Watson, Sr., R.I. (1978). The great psychologists. (4th
edition). New York: J.B. Lippincott Co.
CHAPTER 17
EDWARD BRADFORD TITCHENER
During the second decade of this century at Cornell University,
an academic ceremony took place each day that the Professor of
Psychology lectured on introductory psychology. Shortly before
the class hour the Professor inspected the demonstrational material
which had been laid out; the staff and assistants gathered in
his office adjoining the lecture room; the professor donned his
Oxford master's gown, "which gives me
the right to be dogmatic"; the staff filed through one door
to take front row seats; the Professor emerged through another
door directly onto the lecture platform. The lecture began.
Such was the grand manner in which lectures were offered by Wundt's
most faithful pupil, Edward Bradford Titchener. Trenchant and
powerful lectures, they were often the forum for pronouncements
about his system of psychology, and to Titchener's audience of
staff, graduate students, and sophomore college students, Titchener's
system was psychology.
After Wundt's American students returned home they almost always
significantly modified his views according to their particular
temperament or social environment. This was not the case with
Titchener. Titchener held to the tradition of Wundt, both in teaching
and writing; although he developed and modified specific details.
His contribution to Wundt's theory was systematic explicitness
in which he surpassed his prolific and erudite master.
Life of Titchener
Titchener was born in 1867 in the old Roman town of Chichester,
England. Titchener's father, a second son, died shortly after
marriage, leaving young Titchener little monetary security. At
fourteen Titchener went to Malvern College, a new but already
recognized public school. He continued his studies at Oxford,
where he concentrated upon philosophy and a the classics for four
years. In his fifth year he became a research assistant to Burdon
Sanderson, the physiologist, for whom he was to hold a lasting
admiration.
Dissatisfaction with what he called the "logical constructions
of the English school," was instrumental in drawing Titchener
to Leipzig. As he was later to evaluate it, he heard about psychology
at Oxford; he studied it at Leipzig. Upon arrival he found himself
in an active, enthusiastic group of young future psychologists
among them a half-dozen from the United States. Meumann, mentioned
earlier, was his room-mate, and Kulpe was Dazent. Titchener actually
saw very little of Wundt who was thirty-five years his senior
and who had already adopted his characteristically aloof pattern.
Despite this lack of a personal relationship and only a two-year
stay at Leipzig, Wundt made a life-long impression.
After receiving his degree from Leipzig in 1892, Titchener returned
to Oxford, where for a few months he served as an extension lecturer
in biology. To stay on at Oxford would have been his ambition,
but Oxford was not ready for psychology. In any event, he had
agreed to accept a
position at Cornell University replacing a friend from Leipzig,
Frank Angell, who was leaving for Stanford University.
So in 1892 Titchener arrived in Ithaca, New York, to the raw
and new (and muddy) campus of Cornell University. He was Assistant
Professor of Psychology, but, more important, he was in charge
of the laboratory his friend Angell had founded the year before.
There followed busy years spent organizing the laboratory, buying
and building equipment, carrying out research, and writing articles
(sixty-two between 1893 and 1900) and gradually attracting more
and more students. At first Titchener cooperated personally with
every study in his laboratory, but discontinued this arduous practice50
in later years. His research then came almost entirely through
his students; he, himself, published nothing from the laboratory
under his own name alone. His own published research consequently
gives no indication of his productivity; it was through his direction
of student investigations that the base for his systematic statements
was developed. Under his direction fifty-eight doctorates and
many minor studies were conducted. Of the forty-six studies published
in the first thirty volumes of the American Journal o f Psychology,
fifteen were on sensation, eight on perception, six each on memory
and attention, with the rest scattering.
What could be more natural than to translate the Master? This
he
proceeded to do for several of Wundt's works. With one project
of this
kind Titchener found it hard to keep up with him. Years before,
while
still in England, Titchener had finished translating the third
edition of the
Principles o f Physiological Psychology only to find that the
indefatigable
Wundt had written the fourth edition. Titchener, therefore, started
over
again, translating completely this new edition-only to find the
prolific
Wundt now had his fifth edition ready. This time Titchener translated
but six of the twenty-two chapters, and, taking no chances, went
to press.
The rest of the book was never put into English. Titchener also
trans
lated works of Kulpe, his friend from Germany who had not yet
strayed
from the true path of Wundtian exactitude into the luxurious,
but over
grown jungle of imageless thought. Moreover, before the new century
was six years old, Titchener had, on his own, written his Outline
o f
Psychology (1896 ), his Primer of Psychology (1898) , and the
four im
portant volumes of his Experimental Psychology (1901-1905).
