Naming the Mind

by Kurt Danzinger

Kurt Danzinger is an academic who focuses on the history of psychology. Naming the Mind is a history of how psychological terms came to be. We take these terms like “intelligence”, “motivation” and “perception” for granted without considering the context and assumtpions contained within these terms’ definitions.

Implicit Asumptions

Psychological “traits” rely on implicit assumptions that do not apply universally. The meaning of psychological terms are based on convention and discourse; they are not representative of “non-textual phenomena”. In all cases is a gap between the definitions and the actual phenomena. Psychologists try to fit their research to these popular pre-defined categories (e.g. attitude, intelligence, motivation). The categories we have today (and ultimately any categories at all) are not natural divisions in how the human mind operates.

More generally, ethnopsychological studies have produced a mass of converging evidence on the non-universality of some basic distinctions that form the conceptual skeleton for our own conventions of psychological classification. One of these distinctions amounting to an opposition is that between what belongs inside the individual and what belongs to a social sphere entirely outside the individual.

Producing a history of ‘motivational psychology’, for example, is an excellent way of side-stepping the historicity of the category of motivation itself. The real existence, independently of any discourse, of natural divisions between motivational and other phenomena is assumed from the outset, and all that remains is the reconstruction of some historical material to fit in with this division.

There is a distinction, often ignored by practitioners, between the language used to describe a particular set of phenomena and the phenomena themselves.

The Self

The idea of the self was developed by John Locke, separating consciousness from the actions and experiences from an individual. The separate, empirical self led to the change in the measurement and understanding of all other parts of the mind. The empirical self was not immediately accepted. In conflict with the later Romanticist approach to viewing the mind, perception (empirical, objective) and emotion (romantic, subjective) ended up becoming separated as concepts.

Locke had invented a means of describing what was then a new way of experiencing the world, that is, separating the sense of self from the experience of one’s inner and outer actions. In this world one never just lives or acts; one is always ‘conscious’ of one’s self living and acting. The self is now a distinct, this-worldly entity, a view which was at first widely regarded as misguided and rather shocking.

In subsequent Anglo-Saxon literature Locke’s conception became part of a taken for granted framework for understanding the nature of the self. This conception may be characterized as empiricist because the self is regarded as an object that can be empirically known and studied, much like any other object.

As this distinction crystallized, the terms Empfindung (sensation) and Gefuhl (feeling) took on their modern psychological meaning. In the nineteenth century an analogous process occurred in English. Prior to this, ‘feeling’ had referred to any mental state (see note 5); now it took on the subjective colouring which placed it in the proximity of ‘emotion’.

Development of terms

Development of psychological terms is driven by cultural context, not empirical accuracy. The term “intelligence” was originally developed in place of reason to avoid attributing reason to non-humans. Distinctions from other existing terms plays a role in the development of terms’ meanings.

A new set of categories was developed for the description of this human nature, which, one is not surprised to discover, would have been rather well adapted to life as a man of property in eighteenth-century Britain.

The tenacity with which the basis for the modern instinct intelligence distinction was adhered to in the twentieth century, even in the face of awkward empirical observations, makes one suspect that this basis owes more to the culturally sanctioned value of individual flexibility than it does to the demands of scientific work.

Psychological categories have a political dimension because they are not purely descriptive but also normative. Adopting a particular classification of psychological phenomena, and implicitly rejecting a myriad possible alternative classifications, means establishing a certain form for the recognition of human conduct and human individuality.

20th Century Context

The development of the field of psychology reflects the 20th century need for legibility and mass social selection. Industrialisation at the turn of the 20th century led to systematisation of education and an increased focus on intelligence as a way to ascribe success / failure away from the system itself and on to the individuals within it. Danzinger identifies a general pattern of applying new psychological ideas to education, then broadening them to adults. This includes terms like “intelligence”, “personality”, and “motivation”.

Personality and motivation were 20th century inter-war constructs to increase the legitimacy of scientific psychology. Personality came to be used as a category for social selection, covering all non-intelligence aspects of behaviour. Intelligence alone was not predictive enough of education / work performance. It originated as a medical entity in France. Motivation came from greater involvement of psychologists in “solving” real problems in education and industry (i.e. how can we get our children / employees to be more productive?).

Once educationists had come to conceptualize some of their problems in terms of the category of ‘classroom motivation, there was a potential market for psychological principles and techniques labelled as pertaining to this category

But the institutional demand for rationalized, impersonal methods of social selection on a mass scale continued undiminished. The result was a scramble to invent and apply techniques for the assessment of ‘non-intellectual traits’. Many of the new instruments did not survive for long, but gradually a few came to dominate the field. In any case, a mass of data accumulated that could not easily be accommodated within any of the existing subdivisions of the discipline. The need for a label that would be less cumbersome than ‘non-intellectual trait testing’ became obvious.

A variable constitutes ‘a distinct item with a unitary qualitative make-up’ (Blumer, 1956: 688), but the items that are important in the meaningful world of human action are neither clearly distinct from one another, nor do they remain qualitatively unchanged, irrespective of context.

Measuring psychological traits

Conventional measuring of psychological traits ignores implicit assumptions within the measurement methods. The main assumption made by the stimulus-response is that the lab was the place for investigating psychological phenomena. Highly patterned lab interactions do not closely map on real social situations.

Psychological experiments involving human subjects are of course social situations that require the highly patterned interaction of the participants (Danziger, 1990a). Without the experimenter’s authority (an intrinsically social concept), or without verbally transmitted understandings among human agents, there would be no experiment. But in the language of stimulus and response such features became invisible. All that was supposedly going on was that the experimental subject reacted to stimuli. In this way the fiction that there was no essential difference between psychological experiments and experiments in the natural sciences could be maintained

In the social sciences the command to look for variables was taken to mean that phenomena ought to be investigated in terms of their variation in Psychology, typically, inter-individual variation. Had physicists proceeded like this they would have attempted differences among a variety of falling bodies, or the differences among a study the variety of warm bodies. Fortunately, this was not their approach, for had it been, it is highly improbable that they would ever have arrived at the law of gravity or the principles of thermodynamics.