a matter of great practical importance that comes its way. Our question, if we rephrase it a little, merely asks that a term, familiar to us in our daily life, be translated into the language of science; and if the translation out of common sense into science is to be made at all, psychology is the science in which the equivalent of meaning will be found. For these reasons we are justified in discussing the matter here; and the question at issue—let us be quite clear about it—is this: What mental processes, in perception and idea, are the scientific equivalent of what we know in everyday life as meaning? what processes carry the meaning?

The answer is that the processes which surround the nucleus carry the meaning. Psychologically regarded, meaning is always context; and the context is the fringe of related processes that gathers about the central group of sensations or images. Ordinarily, as our analysis has shown, the two come together; but they may be disjoined. When the word ‘house’ becomes meaningless with repetition (p. 26), it is because the bare sound grows more and more vivid and dominant; like the nestling cuckoo, it drives out its normal associates; and these associates, the carriers of its meaning, sink lower and lower into the obscurity of the background. So the meaning, almost literally, drops off, falls away. When one and the same experience has different meanings, it is because the context varies; we read, for instance, that so-and-so received a warm welcome, and we put directly opposite interpretations on the words, according as so-and-so was friend or enemy. When we mistake a meaning, it is because we supply a context of our own: what child, reading that “the quality of mercy is not strain’d,” has not thought of mercy being wrung out through a strainer, as the cook wrings the water out of cottage-cheese in a muslin bag? The context of images is obvious; the rain falls freely, like water poured through a sieve; but what is strained comes out grudgingly in drops. When one and the same meaning attaches to several experiences, it is because these different experiences are received into the same context, or into a context so nearly the same that for practical purposes the differences disappear; for example, the experiences may be named, that is, may be received into a context of verbal ideas; and verbal ideas tend to become stereotyped, as it were, into permanent groups. All the facts of § 6 are to be accounted for in this way, by the distinction of nucleus and context.

Originally, we must suppose, meaning was carried exclusively by kinæsthetic and organic sensations. Think of the animal that we pictured on p. 101 as startled by some sudden stimulus and as facing the stimulus by way of a bodily attitude; the sensation is hemmed in, like a jewel in its setting, by the sensations of organic stir and motor posture; and these sensations give the meaning; they cry out ‘Danger!’; they are the psychological equivalent, the carriers, of that meaning; without them the sensation would be meaningless. Meaning is thus older than the free image; and kinæsthesis is still, for many of us, the characteristic context, the common denominator of our meanings; we hinted at this rôle on p. 47. None the less, the development of free images, the images of memory and imagination, changes the whole situation; kinæsthesis now has many rivals; and it depends on our individual equipment of images, on our ‘type of mind,’ whether a meaning shall be carried by a quiver of the stomach or some muscular set, or whether it shall be carried by some complex of images. If we were to work out a great number of cases, we should probably find that any sensory or imaginal process whatsoever is able, in our adult human experience, to carry the meaning of any other.

There is yet a further stage: a stage in which meaning is carried not by any sort of sensation or image, but simply and solely by physiological processes, by some set or disposition of the brain. When the practised reader skims a number of pages in quick succession; when the musician renders a composition in the prescribed key; when an accomplished linguist shifts from one language to another as he turns to his right or left hand neighbour at a dinner table; in cases of this kind there need be no discoverable context; the stimuli press the button, and the brain, prepared by constant practice in the past, now does the rest. The experiences mean, positively enough; the ‘sense’ of the pages is grasped, as the eye hurries over the lines; the three flats on the staff set the player’s hand and eye for the key of E♭; the question put in French is suitably answered in the same language; everything takes place as if there were a fringe of images that gave meaning to the bare perceptions; and yet imaginal fringe and kinæsthetic setting may be conspicuous only by their absence. Of course, there has been context; one does not learn French and German, or transpose on the piano, by gift of a ready-made nervous system; even after years of work one may be a little uncertain of the German auxiliaries, or have a repugnance to four sharps. The point is, however, that an habitual and often-repeated context does, presently, lapse altogether; the nucleus is not always supplemented; the nervous system can now do, by a set or disposition that has no mental correlate, what it used to do by processes that had as accompaniment the sensations or images of the context.