His Experimental Psychology bears the significant and relevant
sub
title, A Manual of Laboratory Practice, designed to be used in
"drill"
courses for training in the method of psychology. It is divided
into four
parts, two instructor's manuals and two student's manuals, one
of each
devoted to qualitative experiments-sensations, affective qualities,
attention, action, perception and association of ideas-and another
of each devoted to quantitative experiments-thresholds for pressure,
tone and sound, Weber's law, the various psychophysical methods,
the reaction study of simple discrimination, cognition and choice
times, and the reproduction of a time interval. Qualitative experiments,
as he saw them, were essentially descriptions of conscious experiences
by means of introspection, in which questions of "what"
or "how" are asked; quantitative experiments assume
that the mental process as such is already familiar from prior
examination, and the task is to gather a long series of rather
simple observations which are then expressed through mathematical
shorthand in which questions of "how much" are asked.
These volumes are probably the most erudite and encyclopedic works
on psychology written in English.
As a younger man Titchener had close friends from his student
days whom he cherished through the years. Throughout his life
he always had a small group of psychologist friends with whom
he kept up a voluminous correspondence. One psychologist still
has a collection of 212 letters addressed to him from Titchener.
At first Titchener entered into social life at Cornell, but as
he grew older, he withdrew more and more from the usual social
and university contacts. He had been a living legend to some members
of the faculty of Cornell, who, although they had heard of him
for years, had never met him. Punctilious and somehow formidable,
he gave deference where he thought it due and expected in turn
to receive it from those he thought owed it to him.
His relation with psychologists outside of his own group also
showed a tendency toward withdrawal. The American Psychological
Association to which he was elected by the charter members in
1892, did not have him for long. He resigned almost immediately
in response to the Association's refusal to support a measure
that Titchener considered to be a matter of professional ethics.
Moreover, the Association's membership as a whole was by no means
as rigorously scientific as Titchener's standards demanded. In
1897 he was host to a meeting of the Association, but he was still
not a member. He did later rejoin but probably never again attended
a meeting. When the Association meeting was held in Ithaca in
1925, Titchener held "open house" at home for those
who cared to come to see him.
Beginning in 1904, Titchener organized his own group, the "Experimentalists."
It was not an organization in the strict sense; annual meetings
were arranged by the host, the director of the laboratory, where
the group was to meet. Almost needless to say, Titchener dominated
the
meetings, selecting those to be invited and the topics to be included.
To this very day, this group, now somewhat more formally organized,
carries on as a worthy representative of experimental psychology
of the purest variety.
The American Journal of Psychology, for which Titchener became
an associate editor in 1895, served something of the same function
for him as did the Philosophische Studien for Wundt. However,
it was not until 1921 when he moved up to become sole editor that
it could begin to be employed as his own journal and, therefore,
could serve as a platform similar to Wundt's. Titchener held firmly
to his conviction that Cornell graduates in psychology formed
a group, unified by their shared psychological orientations and
therefore differentiated from the rest of the psychological world.
He was staunch in defending his opinions against outside disagreements,
yet flexible under self-criticism. In these and other respects
he resembled Wundt.
Toward the close of the first decade of the century Titchener
prepared
the Textbook of Psychology. A systematic work in relatively brief
com
pass, this gives what is still the most comprehensive account
of his psy
chology available. After publication of the Textbook, Titchener
began to
prepare an extended statement of his systematic views. This work
he
found impossible to complete, although its appearance was expected
for
many years. A part of this work was published as articles in the
American
Journal o f Psychology, and republished posthumously as a book.
During the fifteen years preceding his death in 1927 his productivity
showed neither the scope nor the depth of his earlier work. This
is sometimes attributed to the cerebral tumor from which he suffered,
but there is some evidence that the tumor did not originate until
shortly before his death.
In his later years Titchener developed an intense interest in
numismatics, especially in Mohammedan coins, even going so far
as to learn Arabic in order to read the inscriptions, but one
may question why a man heretofore so wrapped up in psychology
found it necessary to turn to a hobby at all. Perhaps he had known
honorary degrees and the trappings of academic success too early.
Perhaps the decline had something to do with geography; Titchener
never really became a part of the American scene, and he never
considered giving up his English citizenship. Hence, he was ineligible
for election to the National Academy of Sciences, and, as a psychologist
in the "colonies," he never received his F.R.S.
