After all the spelling mistakes, after all the groping in the dark,
Can this page of strange gibberish get a final punctuation mark?
Hurry up and let's get this over with.
You don't have to go home but you can't stay here.
Everybody knows how this goes so let's get over it, and let's get this over with.

EL

2100

3100

PSYC 3100 sec 001
History And Systems Of Psychology, Spring 2019
UConn Storrs Campus, GENT 131
MON WED 4:40-5:55
Eric Lundquist

Hey remember, the first thing you'll see when I'm done with grades is your FINAL COURSE GRADE appearing on StudentAdmin on Monday or Tuesday. Until then I really won't have any opportunity to respond to individual emails wondering when the grades will be posted. Once the course grades are posted, I will add the rest of the scores to HuskyCT, hopefully within a week or so, and then you'll have all the information about where your course grade came from. If you still have questions after all the scores are added to HuskyCT, you can certainly ask then. Thanks for your patience!

FINAL EXAM REVIEW INFO
This is a preliminary version and may be updated after the review session Friday 5/3/19, 3:00 in BOUS A-106. Probably won't change much though.

FINAL EXAM IS MONDAY 5/6/19, 1:00-3:00 PM, GENT 131
REVIEW SESSION FRIDAY 5/3/19, 3:00-4:30, BOUS A-106

RECORDING OF EXAM 2 REVIEW SESSION FRIDAY 5/3/19 (approx. 77 minutes / 37 MB)
(starts off slow and rambling, ends up being kind of worthwhile once the questions get going -- but mainly as an extra review once you've done some studying)

Recording of brief lecture on epistemology to supplement readings on Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant

QUIZ 2 IS POSTED HERE (as a web page) and also HERE (as a PDF file for printing).

QUIZ 2 INFO
READ IMMEDIATELY!... how to submit a question; bubble sheets; planned online posting date; planned due date; etc.
Note that subject matter for the quiz extends into reading we haven't covered yet. This may be updated depending on the timing of the quiz posting and due date.

EXAM 1 REVIEW INFO
UPDATE: Popper and Kuhn will not be on the exam. Logical Positivism could be on it a little, since it was discussed in the context of Philosophical Behaviorism, so you should see the portions of the "Outline of Logical Positivism" indicated below (omitting the mention of Popper and Kuhn, as well as all its predecessors). The Stanovich reading on defining science, and the corresponding slides (up to "publicly observable data", but not Einstein etc.) are fair game since they're the last thing we covered.

EXAM 1 IS WEDNESDAY 4/3/19, 4:40-5:55 PM., GENT 131
REVIEW SESSION MONDAY 4/1/19, 6:00-7:00 PM (ending earlier or later depending on time needed), GENT 131 (not BOUS 160!).

RECORDING OF EXAM 1 REVIEW SESSION MONDAY 4/1/19 (approx. 62 minutes / 30 MB)

QUIZ 1 REVIEW INFO

READING:

1. REQUIRED: Hergenhahn, B.R. (2009). An Introduction to the History of Psychology (6th ed.). Wadsworth. (ISBN13: 978-0-495-50621-8) OR SEVENTH EDITION
2. REQUIRED: On-Line Readings and Reserve Readings (to be announced)
3. OPTIONAL: Some classic papers in the Psychology of Learning: Here's a collection of links to papers I'll refer to in class -- and a few of them may appear among the required readings for the class. Also see Classics In The History Of Psychology, if you're looking for extra stuff to read.

GRADING:

	Two Quizzes:	30%	approximately 5th and 12th weeks of class (Thursday 2/20/19 and Thursday 4/17/19) NOTE: QUIZ 2 is a TAKE-HOME quiz that will be posted sometime after 4/17/19 and will (most likely) be due on 4/24/19 though that could be later; details to appear on web page.
	Midterm Exam:	35%	approximately 10th week of class (Wed 4/3)
	Final Exam:	35%	MONDAY 5/6/19 1:00 PM IN GENT 131

Other general University policies and information are available at the Office of the Provost's page of References for Syllabi Links, including policies concerning such issues as Absences from Final Examinations, Class Attendance, Credit Hours, People with Disabilities, Discrimination, Harassment and Related Interpersonal Violence, The Student Code, Academic Misconduct Procedures for Instructors, and more. These should be considered part of every course's policies at UConn.

For those purchasing the older Fifth Edition of Hergenhahn's text:
CLASS SYLLABUS for HERGENHAHN FIFTH EDITION
BUT please note some of the order of the readings has changed from that older syllabus!

Stellarium is a free program that will simulate a planetarium on your computer so that you will always know what stars you're looking at and when something interesting will be appearing. It's quite addictive.

Two short excerpts about James Gibson's Ecological Psychology: these are written by people who DON'T actually agree with Gibson and his ecological view, but who are describing him and his work fairly objectively. (While they're sort of skeptical, personally I'm not!) It's difficult to sum up the approach in brief; the linked passages are decent outsider views, but they're still incomplete and fail to appreciate some subtleties and philosophical implications. Ecological psychology is an approach to problems of perception and other aspects of psychology that is very different from conventional mainstream approaches. Instead of looking at the mind as a kind of computer involved in the processing of information (which is what mainstream psychology assumes), it is concerned with how animals and people can directly detect information in the environment which will be sufficient to guide their actions. The phrase "directly detect" is why the approach is often referred to as "direct perception"; it implies that the information doesn't need to be processed at all, which is controversial to say the least, and which certainly flies in the face of many centuries of epistemology. (At the end of the excerpt is an example of what a conventional "INdirect perception" approach looks like, for comparison.) The term "ecological" refers to a view of the animal and its environment as an integrated and co-evolving whole, as opposed to the conventional approach which seems to view the animal as an arbitrary observer placed into an arbitrary context. The ecological approach was developed by James Gibson over the whole course of his career, and today the University of Connecticut is the world leader in promoting and pursuing this approach. In particular the Psychology Department's Center For The Ecological Study Of Perception And Action (CESPA) is dedicated to advancing research and theory in ecological psychology.

• Some excerpts from a paper on the Ecological view of scientific laws: quite challenging and probably only of interest to the most devoted students, though parts of it may well be fairly accessible. I would draw your attention to the general point being made, that animals moving about in their environments are in fact an instance of motion that science needs to consider, and that traditional scientific laws are quite inadequate for describing that motion, regardless of how successful they may be at accounting for planetary orbits and planning space shuttle flights. This suggests that the laws we have at present are only applicable to the special simple case of inanimate motion, and accounting for biological and psychological phenomena will require a more sophisticated view of what counts as a scientific law. To simply say there is no lawfulness in such phenomena would be lazy; but to say that what we know as "the" laws of nature today are all that there can be, and that lawfulness consists of simple deterministic causes and effects such as apply to inanimate motion, would be equally lazy.

• An excerpt from Beyond The Brain by Louise Barrett in which she offers an overview of Gibson's perspective, for those who want to read more. It's a pretty accessible description of some subtle ideas, and the section headed "The Environment as Illusion" reviews why the mainstream approach was so unsatisfactory to Gibson. In addition, this excerpt describes Turing machines and how they are an inappropriate model for cognitive processes (unless radically reinterpreted as mentioned in this chapter), and it introduces some cutting edge concepts of dynamical systems theory as applicable to psychology, in terms an interested general reader could understand.

