PSYC 100 Chapter Notes -Western Philosophy, Wilhelm Wundt, Empiricism

• School: Queen's University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 100
• Professor: Ingrid Johnsrude

Document Summary

And are people inherently good or evil? the ancient greeks examined these questions through rationalism the pursuit of truth through reason and logic. Reason and logic cannot solve everything, however, and so the empirical approach was adopted. Empiricism is the belief that people can describe the world through rules generated by observation, quantification and the principle of parsimony - or accepting the simplest testable solution that accounts for all available evidence. Wundt, von helmholtz, fechner and other 19th century german psychologists are now considered to have followed the structuralist viewpoint. They thought that, like bricks in a wall, human experience was built up of elemental sensation. They attempted to understand perception by dissecting it into its constituent elements sensations and then cataloguing and exploring these sensations. Introspection was one of their tools, but the importance of introspection to structuralism is over-emphasized in the textbook (p. 20-21). The really important element of the structuralist view is analysis according to the,.