It is plain, therefore, that perception and idea are not always so rich and complicated as we have described them; we spoke, for that very reason, of the ‘typical’ perception and idea. They range, according to their age and use, from the cluster of nuclear processes surrounded by a group of contextual associates, all under the guidance of a directive nerve-force, down to a mere rag and tag of sensory or imaginal process, wholly bare of associates, and dependent for its meaning upon some habitual nervous set.

[§ 27]. The Types of Perception.—Our perceptions are based upon three of the attributes or aspects of sensation: upon quality, upon duration, and upon extension (p. 66).

The quality of sensation has already been discussed. We may take, as instances of qualitative perception, the taste of coffee, the resistance of a jammed door, and the note of a musical instrument. The taste of coffee analyses into sensations of bitter, the real taste of the coffee-berry; of warmth; of pressure, the feel of the liquid in the mouth; and of a peculiar fragrance, the odour of coffee. Along with these goes a colour, the clear or clouded brown of the coffee in the cup, and various other contextual processes. The resistance analyses into the qualities of pressure from the skin; of strain from the tendons of the arm; and of pressure, or something akin to pressure, from the binding of the joints and the contraction of the muscles. There is probably some organic stir; there is the sight of the door; and there may be a further context. The musical note analyses into fundamental tone and overtones, and into the noise characteristic of the instrument; the thud of the piano, the scrape of the violin, the pluck of the harp. The supplement is perhaps visual; but here, as in the other cases, verbal ideas may enter into the context; we may think ‘Violin, of course,’ All our qualitative perceptions are of this kind; they come to us as meaningful wholes, and they may be analysed into a number of sensory qualities, run or fused or blended together, and set in various contexts of associated processes.

The attribute of duration has not yet been defined. It is the bare going on, going forward, keeping like itself, that may be observed in any and every sensation; you recognise it most easily, perhaps, if you listen to a tone, or attend to the kinæsthetic complex as you slowly extend your arm from the elbow. It is the elementary time-factor in all our perceptions of time,—in the perceptions of period, of interval, of rate, of rhythm, and so on; though in some of these perceptions it is overlaid and obscured by other factors. Qualitative perceptions undergo relatively little change, just because they are qualitative perceptions; the best and easiest way to mean a quality is to be it; the best way to mean the coffee-taste is to be the coffee-taste; and so our perception of that taste remains practically the same all our life long. Time-perceptions, on the other hand,—and the same thing is true of space-perceptions,—change enormously; the nervous system finds all manner of short-cuts to the meaning of time; and these short-cuts have to be unpractised, to be practised out, if we are to observe the perception in its original form. Thus, to take the simplest case, a period of time may seem long because the kinæsthetic strain of waiting becomes intense, or because a great number of perceptions and ideas occur during its course; the strain and the number of ideas have come to mean length of time, and the primary experience of duration, so to say, drops out of sight. If, therefore, we wish our observers in the laboratory to compare periods of time; if we wish to find out accurately what durations can be grasped by the attention and held in the memory; then we must break them of these time-habits, and must somehow train them to disregard strain and to discard imagery. We cannot often carry the unravelling of a perception to the very end, though we can go some distance behind the appearances of everyday life.

The attribute of extension is the bare character of patch or spread that inheres in all sensations from eye and skin, and possibly also in kinæsthetic and organic sensations. No point of light or pressure is so fine that it is not areal. Extension is the elementary space-factor in all our perceptions of space. It enters most obviously into the perception of surface, as duration enters most obviously into that of period; but it is the basis also of our perceptions of form, size, distance, locality, direction. Like duration, it is often obscured and overlaid by other factors.

Here, however, you will raise an objection. Have we not said, on p. 115, that perception is shaped and moulded by nerve-forces that have no mental correlates? and did we not take as an example the casting of perceptions into the forms of ‘thing’ and ‘space’? How, then, can we now speak of perceptions of space?—Well, for one thing, there are various kinds of spatial perception; and it will not do to assume that they are all alike a matter of brain-habit, without mental correlate. Secondly, however, there is a difference between perceiving the piano or the tree as spatial, and turning our attention directly upon its spatial characters, its size or form, its distance or direction. In the latter case, we may rightly speak of a perception of space; we may so speak, even if the various kinds of spatial perception do turn out to be matters of brain-habit; and we must examine every kind for itself, precisely in order to determine how far it is sensory and imaginal, and how far it is a form impressed on sensations and images by the trend of the processes in the brain.