• Direct Perception by Claire Michaels and Claudia Carello (both longtime UConn Psychology faculty): this is the brief first textbook on James Gibson's Ecological Psychology, from 1981. As such, it's fairly out of date as far as the research support goes but still provides a useful and authoritative introduction to the perspective for those who are interested in learning more. Some of the concepts and some of the research are quite challenging; there's plenty in it that can be read by any curious student though. (There are typos in this scanned copy, some of which could be deeply confusing if not noticed. For instance on p.2 it reads "The latter term, information processing, rejects the accepted notion that information must be processed." That becomes much more comprehensible when you realize that instead of "rejects" it should say "reflects".)

Silicon Immortality: Downloading Consciousness Into Computers, by neuroscientist (and author) David Eagleman: an interesting thought, very popular among some scientists and philosophers and especially science fiction writers. But I think it's based on an incorrect premise from the start, and thus is nonsensical. I used to express my annoyance at this idea being taken seriously by simpy titling this link "AAAAAAARRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH THIS STUFF NEVER ENDS."

Edward Tolman is my favorite psychologist.

• Tolman, Edward C. (1948). Cognitive maps in rats and men. Psychological Review, 55(4), 189-208. This famous paper shows the range of his experiments and arguments. It's worth reading about experiments (1) "latent learning", (4) "hypotheses", and (5) "spatial orientation", at least. And the conclusion, which is nice.

• Race a rat through this maze, by pausing the video on the maze overview and tracing through it on your own, and then hitting play to see if you can actually stay ahead of him when they show his whole run in the second half. I'm not saying it's hard, just that he's faster than you think - and the rat doesn't get the bird's eye view that you get either.

Spiders and turkeys and bears: some pictures from backyards (mine, my brother's). You're free to exclaim "oh my!" after reading the album title. Just something to look at if you're bored.

Some relevant quotes, capturing some insights into the nature of science and psychology. (Not all of it is immediately relevant at the beginning of the course.) Here are the two standard quotes to start off the History And Systems Of Psychology course:

• Hermann Ebbinghaus in his historical Outline Of Psychology (1902): "Psychology has a long past, but only a short history."
• William Faulkner's most famous line isn't included in the link above but it's pretty relevant, from his novel Requiem for a Nun (1951): "The past is not dead. In fact, it's not even past."

Various schools of thought in psychology which co-existed in the beginning decades of the field's history, and the implications of this situation for a history of psychology course.

Defining psychology as a natural science: four definitions of psychology; three important dates in the history of psychology; a timeline and four terms that are central to epistemology. (An expanded version of the epistemology section will be appear again later in the course.) Language Development: here are a couple of brief passages scanned from Erika Hoff's text that describe the Chomskyan view of language acquisition, along with an orientation to the perspectives of empiricism and nativism.

Some perspectives on the "fate" of Behavioristic Psychology:

• An overview of psychology's history from another textbook, which is too superficial for this class but I've posted it just in case you want a brief overview. (Note, for instance, that "voluntarism" is conflated with "structuralism", and there's no mention of the imageless thought debate.)
• Chomsky, Noam (1959). A Review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior. Language, 35(1), 26-58. The famous critique of the behaviorist approach is fairly difficult, but rewarding if you're interested.
• MacCorquodale, Kenneth (1970). On Chomsky's Review Of Skinner's Verbal Behavior. Journal Of The Experimental Analysis Of Behavior, 13(1), 83-99. This lesser known but fairly effective rebuttal of Chomsky's arguments shows how he missed the point of Skinner's book and chose instead to attack behaviorism in general; of course by 1970 this essay was a bit late to counter the perception that Chomsky had successfully demolished behaviorism, which of course he had not done.
• Roddy Roediger's March 2004 commentary from the APS Observer, 17(3) re-examines the simplistic story about behaviorism's fate after the rise of cognitive psychology, shedding some important light. One nice point he makes is that Chomsky contributed a rationalist intellectual foundation to refuting Skinner's behaviorism, but mainly was arguing at cross-purposes with Skinner and maybe shouldn't be thought of as have fomented a revolution.
• Alferink, Larry (2005). Behaviorism Died Today, Again! The General Psychologist, 40(1) (Spring 2005), 7-9. This is a brief mention of some of the many ways, both scientific and practical, in which behaviorism is still thriving today, which should counter the cliché that it's a thing of the past.

Excerpt from an interview with philosopher Daniel Dennett (from Jonathan Miller's collection titled States Of Mind) on the strategy of investigating the workings of the brain by probing the information processing capacities of the mind, rather than approaching it directly through neuroscience. Note that this difference in investigational strategies is referred to as top-down vs. bottom-up, but in a different sense than cognitive psychologists usually mean.

Excerpt from Out Of Our Heads by Alva Noë: from an introductory chapter of a book by one of the few philosophers to question the seemingly fundamental notion that the mind is the product of the brain. It's important to understand that he doesn't promote any supernatural alternative, but rather argues that the basic concept needs to be reconsidered.

Thomas Nagel's Precis of his book Mind And Cosmos in which he questions some very fundamental assumptions about the nature of the universe.

Localization of Cortical Function slides, highlighting some conceptual milestones from Gall to Penfield

Franz Joseph Gall and phrenology, along with some of his legitimate scientific achievements.

• Phrenological diagram in a more readable version, according to Franz Joseph Gall's disciple Johannes Spurzheim who increased the number of faculties from Gall's 27 to at least 35.
• History Of Phrenology: a comprehensive source, and the page that's linked to the phrenological image above.
• An excerpt from Jerry Fodor's The Modularity of Mind: an important bit of philosophy and/or theorizing in cognitive science that might be too dense for you, though it's worth a try if you're ambitious; see pp. 22-23 for the quotes about Gall though. And here's a 5 page summary he wrote of his main claims, followed by 28 pages of commentaries by other scientists (the one by Gross on p. 16 is especially interesting), and 6 more pages of Fodor's replies, in case that helps.
  
• Face-Reading story on CNN, 1998: Here's a story that was broadcast on CNN in 1998 about the applications of something called "face-reading" in contemporary society. Is this any different than phrenology? Phrenology might have been MORE scientific, actually! Chilling, if you're about to look for a job... And if you're thinking, well, that was a long time ago, just realize the idea was exactly as laughable then as it is now.
  Here's an edited video of the broadcast of the story, and the original transcript revealing that all the critical parts have been edited out for promotional purposes. Because this scam is ongoing!
• Brain cartoon: a satire of overeagerness to find cortical locations for every trait and skill, and need I say this?... you do NOT need to know this picture for the exam!
• World's best phrenology client: okay not really his brain contours, obviously, but a fun picture.

Phineas Gage's story is related here, with admirable restraint, for those who want to read the details. But all the links make interesting browsing. Phineas's damaged skull and his tamping iron are displayed at the Warren Anatomical Museum of the Countway Library of Medicine at Harvard University; next time you're in the Boston area, stop in. The story of the daguerreotype image identified in July 2009 is recounted here.

• This May 2014 article from Slate.com is probably the best treatment of the whole story -- the person, the accident, the history, the brain, and the use of the story in science. It's really good.

Wilder Penfield and the motor and somatosensory areas in the human brain: a brief excerpt from an Intro Psych textbook, provided as an optional reference since he's not covered in Hergenhahn.

