There are parts in his lecture where he references someone to make his point but i can’t quite make out the name enough to google it. For example in lecture 1 he mentions a “Karl Brulla who had influence on Karl Popper” but I have no idea how to spell that name.
I tried to find Mr. ‘Brulla’ (probably 'Brüle) with my limited knowledge of German phoenetics, and no luck.
Karl Bühler.
Karl Bühler.
Hah! I can’t believe I didn’t make the connexion betwixt the name and Popper. From here, a bit in Karl Bühler:
According to Eschbach, Karl Buhler’s efforts to found a new psychology began with the insight that the two great paradigms of psychology, the Aristotelian and the Cartesian, failed because of systematically false assumptions. One is based on religious ideas about a soul, the other on the assumption that man is a machine. Buhler proposed a number of principles which he called "maxims of life-research". These defined his research program.
- The situational model of action, emphasising that the individual is not passive but participates in the formation of the environment. “For this reason it is not possible to proceed on the basis of sense data, images, feelings, reflexes or the like; this basis does not make it possible to undersand the meaningful behaviour of the individual”. This case was made later by Hebb (The Organization of Behavior, 1948), a work that was regarded as path-breaking. The “meaningful behaviour of the individual” has the ring of the Austrian school of economics, and Buhler drew a further analogy with the marketplace, speaking of a balance of supply and demand in psychological processes.
To put it bluntly, there are markets in the psychophysical system of the acting individual, and there is a specific class of experiences in which this measuring and evaluating becomes evident.
Actions are oriented in relation to space and time. Temporal considerations include the daily rhythm of sleeping and waking, and the longer-term activity of planning. In the US Buhler wrote on various aspects of space and time in papers like “The skywise and neighbourwise navigation of ants and bees” and “Human orientation at a distance”. He also studied the migration of birds and a described a series of studies under the title “The clocks of living beings”.
The inventiveness of the acting individual and creative behaviour. Buhler emphasised the intimate relationship of psychology with biology and medicine on one side (the science of men and animals) and with the human and social sciences on the other side, including custom, law, art and religion.
The transcendence of individualism that is manifest in procreation and the changes in behaviour that ensue to raise the young.
The transcendence of individualism that is required for life in a community.
The problem of form, noted by Aristotle in antiqity and taken up as the conceptual core of Gestalt psychology. Eschach claims that Buhler rejected both the historical and the modern Gestalt-theoretical solution to the problem of form, and demanded a renewed treatment of the foundations of the task.
The challenge of “significative exchange” that is to say, the use of language, especially in its higher forms which makes it possible to have community life and especially the life of an intellectual community.
Perfect! Thank you