What is ‘Psychology’?
Scientific study of mind and behaviour
What is ‘Mind’?
Private inner experience of perceptions, thoughts, memories, and feelings
What is ‘Behaviour’?
Observable actions of human beings and nonhuman animals
Who was René Descartes?
- Argued for dualism of mind and body
- Dualism: The mind and body are fundamentally different things
Who was Thomas Hobbes?
- Argued that the mind is what the brain does
- Philosophical Materialism: All mental phenomena are reducible to physical phenomena
Who was John Locke?
- Argued that there is a real-world
- Philosophical Realism: Perceptions of the physical world are produced entirely by information from the sensory organs.
Who was Immanuel Kant?
- Suggested that Locke’s theory was too simplistic
- Philosophical Idealism: Perceptions of physical world are brain’s interpretation for sensory organ information
What is ‘Philosophical Empiricism’?
The view that all knowledge is acquired through
experience
What is ‘Philosophical Nativism’?
The view that some knowledge is innate
rather than acquired
Who was Hermann von Helmholtz?
Studied human reaction time; estimated the length of nerve impulse