Some colorful pictures I use to highlight the power of colorful pictures of brains to give extra weight to scientific points:
Here's a brain image with colors representing various levels of blood oxygen consumption during a task (which I could not identify, unfortunately). Next, a 3D brain image colored to represent average amounts of different types of brain tissue present in twelve adolescents with schizophrenia, all mapped onto the same abstract brain image -- that is, the pictured brain is not actually the brain of any individual. Note that these images aren't really "pictures" of the brain or its activity, but are more like graphs in the shape of brains. Part of the information conveyed in the graphs is of course the location of the activity, so it's an appropriate representation. Now look at a brain image with some added fanciful colors,which is not a graph at all, just some fun imagery. The departure from any data shows that colors can be arbitrary, limited only by the good taste of the illustrator. Here's a brain illustration with lobes identified by colors, pictured inside a head, and here's a similar brain without the head included. Since this shape could be used as a graph to represent the information in the first two pictures, it should be equally plausible that those brain activity levels could instead be mapped onto a completely different image, such as this Volkswagen Beetle with different internal components identified by colors. The math required to map brain activity onto this image instead of onto an image of a brain would presumably not be different in kind from the math used to map the activity onto an image of a brain. But if that brain activity were graphed in the shape of the Volkswagen, I think it would lose a lot of its rhetorical authority -- we'd be more aware we're looking at data, not viewing actual brain processes in any concrete sense. I'm not advocating using arbitrary patterns to represent data (and thereby obscuring important location information), I'm just emphasizing that there's an extra dimension of persuasiveness conveyed by the impression the brain image makes on us.

• As a fun comparison, consider these images of a galaxy cluster collision 2.4 billion light-years from Earth, taken from various telescops. The photo at the top is a familiar looking image from outer space, but it's actually a composite overlay of four different representations of different data -- that is, it's more of a graph than a photo. Much of our conceptual imagery of the cosmos is really imagery about data moreso than about how things actually appear through a telescope. For those interested in the cosmological implications of the illustration, apart from the difference between a photo and a graph: The black and white photo of galaxies is the actual light reaching the camera. The orange parts represent the concentrated regions of starlight, abstracting from individual light sources. In green are the regions of hot gas which are evidence that the pictured galaxies have collided. The blue regions are where most of the mass is located, mostly consisting of dark matter which is invisible and can only be detected indirectly by looking at how light is deflected by its gravity. The overlap of green (hot gas from the collision) and blue (the invisible dark matter) is in the center, while the orange (light indicating the locations of the non-dark-matter galaxies) is in the periphery. This suggests the possibility that galaxies are not as closely anchored to dark matter as was previously thought.

Three abstracts on the possibly unwarranted persuasiveness of brain images:

• the effect of showing brain imagery along with results
  Seeing is believing: The effect of brain images on judgments of scientific reasoning, by David P. McCabe and Alan D. Castel: "Brain images are believed to have a particularly persuasive influence on the public perception of research on cognition. Three experiments are reported showing that presenting brain images with articles summarizing cognitive neuroscience research resulted in higher ratings of scientific reasoning for arguments made in those articles, as compared to articles accompanied by bar graphs, a topographical map of brain activation, or no image. These data lend support to the notion that part of the fascination, and the credibility, of brain imaging research lies in the persuasive power of the actual brain images themselves. We argue that brain images are influential because they provide a physical basis for abstract cognitive processes, appealing to people's affinity for reductionistic explanations of cognitive phenomena."
• the effect of irrelevant assertions about what "brain scans indicate" without even providing any images
  The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations, by Deena Skolnick Weisberg, Frank C. Keil, Joshua Goodstein, Elizabeth Rawson, and Jeremy R. Gray: "Explanations of psychological phenomena seem to generate more public interest when they contain neuroscientific information. Even irrelevant neuroscience information in an explanation of a psychological phenomenon may interfere with people's abilities to critically consider the underlying logic of this explanation. We tested this hypothesis by giving naive adults, students in a neuroscience course, and neuroscience experts brief descriptions of psychological phenomena followed by one of four types of explanation, according to a 2 (good explanation vs. bad explanation) by 2 (without neuroscience vs. with neuroscience) design. Crucially, the neuroscience information was irrelevant to the logic of the explanation, as confirmed by the expert subjects. Subjects in all three groups judged good explanations as more satisfying than bad ones. But subjects in the two nonexpert groups additionally judged that explanations with logically irrelevant neuroscience information were more satisfying than explanations without. The neuroscience information had a particularly striking effect on nonexperts' judgments of bad explanations, masking otherwise salient problems in these explanations."
• questioning how strong a case those two papers really make
  The Seductive Allure of "Seductive Allure", by Martha J. Farah and Cayce J. Hook: "The idea of fMRI's "seductive allure" is supported by two widely cited studies. Upon closer analysis of these studies, and in light of more recent research, we find little empirical support for the claim that brain images are inordinately influential."

Take an MRI tour of a really great brain: from left to right, from front to back, from top to bottom.

• Depending on your browser and plug-ins, these versions might be more browser-compatible and convenient: from left to right, from front to back, from top to bottom.
• (And here's a special bonus scan of a really okay abdomen from front to back.)

Irving Kirsch on 60 Minutes, 2/19/12: in this segment Kirsch (a UConn psychology professor from 1975 to 2004) discusses his research that suggests anti-depressant medications are no more effective than a placebo, i.e., they work through expectations and beliefs rather than chemical effects of the drugs. Other supportive or critical points of view are offered too. Here's a transcript if you're interested.

• Kirsch's book summarizing his work is called The Emperor's New Drugs, a pretty short easy read if you want to know more about his view.
• Here's a news release from the American Psychiatric Association objecting to the 60 Minutes segment: "60 Minutes" Segment on Antidepressants "Irresponsible and Dangerous"
• Kirsch co-produced a comedy album parodying Richard Nixon where excerpts from his speeches are spliced together to make him say incriminating things; there are a bunch of topical Watergate jokes you might not get today. It was nominated for a Grammy Award 1974.

Washington Post article on psychiatrist Daniel Amen: "Daniel Amen is the most popular psychiatrist in America. To most researchers and scientists, that's a very bad thing." It's basically a damning esposé that doesn't seem to have affected the guy's business very much. Daniel Amen advocates very strongly for his brain-scan-based approach to psychiatry, especially on PBS stations which often broadcast his programs (or really, infomercials) during fundraising periods because they're THAT popular with audiences hoping for objective advice and help with mental illness. I think Daniel Amen is a goofball and self-promoter more than a charlatan about SPECT (single positron emission computed tomography, a relatively outdated technology compared to MRI and others), since to be a charlatan he'd have to not believe it himself, and I think he does believe it. He's the Dr. Oz of psychiatry. The links I've provided are uniformly critical, as Amen already does a good enough job of promoting himself.

• from Wired: a psychiatrist investigates Amen and his claims personally, compares the treatment to palm reading (or see more generally the topic of cold reading); he says at one point, "I'm reminded of a recent study in which Yale researchers gave participants various nonsensical explanations of human behavior. Half of the time, the researchers added the phrase 'Brain scans indicate' before the explanation, and then inserted the spurious finding. When this brain-speak was added, participants judged the explanations more satisfying." (See that study here: The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations)
• from Salon: explains why Alzheimer's Disease is not diagnosable and preventable and curable the way Amen misleads people into believing, and takes PBS to task for broadcasting unscientific nonsense that will hurt people
• from Slate: especially critical of people finding traits in scans that aren't there to be found, with echoes of phrenology and the science fiction film Minority Report; also scolds the New York Times and Los Angeles Times for their journalistic gullibility.

Connectionism / Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP) / Neural Networks: a few milestones backward in time, showing that "new" is relative.

• PDP models are described here in an excerpt from a cognitive psychology textbook, at an introductory level. Note that the passage is concerned with connectionist models of the organization of memory and how concepts can be related to one another; but keep in mind that the approach is much more general and has been used to model language learning, perception, reading, and many other aspects of human information processing. Apart from their applications in psychology, it's likely that neural networks are being used to recognize your preferences when you use services like Pandora or Netflix, or to decide which emails you receive are probably spam.
• PDP slides from my Cognitive Psychology course, which have more detail than you need but are posted here as an optional resource in case they're helpful.