Did his loss of interest in psychology, perhaps, have something
to do with the changing face of psychology? Here, the record becomes
obscure,and what follows must be seen as a personal interpretation,
not necessarily shared by those who knew him personally and perhaps
understood him better. As a younger man in a magnificent sort
of simplicity, he had seen his particular views as that of psychology,
while other points of view, admirable perhaps though they might
be, were simply not psychology. In later life except at Cornell
and two or three student-manned laboratory outposts at other universities,
psychology as a whole was moving steadily away from him. Did Titchener
refuse to face this tragedy of seeing psychology, his psychology,
changing irrevocably? We cannot be certain, but this might have
made him unable or unwilling to continue with what should have
been his most important work.
The Point of View of Psychology
Titchener started with the view that all scientists are concerned
with a subject matter in some phase of human experience; all knowledge
is based on human experience. While biologists deal with living
forms and chemists investigate elements, the psychologist also
studies experience, but from the special point of view of the
experiencing person. Perception, especially the perceptual illusion,
is illustrative. For instance, if one sees a stick part in and
part out of water, it appears bent. The experience as given, therefore,
is that the stick is bent, even though applying a straight edge
to it would disprove this. Even "white" as experienced
is a mixture of colored lights, none of which is white. Yet as
a datum in consciousness, white is simple in nature. Neither the
physical stick nor the multitude of lights are the concern of
psychology; the experience, as such, is its province. The psychologist's
interest is in the process of experiencing these phenomena.
In the study of experiencing, to confuse the mental process and
the object is to commit the "stimulus error." To describe
the object in common-sense terms of everyday language, instead
of reporting the conscious content of the experience, is to commit
this error. An "orange" is not an orange so far as introspective
report is concerned, but the hues, brightnesses, and spatial characteristics
of that stimulus object. Nor should a subject say he is afraid,
for this is merely an interpretation; he must describe the conscious
content if he is to avoid the stimulus error.
For Titchener mind is the sum total of human experiences considered
as dependent upon a nervous system. Mind and consciousness are
essentially the same, but the latter involves mental processes
occurring now, rather than the sum-total. Human or mental experiences
are always
processes. According to Titchener the most striking fact about
these is change. Nothing is stable; everything is in flux, a mosaic
in motion.
It is perhaps appropriate to examine at this point what Titchener
considered to be outside the field of psychology. Needless to
say, Titchener shared Wundt's distaste for the applied aspects
of psychology. Moreover, behavior is not the concern of a psychology
of consciousness. If experience is the sole concern of psychology,
then performance (behavior) is irrelevant. Behavior is worthy
of study-as a branch of biology, not as psychology. Titchener
objected to what he called, "the penny-in-the-slot sort of
science," in which consciousness is said to be "inferred"
when it was always there waiting to be interrogated. Objective
study is always inferential; experience and its study set the
pattern. Logically, behaviorism, the point of view which would
see study of behavior as paramount, is irrelevant to psychology.
Nevertheless, psychology will obtain information concerning bodily
mechanisms from the study of behavior, examining this biological
information in the light of psychology.
Titchener's dictum concerning unconscious phenomena was simply
that consciousness includes only present mental processes. The
unconscious consists of not present processes. Thus Titchener
was not concerned with what lies below the surface of consciousness.
In fact, he was definite in disparaging psychology as seen by
James. Titchener spoke of James' Psychology as "theory of
knowledge" and not psychology at all!
Introspection as the Method o f Psychology"
All science depends upon observation. Psychological science depends
upon observation of conscious experience or, to put it more succinctly,
upon introspection. For introspective purposes to "look-within"
consciousness, to Titchener, was the having of clear experiences
regarded as dependent upon the experiencing individual.
Sometimes this may involve hardly more than simple inspection.
Consider the following illustration: In front of a subject are
two color wheels (motors so arranged to spin paper discs rapidly).
On one wheel is a violet disc, on the other both a blue and a
red disc, so interlocked that, when the wheel is standing still
one sees portions of both the blue disc and the red disc. They
are adjustable, so that an increase of either portion is possible.
When spun, the second wheel will give a blue-red, that is, a shade
of violet. The task of the subject is to adjust as exactly as
he can the red and the blue portions until the resulting violet
matches the violet of thefirst disc. The introspection is essentially
inspectional; he merely reports when the two discs match.
Another illustration may be drawn from the already familiar two-point
threshold. When the stimulus separation is very small the perception
is that of a single pressure, which is reported as "one:"
When the stimulus separation is great, there is a report of two
pressures. Intermediate between these two the experience of pressure
resembles that of a pattern of a dumbell i.e., two pressure points
which are joined by a narrower band of pressure. The naive subject
would report, "two" because he knows that one round
point could not give that particular stretched-out pattern. But
in so doing he commits the "stimulus error." He has
lapsed from the psychological point of view to infer what the
stimulus must be. The sophisticated introspectionists would report
"one," because he perceives a unitary pattern.
