The first scientific psychologist on the planet was probably named Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt. He created a laboratory in Leipzig 130 years ago (about 20 years after Darwin published “Origin of Species”) to scientifically study in internally accessible elements of mental life, taking into account the physiology of the body. My limited understanding of his methods are that his “experimental subjects” were specialists who were highly trained in (1) something like “luminosity” and (2) a technical vocabulary for talking about their introspection.
This research program seems to have had very little effect on the english speaking world. There were few translations. Some of the early stuff may well have been mistranslations. In later decades this research program may have been the “old paradigm” that behaviorists were reacting against when they were going crazy with claims that their own work was “totally reproducible” by virtue of making no reference whatsoever to “internal states of mind”?
The first scientific psychologist on the planet was probably named Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt. He created a laboratory in Leipzig 130 years ago (about 20 years after Darwin published “Origin of Species”) to scientifically study in internally accessible elements of mental life, taking into account the physiology of the body. My limited understanding of his methods are that his “experimental subjects” were specialists who were highly trained in (1) something like “luminosity” and (2) a technical vocabulary for talking about their introspection.
This research program seems to have had very little effect on the english speaking world. There were few translations. Some of the early stuff may well have been mistranslations. In later decades this research program may have been the “old paradigm” that behaviorists were reacting against when they were going crazy with claims that their own work was “totally reproducible” by virtue of making no reference whatsoever to “internal states of mind”?
If anyone is inclined to read the classics and make accumulative progress the barriers to entry may be substantial… But if anyone is interested, the place to start might be the autotranslation of the german wikipedia article about Wundt, and then there seem to be a few translated books on Amazon by Wundt including:
An Introduction to Psychology (1912)
A Psychological History Of The Development Of Mankind
Ethics: The Facts of Moral Life