Koole, S.L., Greenberg, J., & Pysczcynski, T. (2006). Introducing psychology to the science of the soul. Psychological Science, 15 (5), 212-216: This is a paper on finding meaning in life vs. the fear of death -- not very natural-science-oriented topics -- that nonetheless proposes future research directions involving cognitive neuroscience and PDP models (see p. 215); this makes the point that these are truly pervasive features of modern cognitive psychology. But I've only posted the paper here for those of you who may be interested.

• Excerpt from PBS program How Art Made The World featuring the work of Sheldon Solomon and Jeff Greenberg, in case you're curious about the approach described in the paper. Another excerpt shows experimental work on how the fear of death can influence people's behavior and political leanings. Some of it seems implausible but they have some intriguing results.
• Complete episode here: see 14:04-20:44 and 35:21-40:46.
• Terror management theory in Wikipedia, an overview of some of the claims of the theory, providing some context and criticisms.

Deep neural networks are more accurate than humans at detecting sexual orientation from facial images, by Michal Kosinski and Yilun Wang (in pre-publication form): An interesting and disturbing recent development in Parallel Distributed Processing / Neural Network / Connectionist computer modeling -- a PDP network is able to detect sexual orientation purely from facial features. Of course the success rate depends on how you measure success, and the photos used in the study were taken from a web site where people self-identify as gay or straight and presumably present themselves in the most appealing way they can (grooming, pose, angle of photo, etc.) which might make theses photos convey things that real life faces normally don't. The authors caution about the potential for abuse of such a technology, especially in terms of privacy issues as well as misinterpretation and oversimplification.

• Here's coverage from TechCrunch, where in an earlier version they mistakenly corrected the term "physiognomy" to "phrenology" -- but "physiognomy" is the right word for the pseudoscience of reading personal characteristics from facial features as opposed to bumps on the head
• Here's The Economist article that gave a lot of exposure to the research.
• The New York Times story is a good summary of what the network does and doesn't do, along with an account of the criticism that's been directed at the scientists who made the model -- partly just for their decision to try to do it at all. You can judge whether the criticism, or the attempt to make the model, was appropriate.

Kant proposed three reasons why there could not be a science of the mind, but several 19th Century physiologists and early psychologists met each of those objections. For instance, Kant claimed psychology was impossible because: The mind wasn't a physical entity -- but then Helmholtz measured the speed of the nerve impulse and other aspects of the physical basis of thought. The mind could not be objectively observed since introspection was the only possible method and would always reveal the mind in the process of introspecting itself -- but then Donders invented the reaction time methodology which provided objective measures of the functioning of other minds. The mind could not be subjected to mathematical analysis -- but then Weber and Fechner came up with precise mathematical expressions that related the intensity of a physical stimulus (like light) to the magnitude of the subjective sensory impression it produced (perceived brightness).

PowerPoint slides on Early Psychology: some of psychology's 19th century precursors, followed by Wundt and voluntarism, Titchener and structuralism, the imageless thought debate with Kulpe, and Watson's turn to behaviorism -- all in very brief overview.

Donders's reaction time methodology as used in PET brain imaging research: an excerpt from Russell Poldrack's 2018 book The New Mind Readers describing Donders's legacy for cognitive neuroscience; see mainly pp. 31-32, with the rest getting into more specific findings as examples. Positron Emission Tomography (PET) was a major precursor to today's dominant technology, functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI).

John Watson and Rosalie Rayner's original paper on Little Albert: Judge for yourself whether this paper is a well-controlled and judiciously interpreted study deserving of the attention it's gotten for the better part of a century. Is ONE subject enough? Are they doing classical or operant conditioning? Is Albert's crying really attributable uniquely to that rat and the noise associated with it?

• To help you decide, look at this video of Watson's skill at upsetting a child regardless of the stimulus being employed. I think this would make most babies cry under the best of circumstances!
• Consider this modern evaluation:
  "By itself the Albert study was not very convincing proof of the correctness of Watson's general view of personality and emotions. In addition to the study's reliance on only one subject, the experimental stimuli were insufficient to test for generalization effects, the observers' accounts were too subjective, and the technology did not exist to permit reliable assessment of emotional responses (see Sherman, 1927); there was insufficient follow-up and there was a confounding of instrumental and classical conditioning paradigms. These methodological flaws were also apparent to critical reviewers of the day (e.g., English, 1929; Valentine, 1930) and surely to Watson and Rayner themselves... [I]t seems time, finally, to place the Watson and Rayner data in the category of 'interesting but uninterpretable results.'"
  from Harris, B. (1979). Whatever happened to Little Albert? American Psychologist, 34, 151-160.
• Here is the paper byBeck, Levinson and Irons (2009) in which Albert's identity and fate are reported. And here is the Fridlund, Beck, Goldie and Irons (2012) paper that suggests that the hydrocephalus condition that Albert / Douglas Merritte died of may have been present since birth, rendering him an inappropriate subject for this research in the first place.
• But see the identification of Albert as Douglas Merritte questioned in some back and forth arguments by Powell (2010), and by Reese (2010), and with a response from the original authors Beck Levinson and Irons (2010). Then Powell and others identified another candidate, William Albert Barger, as the real Albert in Powell, Digdon, Harris and Smithson (2014), and also questioned the evidence for any neurological impairment in Digdon, Powell and Harris (2014). You can decide which evidence seems more persuasive.
• Some notes on the intrigue surrounding John Watson: This is the fairly amazing story of John Watson's life outside academia, based on biographies by David Cohen and Kerry Buckley. It won't be on the exams, but you'll want to read it.

Quotes from William James on various topics

• The complete text of James's Principles Of Psychology (1890) is online and rewards random browsing. Some parts are dry or archaic, but you can't go long before finding something that feels modern, relevant, and insightful, and of course the prose is sparkling.
• Here's a decent introductory overview of it from that same History of Psychology web archive.

Crimson by Josip Novakovich is a moving and disturbing short story that features this intriguing passage -- an insight that is certainly knowledge of a sort, but not scientific knowledge: "Milan thought how strange it was that he should be held responsible for the past, three years ago, when he was conscripted and enslaved--when he wasn't even himself. 'We all have multiple personalities,' he said. 'One of us is the past, and another the future, and there's no present me. We are vacant right now--spaces through which the past and the future disagree.'" Knowledge comes in many varieties, and whether it's scientific, or poetic, or spiritual, or intuitive, or common-sense, etc., all of these are valid ways of knowing the world for different purposes and contexts. Science is not the be-all-and-end-all of knowledge, or the ultimate arbiter of what is real for all purposes, but is a specially constructed tool for uncovering certain kinds of facts about nature using certain agreed-upon types of evidence. If other kinds of facts are not amenable to that sort of investigation, it doesn't necessarily make them any less real.

• from In Defense of Naïve Reading, By ROBERT PIPPIN, October 10, 2010, 5:30 pm ( http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/in-defense-of-naive-reading/ ):
  Literature and the arts have a dimension unique in the academy, not shared by the objects studied, or "researched" by our scientific brethren. They invite or invoke, at a kind of "first level," an aesthetic experience that is by its nature resistant to restatement in more formalized, theoretical or generalizing language. This response can certainly be enriched by knowledge of context and history, but the objects express a first-person or subjective view of human concerns that is falsified if wholly transposed to a more "sideways on" or third person view. Indeed that is in a way the whole point of having the "arts."
  Likewise -- and this is a much more controversial thesis -- such works also can directly deliver a kind of practical knowledge and self-understanding not available from a third person or more general formulation of such knowledge. There is no reason to think that such knowledge -- exemplified in what Aristotle said about the practically wise man (the phronimos) or in what Pascal meant by the difference between l'esprit géometrique and l'esprit de finesse -- is any less knowledge because it cannot be so formalized or even taught as such. Call this a plea for a place for "naïve" reading, teaching and writing -- an appreciation and discussion not mediated by a theoretical research question recognizable as such by the modern academy.
  

