PSY 201 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Franz Joseph Gall, Psychological Science, Monism
8 Feb 2018
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Document Summary
Psychological science: scientific study of mind, brain and behavior. Use of objective measures to determine natural laws that govern activities of mind and its behaviors. Objective measures: repeatable, publicly observable, immune to bias. Natural laws: specific principles held to be derived from nature, and therefore universal and predictable. Mind and body problem: separate or distinct, do they depend on each other. Dualism: belief that the world is composed of 2 distinct substance: mental substance (soul), physical substance (body) from material world, from plato, Monism: belief that the world can be explained by only one category of substance, hippocrates (brain is seat of thought + emotion), aristotle (heart is main, brain a cooling organ ) Hobbes: monism called materialism, nothing exists but matter and energy, thought/behavior explained by physical body and brain, modern view mainly. Phrenology: study of structure of skill to determine person"s character and mental capacity. Mind has distinct abilities, which each have their own area.
