The mind is that which thinks, feels, perceives, imagines, remembers, and wills. The totality of mental phenomena, it includes both conscious processes, through which an individual is aware of external and internal circumstances, and unconscious processes, which can influence an individual without intention or awareness. Traditionally, minds were often conceived as separate entities that can exist on their own but are more commonly understood as capacities of material brains in the contemporary discourse. The mind plays a central role in most aspects of human life but its exact nature is disputed. Some characterizations focus on internal aspects, saying that the mind is private and transforms information. Others stress its relation to outward conduct, understanding mental phenomena as dispositions to engage in observable behavior.
Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Its subject matter includes the behavior of humans and nonhumans, both conscious and unconscious phenomena, and mental processes such as thoughts, feelings, and motives. Psychology is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries between the natural and social sciences. Biological psychologists seek an understanding of the emergent properties of brains, linking the discipline to neuroscience. As social scientists, psychologists aim to understand the behavior of individuals and groups.
Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt was a German physiologist, philosopher, and professor, one of the fathers of modern psychology. Wundt, who distinguished psychology as a science from philosophy and biology, was the first person to call himself a psychologist.
In their most common sense, the terms thought and thinking refer to cognitive processes that can happen independently of sensory stimulation. Their most paradigmatic forms are judging, reasoning, concept formation, problem solving, and deliberation. But other mental processes, like considering an idea, memory, or imagination, are also often included. These processes can happen internally independent of the sensory organs, unlike perception. But when understood in the widest sense, any mental event may be understood as a form of thinking, including perception and unconscious mental processes. In a slightly different sense, the term thought refers not to the mental processes themselves but to mental states or systems of ideas brought about by these processes.
In the philosophy of mind, functionalism is the thesis that each and every mental state is constituted solely by its functional role, which means its causal relation to other mental states, sensory inputs, and behavioral outputs. Functionalism developed largely as an alternative to the identity theory of mind and behaviorism.
Introspection is the examination of one's own conscious thoughts and feelings. In psychology, the process of introspection relies on the observation of one's mental state, while in a spiritual context it may refer to the examination of one's soul. Introspection is closely related to human self-reflection and self-discovery and is contrasted with external observation.
Cognitive neuropsychiatry is a growing multidisciplinary field arising out of cognitive psychology and neuropsychiatry that aims to understand mental illness and psychopathology in terms of models of normal psychological function. A concern with the neural substrates of impaired cognitive mechanisms links cognitive neuropsychiatry to the basic neuroscience. Alternatively, CNP provides a way of uncovering normal psychological processes by studying the effects of their change or impairment.
Theoretical psychology is concerned with theoretical and philosophical aspects of psychology. It is an interdisciplinary field with a wide scope of study.
Psychology is defined as "the scientific study of behavior and mental processes". Philosophical interest in the human mind and behavior dates back to the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Persia, Greece, China, and India.
In philosophy, psychology, sociology, and anthropology, intersubjectivity is the relation or intersection between people's cognitive perspectives.
A mental state, or a mental property, is a state of mind of a person. Mental states comprise a diverse class, including perception, pain/pleasure experience, belief, desire, intention, emotion, and memory. There is controversy concerning the exact definition of the term. According to epistemic approaches, the essential mark of mental states is that their subject has privileged epistemic access while others can only infer their existence from outward signs. Consciousness-based approaches hold that all mental states are either conscious themselves or stand in the right relation to conscious states. Intentionality-based approaches, on the other hand, see the power of minds to refer to objects and represent the world as the mark of the mental. According to functionalist approaches, mental states are defined in terms of their role in the causal network independent of their intrinsic properties. Some philosophers deny all the aforementioned approaches by holding that the term "mental" refers to a cluster of loosely related ideas without an underlying unifying feature shared by all. Various overlapping classifications of mental states have been proposed. Important distinctions group mental phenomena together according to whether they are sensory, propositional, intentional, conscious or occurrent. Sensory states involve sense impressions like visual perceptions or bodily pains. Propositional attitudes, like beliefs and desires, are relations a subject has to a proposition. The characteristic of intentional states is that they refer to or are about objects or states of affairs. Conscious states are part of the phenomenal experience while occurrent states are causally efficacious within the owner's mind, with or without consciousness. An influential classification of mental states is due to Franz Brentano, who argues that there are only three basic kinds: presentations, judgments, and phenomena of love and hate.
The cognitive revolution was an intellectual movement that began in the 1950s as an interdisciplinary study of the mind and its processes, from which emerged a new field known as cognitive science. The preexisting relevant fields were psychology, linguistics, computer science, anthropology, neuroscience, and philosophy. The approaches used were developed within the then-nascent fields of artificial intelligence, computer science, and neuroscience. In the 1960s, the Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies and the Center for Human Information Processing at the University of California, San Diego were influential in developing the academic study of cognitive science. By the early 1970s, the cognitive movement had surpassed behaviorism as a psychological paradigm. Furthermore, by the early 1980s the cognitive approach had become the dominant line of research inquiry across most branches in the field of psychology.
Psychologism is a family of philosophical positions, according to which certain psychological facts, laws, or entities play a central role in grounding or explaining certain non-psychological facts, laws, or entities. The word was coined by Johann Eduard Erdmann as Psychologismus, being translated into English as psychologism.
In psychology, mentalism refers to those branches of study that concentrate on perception and thought processes, for example: mental imagery, consciousness and cognition, as in cognitive psychology. The term mentalism has been used primarily by behaviorists who believe that scientific psychology should focus on the structure of causal relationships to reflexes and operant responses or on the functions of behavior.
The philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of the mind and its relation to the body and the external world.
Although modern, scientific psychology is often dated from the 1879 opening of the first psychological clinic by Wilhelm Wundt, attempts to create methods for assessing and treating mental distress existed long before. The earliest recorded approaches were a combination of religious, magical and/or medical perspectives. Early examples of such psychological thinkers included Patañjali, Padmasambhava, Rhazes, Avicenna and Rumi.
Functional psychology or functionalism refers to a psychological school of thought that was a direct outgrowth of Darwinian thinking which focuses attention on the utility and purpose of behavior that has been modified over years of human existence. Edward L. Thorndike, best known for his experiments with trial-and-error learning, came to be known as the leader of the loosely defined movement. This movement arose in the U.S. in the late 19th century in direct contrast to Edward Titchener's structuralism, which focused on the contents of consciousness rather than the motives and ideals of human behavior. Functionalism denies the principle of introspection, which tends to investigate the inner workings of human thinking rather than understanding the biological processes of the human consciousness.
Epistemological pluralism is a term used in philosophy, economics, and virtually any field of study to refer to different ways of knowing things, different epistemological methodologies for attaining a fuller description of a particular field. A particular form of epistemological pluralism is dualism, for example, the separation of methods for investigating mind from those appropriate to matter. By contrast, monism is the restriction to a single approach, for example, reductionism, which asserts the study of all phenomena can be seen as finding relations to some few basic entities.
Structuralism in psychology is a theory of consciousness developed by Edward Bradford Titchener. This theory was challenged in the 20th century.
In linguistics, the term formalism is used in a variety of meanings which relate to formal linguistics in different ways. In common usage, it is merely synonymous with a grammatical model or a syntactic model: a method for analyzing sentence structures. Such formalisms include different methodologies of generative grammar which are especially designed to produce grammatically correct strings of words; or the likes of Functional Discourse Grammar which builds on predicate logic.