Here are a couple of ways to get things really wrong, in viewing the relationship between science and religion:

• Cognitive Psychologist Stephen Pinker argues in a commentary piece in Newsweek magazine that modern neuroscience has disproved the existence of the soul; responses from readers point out that no such scientific disproof is possible. Not stated explicitly is the fact that science is not the kind of inquiry that could ever be used to answer questions about the existence of souls or of God, and that deciding such questions is a matter of personal commitment that might then steer the type of inquiry you choose to pursue. See Lewontin's quote on materialism in science for a voice of reason.
• From a book on the "debate" over Intelligent Design: Intelligent Design is a euphemism for Biblical Creationism that atttempts to portray itself as science by supposing the "evidence" of the complexity of life leaves no possibility for its explanation in material terms, and that instead there must be a "designer" behind all of the complexity. That may sound like a plausible claim to some, but it's not a scientific one, since science only allows certain kinds of evidence and procedures to be used; science certainly doesn't throw up its hands and give up, and say "this is beyond us, so it all must have just been made by someone." If it all WAS made by someone, SCIENCE WILL NEVER BE ABLE TO DISCOVER THAT FACT, and will keep banging its head against the evidence FOREVER, in a noble failed attempt to stick to its principles. But the issue is far from settled, and probably never will be. In this excerpt, Intelligent Design proponent Michael Behe (under "Conclusion") explicitly claims that science is not a game with arbitrary rules, when in fact that's exactly what it is -- well, not arbitrary rules, but rules nonetheless, which exclude the kind of conclusion Behe wants to force. Break those rules, and it's no longer science that you're doing. Then there are a few pages by noted philosopher of religion Alvin Plantinga, who tries to undermine those rules of science (what he calls science's "methodological naturalism" or commitment to non-supernatural explanation), so you can get a taste of the style of argument; notice the footnote that I think shows the bankruptcy of his point of view: #31, which essentially says the thing for scientists to do is to try to solve problems for a while, then give up and say "God did it." Again, even if it's true that "God did it," that's NOT SCIENCE!
• A reflection on changing the meaning of words like "science," or in this passage, the word "art." It's from the play Travesties by Tom Stoppard (author of things you've probably heard of like Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead and Shakespeare In Love and one spectacular thing you should check out, Arcadia, a mere hundred page play that could change how you look at the world). I should note that in this excerpt the character Carr's point of view is hardly the final word on the matter, though it is the reason I've posted this link.

Notes On The Mind-Body Problem: I've summarized some information from Paul Churchland's Matter And Consciousness (Revised edition), and while there's a little more detail here than you need, it's better than the mere 1.5 pages (pp. 17-19) offered in Hergenhahn's Chapter 1. I've also added an outline and an explanation of exactly how Churchland's terminology differs from Hergenhahn's. (Depending on your browser, my nice numbered organization of the various positions might be very messed up, but you'll get the point.) PowerPoint slides on the Mind-Body Problem in text format

Chapter 2 on "The Mind-Body Problem" from Paul Churchland's Matter And Consciousness (Revised edition, 1988): In case you're very interested in these issues and want to read much more detailed descriptions and arguments than I've provided, this was my original source. The perspective called "Eliminative Materialism" is Churchland's own favorite, but I find it unpersuasive and not historically useful for our purposes so I omitted it from my outline. There's a notice about not disseminating this material but I figure I'm not posting it, only linking to someone else's post. That seems okay. But if you're interested, get the whole book, there's a lot more in it than just the mind-body problem.

Excerpt from 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology: Shattering Widespread Misconceptions about Human Behavior by Scott O. Lilienfeld, Steven Jay Lynn, John Ruscio, and Barry L. Beyerstein (2009): this is a really good book that I'd strongly recommend to anyone interested in psychology. The publisher has made Chapter 1 available on their website; see especially "Myth #2" on pp. 25-28 for the discussion of brain lateralization (right vs. left hemispheres) and split-brain patients, related to Roger Sperry's position on the mind-body problem which we identify as interactionist property dualism. The rest of the chapter is quite interesting too, as you'll find when you can't stop reading it.

Where Am I?: a philosophical article (by Daniel Dennett) in the form of a short story, that highlights the links between the mind-body problem and the idea of personal identity.

A brief statement of the strangeness of quantum physics without a lot of explanation, in case you just want to see what's so strange.

• Famous physicists' statements about quantum mechanics, just to make the point that it really is strange.
• The double-slit experiment as described in a pretty good Wikipedia article; you can skip over the more complicated sections like the "Classical wave-optics formulation" and the "Path-integral formulation" and still get the gist of what's going on.
• A digression on quantum physics (featuring former President Clinton's grand jury testimony). After appreciating the irony in the quotations, follow the link to the simulation of the "two-hole experiment," and when that says "to be continued," be sure to click on the little picture of Einstein that says "how do we know this is true?"
• A well-done popular exposition of some of the phenomena of special relativity and quantum mechanics, from Decoding the Universe by Charles Seife. The book demonstrates the relevance of Claude Shannon's mathematical information theory (also very relevant and influential in cognitive psychology) to describing the cosmos. That may sound intimidating but if you stick with this two-chapter discussion, you will follow it all, and then you'll probably be inclined to buy the whole excellent book! Or, if it gets too thick for you, skim a bit till you alight on another section that catches your attention. (For instance, this is one of the few reasonable popular accounts I've seen concerning the physics of time-travel.)
• A warning against the wanton misinterpretation of quantum physics, from How to Teach Physics to Your Dog by Chad Orzel. Like the rest of the book, it takes the form of an imaginary conversation between the author and his dog, so most of the examples have to do with dogs chasing squirrels or looking for treats. But it's surprisingly good, and mostly pretty easy to understand. This is an easy chapter because although it assumes you know some things that came earlier in the book, the only reason it cites them is to show that there are people out there talking gobbledygook and trying to pass it off as real science.
• Not Even Wrong is what scientists and mathematicians often say of something that is so devoid of sense that it's not worth serious discussion (following David Hume, actually -- see the last lines of this page). Here the phrase is used to describe the bologna-fest of a movie called "What The Bleep Do We Know?", whose web site I reluctantly link you to in hopes that you can spot its ridiculous features. The movie claims that quantum physics and contemporary neuropsychology support a new-age worldview in line with the teaching of J.Z. Knight, a woman whose body occasionally channels the spirit of the 35,000 year-old warrior spirit from Atlantis, "Ramtha" (who's not actually so clearly identified in the film -- you should google him/her though). If that sounds at all plausible to you, by all means pursue it with all your energies and devote your life to Ramtha... FYI, here are two basic points about quantum physics that the loony filmmakers completely ignore: 1) the theory applies to the smallest bits of matter at the subatomic level, and the strange phenomena that actually ARE part of the theory do not apply to physical events that we normally experience; and 2) although there are serious interpretations of quantum phenomena that suggest the consciousness of an observer or experiencer plays a role in converting unknowable potential events described only as probabilities into actual observable outcomes at the quantum level, no one has come close to suggesting that the observer has any effect on what those outcomes actually turn out to BE. The movie wants you to think that you can make anything happen in your life though, just by being aware of the possibilities. (In a less idiotic guise, that message might be helpful to some people, I suppose.)
• The filmmakers respond to their critics in this unintentionally hilarious "open letter to the media." They barely have a basic command of English grammar, never mind quantum mechanics. Sorry to be unkind but if they're going to flaunt their idiocy, I'll have to oblige them by pointing and laughing.
• Copenhagen, the play by Michael Frayn, is described here in Wikipedia, but there is no substitute for actually reading it (or seeing the film version starring Stephen Rea, of "V For Vendetta", and Daniel Craig, the current James Bond on screen). Finally someone who actually understands a bit about quantum mechanics applies it to human experience METAPHORICALLY, without getting all metaphysically insane! In particular, he makes use of complementarity (the need for alternate incompatible descriptions of the same event to capture it completely), uncertainty (the impossibility of pinning down all aspects of an event at once and having complete knowledge of it), and even the collapse of the quantum mechanical "wave function" (the active role of observation in deciding what an event actually was, instead of the traditional assumption that things happen and then observers can objectively record them). Frayn shows that the strangeness shouldn't be all that unfamiliar to us since we already see complementarity and uncertainty all around us, if we look for them the right way.

