A Beginner's Psychology

by Edward Bradford Titchener

All thought is of this kind, an answer to a question. Let us take the case of a scientific problem. Suppose that flints, which bear the marks of human workmanship, are found in a Pliocene bed, which has apparently remained undisturbed. The geologist is called upon to decide whether the deposit really has been undisturbed, so that the ‘find’ is reliable evidence of the existence of man in Tertiary times. The situation asks him a number of questions: has the bed been misplaced by faulting? can the materials have been brought to their present position by water? are there any signs that Quaternary man used the place? are the flints associated with bones of Tertiary animals? and so on and so forth. He forms a whole series of judgements; feature after feature of the situation is attended to, and every one in its turn is supplemented by ideas derived from previous knowledge; there is the familiar conflict of secondary attention, repeated over and over. Every judgement affirms or denies some property of the situation, in accordance with the original problem; and the outcome of the series of judgements, of the whole train of thought, is a final judgement,—still, of course, under the determination of the problem,—‘this bed has (or has not) been disturbed’. If the flints themselves are only doubtfully of human workmanship, then the situation is doubly complicated; the questions and the partial judgements are more numerous; but the general pattern of thought is the same.

The tendency to dual division shows itself, then, in the form of the judgement, in the opposition of ‘subject’ to ‘predicate’; it shows itself further in the grammatical distinctions of substantive and adjective, verb and object, verb and adverb. And all thought or reasoning seems to reduce, in the last resort, to a succession of judgements which, under the particular suggestion or determination, exhausts the possibilities of dual division. The duality, however, is not always obvious at first glance. Ideas are involved; and the arousal of a particular idea may mean the excitement of a whole nest of associative tendencies; subject or predicate or both may thus be supplemented in manifold wise; and the train of thought may appear to be variously and irregularly divided. Only a careful observation will show that these supplementary processes derive, not directly from the suggestive situation, but rather from the secondary excitement of associative tendencies. Moreover, the judgements themselves are not always explicit; they may occur in nutshell form, as mental attitudes. The tendency to dual division is thus masked in two ways: by incidental associations, and by attitudes. It seems, nevertheless, to underlie the whole structure of thought.

We are still in the dark as to psychological details. We have evidence that there is no psychological difference between an affirmative and a negative judgement; but we do not even know whether the judgement, affirmative and negative, implies a specific mental pattern of its own, as the idea implies the pattern of core and context, or whether it may express a variety of patterns. On the whole, the latter alternative seems the more probable; if there is any stable characteristic of the judgement, it is not a definite pattern or arrangement of mental processes, but rather a definite mental attitude, the ‘feeling of validity’; and this attitude seems to be allied to the feeling of familiarity in recognition, and so to be remotely akin to the emotion of relief. As far as our evidence goes, it appears to accompany every true judgement, that is to say, every judgement which is formed in the state of secondary attention. A ‘feeling of relation’ need not accompany the final judgement, but is likely to crop up here and there in the course of a train of thought, assuring us that certain things go together, belong to the same ‘circle’ of ideas, and that certain other things are contradictory, and cannot go together. These relational feelings or attitudes are contextual affairs, deriving probably from the kinæsthesis of bodily attitude; they are, however, very difficult to analyse, and their precise psychological nature is still in dispute.

In conclusion, let us revert for a moment to the comparison of thought with constructive imagination. We have said that the two are broadly similar; and we may now add that judgements occur in imagination, and fetches of imagination in a train of thought. The differences are, nevertheless, great enough to justify the popular distinction of the two mental modes; for thought advances by repeated dissections of a situation which is taken as real, while imagination realises in the work of art a situation which at first was vague or fragmentary.

[§ 66]. Abstraction and Generalisation.—We have spoken of the abstract or general idea, as if the two adjectives were interchangeable; and abstraction and generalisation are, in fact, only two phases of the same procedure. When we abstract, we pick out the features of a situation that are relevant to our present determination, and neglect the other features. When we generalise, we bring to light resemblances that have been merged with differences; but this statement implies that we neglect the differences, as irrelevant, and pick out the likenesses, as relevant; generalisation is thus only a special case of abstraction. We have seen that every suggestion is double-faced, positive as well as negative; and we may perhaps say that in thinking of abstraction we emphasise the negative face, the discarding of the irrelevant, while in thinking of generalisation we emphasise the positive face, the bringing together of the similars which are relevant.