The material for introspection often may be more complex, say,
a word called out to the subject who is to report the effect it
produces on consciousness. Sometimes conditions get complicated,
as in a long drawn out observation in which the introspection
is delayed until the experience has run its course. Even a short
temporal exposure may require a very long description. In both
instances the introspector has to use retrospection. Often when
he finds he cannot maintain an introspective attitude throughout
the course of a complicated experience, he can have the experience
repeated as many times as desired, removing the danger of missing
some aspect of it.
The Tasks of Psychology
The problems of the psychologist are "what," "how,"
and "why:" The task of analysis is to answer the question
of "what:" Consciousness is directly observable. It
is composed of simple describable units, and the analytical task
of the psychologist is to break it down into its simplest components.
The task of "how" is the task of synthesis. The psychologist
does this by placing the elements found in the previous analysis
in various combinations to arrive at the laws of their combination.
For example, sensations of tone will blend, but they give an imperfect
fusion, as in a major chord, whereas sensations of color fuse
perfectly as when the spectrum mixes to give a simple white. The
question of "why" gave Titchener more difficulty. One
mental process cannot cause another. As evidence Titchener cited
that an experience may be due to present stimuli to which he has
never before been exposed. He rejected neural processes
as the cause of mental processes, since the theory conflicted
with his already postulated psychophysical parallelism. Titchener
solved the problem to his satisfaction by arguing that, while
the nervous system does not cause mental phenomena, it may be
used to explain them. By introducing the "map" that
the nervous system makes, it is possible to systematize our introspective
data. The parallel processes in the nervous system explain the
mental processes as a map explains the terrain.
Structuralism
Description of Titchener's system of psychology is sometimes
oversimplified. He was a structuralist, critics said, meaning
that the static elements of experience were his concern, as contrasted
with functional study of the process of experience which had been
espoused by James and others. This is simply not true. There is
no doubt he utilized functional material; and the findings of
psychophysics, which formed one major segment in his system, are
readily viewed as depending upon the functions of discrimination
and estimation. Unequivocally, he accepted the existence of a
functional aspect to psychology.
Titchener held that his systematic view of psychology was that
of psychology with no qualification whatsoever. Titchener did
formulate the so-called structural position in an article published
in 1898. In investigating mental structure, he noted, a very large
proportion of experimental psychology corresponds to morphology
in biology. "Descriptive" psychology, concerned with
function, on the other hand, corresponds to physiology in biology.
In his opinion, psychology's study of structure must precede study
of function. He pointed out in justification that, while considerable
agreement has been reached concerning the postulates of a structural
psychology (e.g., among Wundt, Kulpe, Ebbinghaus, and, of course,
Titchener), this is not the case with the functionalists, such
as, Brentano, James, and Stout, who disagree among themselves.
Functional study, he concluded, is neither as accurate nor as
scientifically final as is structural investigation, and a swing
toward a functionally oriented psychology would be regrettable,
since there is so much work yet to be done on structure.
Titchener's view has sometimes been referred to as existential
psychology, since experiences are studied by him as existences,
i.e., as facts deserving of study for their own sake. For example,
content as lacking verbal meaning, as in the nonsense syllables
of Ebbinghaus, present themselves to the experiencing person as
existential. A word of caution isnecessary. The present-day popular
meaning of existentialism has no more relation to that applied
to Titchener's psychology than, for example, would the existentialism
of Thomas Aquinas.
From the standpoint of those who applied the terms "structural"
or "existential," his was a school of psychology. As
for himself, it was simply psychology.
Views on Same Psychological Problems
Elementary mental processes to Titchener consisted of sensations,
images, and affections."" This is to say in each of
these three categories there are irreducible experiences which
are incapable of analysis into anything simpler, similar in this
respect to so-called chemical elements. Sensations are the elements
of perception; images are the elements of ideas; and affections
are the elements of emotions. In practice, Titchener stressed
study of sensations, minimized that of ideas, and placed that
of affections somewhere between.
The Wundtian attributes of quality and intensity were expanded
by Titchener by adding duration, clearness, and ( sometimes )
extensity. Duration is selfexplanatory. Clearness was introduced
as an attribute to lend systematic clarity to the place of attention
in psychological experience. Clearness allows a particular place
to a sensation in consciousness; clear sensations are dominant
and outstanding; less clear are subordinate and undistinguished.