The double-slit experiment in quantum physics: painful as it is for me to admit, this clip from the terrible terrible stupid deceptive pseudo-documentary "Down The Rabbit Hole" (sequel to the equally stupid "What The Bleep Do We Know")... is actually a pretty good self-contained illustration of the famous paradoxical demonstration. Don't watch the rest of either of those movies, but do watch these five minutes.

Interjections, an animated clip from the Schoolhouse Rock series: when you're happy or sad or frightened or mad or excited or glad, those words may just be shorthand for the relation between your situation and your observable behaviors. (Here's the same song starting at the beginning.)

Two excerpts from Stephen Pinker's book How The Mind Works in which the Computational Theory of Mind is nicely described. Note that at one point, Pinker claims this theory is different from "the despised computer metaphor," which he suggests is the idea that the brain is exactly like a digital computer. But no one actually thinks that, and when people "despise" the computer metaphor, it actually is Pinker's own view that they mean. Pinker just wants to make it seem that no one could possibly have any reasonable objection to what he's saying. This is typical of Pinker, and part of the reason many people (including me) can't stand a lot of what he writes; another believer in the Computational Theory of Mind, the famous philosopher Jerry Fodor, found enough to disagree with in this book that he wrote his own book as a response, titled The Mind Doesn't Work That Way. These pages are an interesting read nonetheless.

ENIAC article in Wikipedia: a description of the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, commonly (though perhaps controversially) considered to be the first electronic computer. The general History Of Computing Hardware article is pretty interesting too, if you just want to see a long chronology of the ancestors of your PC.

The Humans Are Dead by Flight Of The Conchords, in which robots reflect on the fate of the humans they have vanquished and replaced. It's from the first episode of their HBO show where they film a video for the song with no budget for special effects.

A statue passes a dog's Turing test: watch as this dog finds the seated figure to be a passable imitation of a human, and tries to interact with it accordingly.

• "Computing Machinery and Intelligence": Turing's 1950 paper in which he first made the analogy between minds and computers and proposed the "imitation game" now known as the Turing Test. Note that toward the end he says the evidence for E.S.P. is overwhelming and as such poses a counterargument to his theory of thought. That was an embarrassing bit of gullibility on his part, because such evidence is non-existent. (His 1936 paper "On Computable Numbers," which introduced the Turing Machine, is also linked here, but it's not so readable.)
• Cartoon tributes to Alan Turing: the Turing machine; the Turing test; and another mentioning the Turing test
• An excerpt from a documentary describing Turing's fate: note this was filmed before his memorial existed. I appreciate the point made by the interviewee toward the end that it's always overly simplistic to assume a straightforward connection between a person's behavior and the supposed "reasons" for that behavior. See the full documentary here.
• Alan Turing's memorial -- note that it took almost half a century to appear.

Here are a few trenchant observations from philosopher John Searle about how dualism seems to remain viable not due to its inherent virtues, but due to materialism's failures to offer a convincing alternative. Note that his famous "Chinese Room" thought experiment is a demonstration of the computer metaphor's failure to account for knowledge and consciousness, and as such is therefore a critique of the materialist view called functionalism.

• From Consciousness and Language (2002) p. 4:
  Dualism makes the problem insoluble; materialism denies the existence of any phenomenon to study, and hence of any problem.
• From Mind: A Brief introduction (2004) p. 34:
  My guess is that dualism, in spite of being out of fashion, will not go away. Indeed in recent years dualism, at least property dualism, has been making something of a comeback, partly due to a renaissance of interest in consciousness. The insight that drives dualism is powerful. Here is the insight, at its most primitive: we all have real conscious experiences and we know that they are not the same sort of thing as the physical objects around us. This primitive insight can be given a more sophisticated formulation: the world consists almost entirely of physical particles and everything else is in some way an illusion (like colors and tastes) or a surface feature (like solidity and liquidity) that can be reduced to the behavior of the physical particles. At the level of molecular structure the table is not really solid. It is, as the physicist Eddington said, a cloud of molecules. It is just that from our point of view it seems solid. But at bottom the physical world consists entirely of microentities, the physical particles. However there is one exception. Consciousness is not just particles. In fact it is not particles at all. Whatever else it is, it is something "over and above" the particles. I believe this is the insight that drives contemporary property dualism...
  The history of materialism is fascinating, because though the materialists are convinced, with a quasi-religious faith, that their view must be right, they never seem to be able to formulate a version of it that they are completely satisfied with and that can be generally accepted by other philosophers, even by other materialists. I think this is because they are constantly running up against the fact that the different versions of materialism seem to leave out some essential mental feature of the universe, which we know, independently of our philosophical commitments, to exist. The features they generally leave out are consciousness and intentionality. The problem is to give a completely satisfying materialist account of the mind that does not end up denying the obvious fact that we all intrinsically have conscious states and intentional states.

PowerPoint slides on Philosophy of Science in text format A definition or characterization of "science" from Keith Stanovich's How To Think Straight About Psychology -- a book that is much more valuable and interesting than its title might suggest; this excerpt is from the 8th edition of 2007 and it's currently in its 10th edition. Outline of Logical Positivism: This is a very brief sketch of the philosophy of science known as Logical Positivism, which was very influential in the development of psychology in the first half of the 20th century. For the moment, all you need focus on is the end of the first section where Logical Positivism, Popper, and Kuhn are mentioned, and the second section titled "A Brief Outline of Logical Positivism." Diagram of the logical positivist view of science from Leahey's History Of Psychology. Diagram of Kuhn's view of revolutionary change in science from Leahey's History Of Psychology.

Science Doesn't Work the Way You Might Think -- Not even for Einstein, by Thomas Levenson in The Atlantic: this short article describes the discovery and un-discovery of the planet Vulcan (nearer to the Sun than Mercury) which was believed to be a planet for the second half of the 19th century, due to the implications of Newtownian physics and people's inclination to observe what their theories tell them they should observe -- which is of course a Kuhnian notion.

Randy Hickey from My Name Is Earl distills the essence of Kuhn's concept of the paradigm as disciplinary matrix.

A somewhat racy illustration of the effects of relative motion on different observers' perceptions of time in special relativity

Here's a segment from the 3/30/15 PBS NewsHour (mainly the portion from about 2:15 to 5:30) featuring some psychology research on implicit racism, using the Implicit Associations Test, Eye Tracking, and Event Related Potentials measured from the brain on the surface of the scalp: watch the video or read the transcript. This is especially relevant to the topic of Kuhnian paradigms since it's a great example of how standard experimental methods like reaction time, eye tracking, and ERP measures can be used more generally as ways of getting at issues in (for instance) social psychology, when none of them were developed with that specific goal in mind. A productive method can be very generally applied within a field.