Experiments upon abstraction may be made in the manner outlined on p. 250: a complex stimulus (say, a visual stimulus that shows differences of colour, of number, of arrangement) is exhibited for a brief time; the observer is asked to attend to some one aspect of it (say, colour); and then, his report given, is asked to state what he can of the other aspects (number and form). Two general results may be mentioned. It is found, as might perhaps have been expected, that things which make the least appeal to attention are also the things most easily overlooked. Colour and form, for instance, are more attractive than number; and when the observer is told to attend to colour or form, number may go entirely unnoticed; whereas, when he is told to attend to number,—a relatively difficult task,—he is still able to say something of colour and form. The result seems only natural; but you may not see at once that it throws scientific light on a matter of some practical importance. We all know from sad experience that when thought, our own or another’s, flows smoothly and easily, it is likely to be superficial; the very smoothness of the flow means that difficulties have been overlooked. The obverse of this fact is, now, that if we struggle with the knotty points of a subject, we get a grip upon the whole; the interesting and attractive things take care of themselves; their native appeal to the attention keeps them in mind. So the experiments upon abstraction point a moral, at the same time that they illustrate the nervous mechanism of thought itself. They show, secondly, that the negative effect of abstraction varies in degree; the aspects of stimulus from which we abstract may be wholly suppressed, so that no report at all can be made of them, or may be apprehended indefinitely, so that the report is general; thus, form may be correctly named, while the colours are reported merely as ‘different,’ or as ‘dark.’ Another significant result! for it means that a concept is more easily touched off than a special name; we may fail to identify colours as red or blue when we can still say that they are dark or different. The reason is that the concept, the general name, is applied far oftener than the special name; its associative tendencies are therefore both deeper seated and more numerous. We have a parallel case in the image of p. 266, which slowly loses its distinctive features and approaches a type; and we have others in the gradual decay of memory with old age: a grandfather may forget the names of his grandchildren, but he does not forget that they are ‘boys’ and ‘girls.’

Experiments upon generalisation, that is, upon the positive abstraction of similars, have been made by the aid of meaningless forms, grouped as in the figure. The groups were of varying complexity, but always contained one common element; and the instruction given to the observer was that he should await the stimulus with as even as possible a distribution of attention, and then, when the figures appeared, should pick out the two that were alike. No less than six modes of procedure were distinguished. The observer might work actively through the forms, one by one; this is a laborious method, and was employed for the most part only in the early experiments of the series. Or he might travel over the groups, back and forth, until some figure struck him as familiar; this is the method of simple recognition. Or again he might start out on his journey of exploration, and find himself suddenly arrested by an insistent form, some figure that stood out more clearly than its fellows. Here are mixed methods, part active search and part passive impression. In other cases, the two forms stood out in quick succession, as if the one had drawn the other after it; in still other cases, the two similars stood out simultaneously, sprang forth as if of their own accord. Lastly, in rare instances, passivity reached its maximum; the observer looked at the field, was at once held by some outstanding form, and knew that this was the form required, although he had not remarked the presence of its pair.

We cannot enter further into details; nor, indeed, is the time ripe for discussion; the experimental study of thought-procedures has hardly more than begun. You see, however, that the pattern of thought may vary widely in certain of its features, while yet the outcome of thought, the abstraction or generalisation, is the same; and this conclusion may help you to understand why there need be no specific mental pattern for the judgement.

[§ 67]. Comparison and Discrimination.—One of the commonest occurrences in a train of thought is the comparison of present with past, the harking back to a former stage of the procedure in order to make sure that we have not missed or mistaken some item of experience; and one of the commonest tasks set in the psychological laboratory reduces this comparison to its lowest terms. Two stimuli are presented, in succession; and the observer is required to say whether the intensity or quality of the corresponding sensations, the duration of the intervals, the magnitude of the forms, or whatever it may be, is the same or different. Both the stimuli themselves and the time which separates them may be varied in all sorts of ways; and the mental processes involved in the comparison vary accordingly. Here we shall mention only two points, which bear upon the course of thought at large.