Wundt’s contribution to folk psychology is perhaps the aspect of Wundt that has been taken least seriously. Little or no use has been made of this term in academic psychology. One exception is Jerome Bruner, but he believed that his own use of folk psychology referred to something completely different from Wundt’s use of it. The purpose of this chapter is to explore what content Wundt attributed to the concept of folk psychology. The assumption is that there must be some kind of underlying connection in everything Wundt wrote, which is why it is important to find out how folk psychology fits into Wundt’s experimental psychology projects. Various texts from different periods in Wundt’s writing are examined in order to explore this topic. The most crucial aspect was to find an early text by Wundt that could say something about this relationship. The introductory chapter to Beiträge zur Theorie der Sinneswahrnehmung (Contributions to the Theory of Sensory Perception), a publication from 1862, is such a text. In addition, it is important to see what he writes there in light of his major ten-volume work on folk psychology. Its subtitle summarizes the main message of this work: An Inquiry into the Laws of the Development of Language, Myths, and Customs. The findings of this analysis show that, as early as 1862, Wundt had a clear idea that folk psychology cannot be understood without seeing it in the context of experimental psychology. Folk psychology has an overarching perspective that must meet the bottom-up perspective of experimental psychology. In both cases, it is about investigating the connection between perception and imagination. While experimental psychology can reveal the mental conditions at a micro level, folk psychology can reveal the social anchoring of these mental conditions, that is, at a macro level. In order to realize the latter, Wundt assumes that folk psychology makes use of the entire repertoire of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. The prerequisite is, however, that a psychological problem is constantly being pursued, and in folk psychology, this will be to find out about the process behind the social anchoring of our ideas.

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The Cultural Psychology of Wilhelm Wundt

  • Sven Hroar Klempe

摘要

Wundt’s contribution to folk psychology is perhaps the aspect of Wundt that has been taken least seriously. Little or no use has been made of this term in academic psychology. One exception is Jerome Bruner, but he believed that his own use of folk psychology referred to something completely different from Wundt’s use of it. The purpose of this chapter is to explore what content Wundt attributed to the concept of folk psychology. The assumption is that there must be some kind of underlying connection in everything Wundt wrote, which is why it is important to find out how folk psychology fits into Wundt’s experimental psychology projects. Various texts from different periods in Wundt’s writing are examined in order to explore this topic. The most crucial aspect was to find an early text by Wundt that could say something about this relationship. The introductory chapter to Beiträge zur Theorie der Sinneswahrnehmung (Contributions to the Theory of Sensory Perception), a publication from 1862, is such a text. In addition, it is important to see what he writes there in light of his major ten-volume work on folk psychology. Its subtitle summarizes the main message of this work: An Inquiry into the Laws of the Development of Language, Myths, and Customs. The findings of this analysis show that, as early as 1862, Wundt had a clear idea that folk psychology cannot be understood without seeing it in the context of experimental psychology. Folk psychology has an overarching perspective that must meet the bottom-up perspective of experimental psychology. In both cases, it is about investigating the connection between perception and imagination. While experimental psychology can reveal the mental conditions at a micro level, folk psychology can reveal the social anchoring of these mental conditions, that is, at a macro level. In order to realize the latter, Wundt assumes that folk psychology makes use of the entire repertoire of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. The prerequisite is, however, that a psychological problem is constantly being pursued, and in folk psychology, this will be to find out about the process behind the social anchoring of our ideas.