• If you're not familiar with the implicit racism concept, this describes it briefly: Wikipedia on Implicit Stereotypes
  
• The world is relying on a flawed psychological test to fight racism: a popular-science article from Quartz.com highlighting the flaws in the Implicit Association Test or "IAT", which includes a link to a meta-analysis (a broad statistical review of research findings) co-authored by former UConn Psychology professor Hart Blanton.

A discussion of the basis of trust in science: In this March 25, 2012 segment from the MSNBC program "UP with Chris Hayes" (5:57 to 10:10 is the relevant part) several panelists address a paradox: science says that we should believe its claims based on evidence, but that evidence is usually inaccessible to non-scientists, which leaves them in a position of having to trust the scientists, which in turn leads to the question of how we decide whom to trust. The panel includes psychologist Stephen Pinker, science journalist Robert Wright, and evolutionary biologist / atheist insult comic Richard Dawkins. (Not to slight the two women -- I'm unfamiliar with them but their contributions are illuminating too.) The specific issue under discussion was the question of how private belief might enter into the public sphere in terms of politicians' attitudes about evolution or climate change, especially if they're influenced by private religious convictions. It also gets at the idea that maybe, as Wright says, if you want to supplant religious doctrine with a scientific perspective as in the case of evolution or climate change, maybe it's better not to mock and insult religious people as Dawkins explicitly does. It's not a definitive or even essential discussion by any means but if you're interested in seeing the rest of it, here's the first part.

Historians Admit To Inventing Ancient Greeks: "We were young and trying to advance our careers, so we just started making things up: Homer, Aristotle, Socrates, Hippocrates, the lever and fulcrum, rhetoric, ethics, all the different kinds of columns -- everything... Way more stuff than any one civilization could have come up with, obviously."

PowerPoint slides from Thales to Democritus in text format.

Heisenberg on Heraclitus: a short paragraph in which one of the founders of quantum mechanics points out the analogy between Heraclitus's views and contemporary physics. From Werner Heisenberg (1958), Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science.

Das Rad (The Wheel): a 2003 Oscar nominee for best animated short film; its relation to Heraclitus's philosophy will be fairly clear.

• Shelley's poem Ozymandias in Wikipedia; it's a famous depiction of the arrogance of thinking you'll be around forever. You can read the whole article if you're interested, but at least read the poem. Interestingly the article also includes a parallel poem by a friend of Shelley's who was engaged in a friendly competition to tell the same story; his isn't as good, but it's not bad.
• Two passages from George Saunders's 2017 novel Lincoln In The Bardo, imagining a grief-stricken Abraham Lincoln's thoughts on the death of his third son Willie at age 11 in February 1862, less than a year into the Civil War.
• The Wheel And The Maypole, XTC's final song from their final album, finds impermanence (of relationships, people, civilization, the entire universe) to be a freeing and even joyful thought, in an 80's-pop / ancient-pagan-ritual sort of way. (Kind of a fun fan-made video here.)

A concise statement on Parmenides from W.K.C.Guthrie (1950), The Greek philosophers from Thales to Aristotle.

Steve Martin reflects on philosophy and religion and other stuff, c. 1977.

Some Pythagoras links, for those who would be Pythagoreans if they could:

• Pythagoras in the BBC production "The Story Of 1", a program in which Terry Jones of Monty Python fame recounts the history of numbers - kind of silly as you'll see, but it makes its points accurately.
• On Pi and Pythagoras: my explanation of why irrational numbers like pi were so unsettling to Pythagoras.
• Pythagoras on Wikipedia
• Pythagoras in the University Of St. Andrews History Of Mathematics Archive
• Pythagoras in a history of mathematics page at Texas A&M
• Leonardo DaVinci's drawing called the Vitruvian Man in Wikipedia; notice that Pythagoras is not mentioned at all, but the inspiration for the drawing and the architecture is clearly Pythagorean in spirit.
• Monument to Pythagoras in the harbor of Pythagoreio (formerly Tigani until 1955) on the Greek island of Samos.
• A Mathematician's Lament, linked at this blog, is really important to read (at least the beginning of it) if you DON'T like math or possibly even fear it, and can't see why Pythagoras or anyone else would ever become fascinated by it. Basically this article explains that you've been damaged by our educational system. If you're interested, there's discussion of the essay here.

Shakespeare's famous lines from The Merchant Of Venice about the Pythagorean "music of the spheres", which is hidden from us while our souls are imprisoned in our earthly bodies.

Hunting the Hidden Dimension, an episode of the PBS series NOVA that explores the mathematics and applications of fractals in a very accessible and interesting way. The segment from 8:02 to 10:10 is a nice capsule summary of how fractals describe nature differently than traditional mathematics.

Arcadia, Tom Stoppard's play as described in Wikipedia. If you choose, you can read this entire synopsis including details of the plot, and it will not ruin the experience of reading the actual play -- which, I remind you, is quite a fast read and is available at libraries and could change how you look at the world. But if the synopsis bores you, don't let that put you off. You liked Shakespeare In Love, didn't you? Same author. Also Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and Travesties, mentioned above.

• Also consider this quite smart essay published on the eve of the play's first major revival in 1999 when it had firmly established itself: Is Tom Stoppard's Arcadia the greatest play of our age?.

A short excerpt from Jamie James's The Music Of The Spheres in which he describes the Pythagorean context for Beethoven's revolutionary musical achievement. Also of interest on the scientific heritage of Pythagoras's view of music:

• Temperament by Stuart Isacoff, a very entertaining and understandable description of the way musical ratios and intervals changed from Pythagoras to the Scientific Revolution and after.
• Measure for Measure: A Musical History of Science by Thomas Levenson, which traces the intriguing connections and mutual influences between science and music over the centuries.

Greek Philosophy through Aristotle, from Thomas Leahey's textbook on the history of psychology. It's a little more sophisticated than Hergenhahn's treatment so it may make for interesting reading; you don't have to study from it though!

Laughing Philosopher / Weeping Philosopher, by John Heath-Stubbs: Those are the traditional nicknames of Democritus and Heraclitus, referring to their respective attitudes toward their shared acknowledgement of the impermanence of the world. This poem is inspired by that difference, as described by Montaigne: "Democritus and Heraclitus were both philosophers; the former, finding our human circumstances so vain and ridiculous, never went out without a laughing or mocking look on his face: Heraclitus, feeling pity and compassion for these same circumstances of ours, wore an expression which was always sad, his eyes full of tears." (Montaigne, Essays, c. 1580)

Socrates is portrayed here in an excerpt from Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter by Thomas Cahill. In just a few fun pages you get a character sketch, an example of his method of questioning (and why it was annoying), some mention of the nature of Plato's rendering of Socrates, and a note on his appeal to early Christianity due to the similiarities between him and Jesus.

• The Death Of Socrates as portrayed by Plato in his dialogue called Phaedo. The ending is the relevant portion, beginning around where it reads: "We will do our best, said Crito. But in what way would you have us bury you?" Someday you should probably get around to reading the whole thing, along with the first two dialogues in the sequence, Apology (the trial of Socrates) and Crito (Socrates in prison). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVc8jwYexjE
• The Death Of Socrates as portrayed by Steve Martin in a 1980 TV special, "Comedy Is Not Pretty." It's pretty great.

