Origins of Modern Science & Early Psychology

Science is a new way to gain knowledge, starting in the early modern period.
Francis Bacon: called the father of science; believed knowledge comes from experience (empiricism), not just thinking.
Process: look at many individual things
- find patterns
- form general rules; aims to make life better with practical knowledge.
Science goals: describe things, explain how they work, predict what will happen, and control nature; this is also a goal in psychology (describe, explain, predict, control).
Bacon warned against personal biases (idols) that make objective study hard.

Empiricism: knowledge comes from what we sense; try to avoid existing ideas.
Idols (biases): Bacon's terms for things that can twist our observations (like the human mind, language, or what we already believe).
Goal: reduce personal views to find the truth.

Descartes: started modern Western philosophy; believed in reasoning.
Cartesian doubt: question everything unless it's absolutely certain.
"I think, therefore I am": a basic truth he found for building knowledge.
Mind-body dualism: said there are two separate parts – the mind (non-physical) and the body (physical).
Mind-body interaction: believed mind and body affect each other; struggled to explain how a non-physical mind could impact a physical body (suggested the pineal gland but had no clear answer).

Isaac Newton set up the rules for the scientific method in his book Principia.
Main ideas of Newtonian science:
- Don't use divine power to explain nature; God created the universe but doesn't interfere regularly.
- The physical world follows natural laws with no exceptions; these laws are constant and apply everywhere.
- Don't explain things by their purpose (teleological); explain by what caused them from behind.
- Explanations should be as simple as possible (Occam's razor).
- Just describing or classifying isn't explaining; you need to show how things work (causal mechanisms).
Result: the "clockwork universe" – the universe works like a machine; early science focused on determinism (everything is caused) and materialism (everything is physical).

British empiricists (16th–18th centuries) combined empiricism with science: knowledge comes from experience.
John Locke: said the mind at birth is a blank slate (tabula rasa); we have no inborn ideas; all we know comes from experience.
Simple ideas and complex ideas; complex ideas are made by connecting simple ideas.
Association: the way simple ideas link to form complex ones (an early idea of how the mind combines thoughts).
Focused on the mind as something that passively gets sensations, then forms ideas by thinking and linking them.

Charles Darwin: explained how evolution works through natural selection.
Different individuals exist within a species; the environment favors traits that help survival and reproduction; these helpful traits become more common over time.
Alfred Russel Wallace also thought of natural selection; Darwin published The Origin of Species after much thought due to religious debate.
Big impact on beliefs: species change over time; humans are connected to other life forms; mind and body are continuous across all life.
Effect on psychology: led to comparing animals and humans to understand people; started functionalism; later led to evolutionary psychology (how evolution shapes our thinking and brain).

Leipzig University: where psychology became its own field.
Wundt opened the first psychology lab; many of his students then started labs globally.
Two parts of psychology he studied:
- Experimental psychology: focused on basic mental processes (like senses, how we see, reaction time, attention); aimed to be a lab science.
- Völkerpsychologie (folk psychology): studied complex mental processes (like language, social behavior, development) using methods beyond the lab.
Experimental introspection: carefully observing and reporting one's own thoughts and feelings under controlled conditions.
Complex mental processes: social and cultural aspects studied using case studies, watching people naturally, and looking at history and culture.
Cultural products: language, art, laws, customs show group psychology; comparing cultures reveals common and different traits.
Approach: psychology should be a science like physics/chemistry; focused on consciousness; introspection tried to be scientific but wasn't objective enough, leading to behaviorism.
Legacy: Wundt’s students spread psychological labs everywhere; psychology began as a science.

Psychology now studies behavior and mental processes, moving from introspection to objective measurements.
Shift: from culture-based studies to focusing on tests, measurements, and behavior data.
Cultural psychology: came back in the late 20th century, bringing back Wundt's folk psychology ideas and showing how culture shapes our minds and behavior.
The early focus on consciousness and introspection changed into modern methods, including experiments, surveys, natural observation, and cross-cultural research.