Clear sensations are those to which we attend; attention and sensory
clearness are identical. By making attention into an attribute,
Titchener eliminated the need to appeal to a "power"
of attention while at the same time giving it a systematic place
within his system.
Titchener later postulated that these attributes might be the
datum of observation, while sensation was only a systematic classificatory
device almost without existential reality.°° Attributes,
once they become the object of direct study, were the "systematic
concepts" that stood up under observation.
After examining the imageless-thought controversy, Titchener
saw no reason to change his basic assumption concerning the primacy
of sensation, images, and feelings. In thinking there may be obscure,
fleeting, or faint aspects of the experience, but these are still
imaginal or sensory elements. Conscious attitudes, to Titchener,
were no more than complex integrations of sensory components,
improperly analyzed by the Wurzburg group and others. Even if
later these proved to be non-sensory meaning elements, they would
be the concern of logic, not of psychology.
Meaning as conscious representation comes about from combining
primary elements in a manner reminiscent of Berkeley. Perceptions,
to put it simply, are sensations (and images) with meaning, and
this meaning is defined by Titchener as context. Sensations, therefore,
are the core of perceptions to which images contribute as well
to the context.
In order to be systematically rigorous and parsimonious, Titchener
did not wish to introduce perception as still another mental element.
Sensation and attention, as a pattern of clarity, account for
some of the phenomena of perception, but there remains an unexplained
aspect. Meaning is that something which we expect to be accounted
for by perception; perceptions are meaningful, we say, when we
perceive an apple, a friend, or a sentence in a book. To Titchener,
meaning shows itself in context -one mental process is the meaning
of another, if it is the other's context. In its simplest form
it takes at least two sensations (or images), then, to make a
meaning, one serving as core, the other as context. Illustrative
would be seeing a strange face (core) and having a visual image
of the name come to one (context). Hence one knows what it means
(perception). By some process of accretion, presumably associative,
meanings as composed of sensory or imaginal contexts accrue to
an initial sensory or imaginal core. Thus, context gives meaning
in the framing of new perceptions and ideas. Titchener does note
an important exception: habitual meanings can occur without conscious
context, which means they may be carried unconsciously. In this
acceptance of unconscious context Titchner went beyond Berkeley
in his theory of meaning. In addition, then, to perception having
as its core a sensation, to which the context is other sensations
and images, an important addition is the unconscious context.
All three make up the context.
Feeling or affection received special attention from his students
in the Cornell Laboratory. On the basis of introspective studies
carried on in his laboratory, Titchener dissented from Wundt's
tridimensional theory. He denied to feeling the dimensions of
tension-relaxation and of excitementdepression, since he found
these to be "muscular attitudes." This left to feeling
the traditional dimension of pleasantness-unpleasantness.
At one time Titchener held that feeling was a conscious element,
distinct from sensation. Work from his laboratory during the last
years of Titchener's life tended to show that this view must be
modified . Under introspection, feelings turn out to be modes
of pressure. Pleasantness is a bright pressure; unpleasantness
is a dull pressure. Affective experience from every sense department
may take on an increment of bright or dull pressure. For pleasant
experiences, terms such as "liveliness," "brightness,"
"airy" were used by the introspectors, while unpleasant
experiences were identified as "dull," "heavy,"
and "hard." Direct appeal to pressure, as such, was
very evident among all the observers. Thus feeling was related
to touch. This study, appearing in 1924, was made too late to
be incorporated into Titchener's own systematic publications.
Overview
The biography of Titchener, published the year of his death by
Boring, closes with the statement that a century may have to pass
before it is possible to assess Titchener's place in the history
of psychology. From the present perspective of only some thirty-five
years later, the approach to psychology through introspection
seems to have closed with Titchener's death. Not that content
of consciousness as a source of psychological data disappeared.
Verbal report and free association are still with us, but a unified,
unsupplemented appeal to introspection and nought beside has disappeared.
That we have progressed beyond Titchener's views anyone with a
sense of history would acknowledge, but this inevitable lesson
does not detract from the contribution they made.
Instead of setting the pattern for psychology, as Wundt and Titchener
thought they had, their work has proved to be but a stage of its
history, barely surviving Titchener's death. In fact, the remarkable
aspect is the speed with which the change took place. By 1930
students of Titchener were arguing that the homogeneity among
psychologists is much greater than the differences and that a
reconciliation among the warring schools was actually taking place,
except for a few diehards.
The transfer of Wundtian, German psychology as a unitary social
institution was a failure. A sociologist of today would have predicted
it, reminding us that transfer from one culture is relative and
selective, not wholesale. But Titchener's attempt was a magnificent
failurel