My Day With The Sophists: Not really, but given the description of the Sophists I offer in class, this seems almost appropriate. What it really is, is my account of my day of jury duty back in September 2000, which I wrote down because a bunch of friends kept asking me to tell them about it. On re-reading it, I wonder whether I'm actually more of a sophist than the attorneys. (Please keep in mind what a nice person I am, so that you're not annoyed that I come across as so obnoxious, elitist, and generally snarky.) This needs a serious re-write, having originated as an off-the-cuff email message, but I'm just not inclined to do it -- so it remains a little embarrassing, but makes the point okay.

PowerPoint slides from the Sophists to Aristotle in text format.

Examples of Plato's idealism in psychology as described in class.

Some excerpts from Plato's Dialogues: They're very readable even in this classic translation from the 19th century. "Meno" features the slave boy demonstrating that he knows the Pythagorean Theorem (this version with illustrations may be easier to follow); Book VI of "Republic" describes the Divided Line; Book VII contains the Allegory Of The Cave. The excerpt from "Symposium" is Plato's famous discussion of the nature of love.

• The song "No One Knows My Plan" by They Might Be Giants includes these lines:
  When I made a shadow on my window shade
  They called the police and testified
  But they're like the people chained up in the cave
  In the allegory of the people in the cave by the Greek guy
  
• (Here's the recording where I spliced in my band for that line and the guitar solo.)
• XKCD takes the cave allegory literally though I suppose this actually has more to do with Descartes's epistemology than Platos's.
• Just for kicks, compare the excerpt from the Symposium with this excerpt from Hedwig And The Angry Inch (and for a limited time only, check out this video clip).
• If, like most people, you love the soundtrack to that movie, you can hear the whole Hedwig soundtrack here; and since it started out as an off-Broadway show, the album of the stage version is also pretty great, and slightly different so worth a listen just for variety.

Ode On A Grecian Urn, by John Keats: This poem is a meditation on a very old Greek urn (a vase) decorated with pictures of life at the time it was made. It captures the Platonic theme of abstract eternal existence, of music and love for instance (note especially the second stanza), as well as Plato's notion of "The Good" (in the last few lines).

The Wreck Of The John B is the 1958 popular recording of the folk song, performed by The Kingston Trio, and it does a decent job of using the Pythagorean basics to fill out a pleasant tune. Compare that to the much more famous recording by the Beach Boys called Sloop John B for a closer approach to a sort of Platonic ideal, in terms of building a richer, more exciting arrangement gradually, out of parts that are very well integrated. Notice the initial flute and bells, and the strange entry of the bass, and the later removal of the instruments to expose the vocals for a climactic phrase. It may sound dated because the equipment and techniques were cutting edge but it was 1966 after all. Hopefully you can hear past that to the underlying musical vision.

• Then if you want a more recent example of a Platonic ideal of a pop song, I recommend this.

The School Of Athens, a fresco in the Vatican by Renaissance painter Raphael. This link helpfully allows you to click on the figures and identify them, but you may find other sites that additionally explain the significance of the figures' poses and activities. For instance, you will note the central positions of Plato, gesturing toward the heavens and the realm of the abstract ideal forms, and Aristotle, gesturing toward the natural world surrounding us which reveals itself to the careful observer. Maybe more important, though, is that links are provided to the major works of many of these philosophers so if you're interested, you can just click away.

"Who died and left Aristotle in charge of ethics?" From the TV show "The Good Place" which has a lot of good philosophy like this.

This Too Shall Pass, a music video by OK Go which nicely illustrates Aristotle's concept of "efficient cause". There's also a live version that's worth watching (though I can't think of any obvious Aristotelian connection, if that's what you look for in a video.)

B.F.Skinner lecture excerpt 1 and B.F.Skinner lecture excerpt 2 in which he explicitly denies that the cause of behavior is to be found in the immediately preceding events and instead lies in the consequences or following events.

Excerpt from the film of The Name Of The Rose: I let this clip drag on too long so it's a large file, but once the bad monk catches on fire you can turn it off. Don't watch it if you plan to see the whole movie, or read the book.

• Tom Carson's article on The Simpsons: This 1999 column from Esquire Magazine is a good account of why the best social criticism on TV comes in the form of animated shows, and it may give you an inkling of what Western Civilization lost when we lost Aristotle's Poetics of Comedy (see Umberto Eco, The Name Of The Rose, pp. 567-583 paperback; pp. 466-479 hardcover). What if the comedic had been a recognized mode of formal discourse all these millenia? In some sense it has, of course, but those monks in the novel make some good arguments about how things might have turned out. (In this article, the most relevant section starts with the phrase "But only compared with other animated shows...")

Excerpt from Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife by Mary Roach: a few subtly hilarious pages that take us through the history of scientific thought about how the soul gets into the body, from Aristotle to Descartes -- including the story of how sperm and egg were discovered when the first microscopes were turned toward... well, you know. Anything that begins, "There's a very good chance you underestimate the historic import of the sea urchin" is clearly right up my alley, and hopefully yours too. (Sorry the excerpt just leaves off... If you find this selection fun, don't go get the book -- instead, first read her debut Stiff about things that are done with human cadavers, which is high on my list of the most interesting and funniest things I've ever read.)

• Here's another excerpt from Spook that just happens to be online, in case you like it. It'll fill you in on that bit of folklore that says the soul weighs 21 grams since that's the weight you lose at the moment of death. (Hey, in case you don't read this, let me just add: that's not actually true!)

PowerPoint slides on epistemology: These are slightly more current than the Epistemology web page that summarizes them. The web page version, though, may be a useful reference for some of the technical terms that come up in lecture, as well as for the timeline along the top. NOTE: the "Rationalism vs. Empiricism" section lists five questions that distinguish the two approaches, and the last three of those are not specifically intended for PSYC 3100 -- so if you find them mystifying you can ignore them. The last of them may describe some familiar comparisons though.

Three ways Hume was really influential in psychology were: Hume said simple ideas could be built up into complex ideas through some simple laws of association, instead of depending on the mind playing an active role with its unexplained homunculus abilities. PDP models of information processing are based on applying a few generic rules to a large collection of simple processing units instead of depending on a program that executes an explicit set of instructions. Hume said all knowledge could be reduced to either matters of fact or observation (synthetic statements) or matters of the relations among ideas (analytic statements), and anything else didn't count as knowledge at all. Logical positivism was the philosophy of science in the 20th century that took that as its starting point and said science was the model for all knowledge; it was the most influential philosophy underlying behaviorism, affecting the kinds of theories that were developed and favoring the neglect of any role for the mind. Hume said that cause and effect couldn't be perceived with the senses and were merely the result of observing repeated contiguity between successive events, along with the unjustifiable assumption that the future will be like the past; therefore the best attitude toward science would be to stick to cataloging the observations and their typical sequences without proposing any underlying causal explanations of why things happen. The most influential behaviorist, B.F. Skinner, adopted much the same attitude by arguing against complicated theorizing in terms of physiology or cognition or other unobservable variables, and instead just cataloging the observed relationships between stimuli, responses, and reinforcements and punishments.

David Hume on causation, from An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) -- in case you want to see where questions about causality all began. (See also the famous conclusion.)

Outline of Logical Positivism: This is a very brief sketch of the philosophy of science known as Logical Positivism, which was very influential in the development of psychology in the first half of the 20th century. Note the concluding segment, an excerpt from the first English-language manifesto of logical positivism, in which Hume's influence is explicitly acknowledged. The diagram of the logical positivist view of science cited above may be useful to note here as well.

Recording of brief lecture on epistemology (46 minutes, 21MB) to supplement readings on Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant