The Würzburg School today: The three—now four—world theory and new psychological research

Abstract

Research in cognitive psychology has been by and large dominated by attempts to explain how psychological processes can be explained as products of biological ones; these processes are presumed to be causal. These theories fail to account for and be integrated with theories of non-causal mental activities. In order to bridge this gap a new theory of mental processes is needed. Karl Popper and John Eccles’s three world theory offers a promising path. According to this view there are biological entities, rational thought processes and ideas’. It is a revision of a view that Popper adopted as a member and student of the Würzburg School, which held that there are biological entities, causal psychological processes and ideas’. By going back towards the original and redoing it as a four world theory, by adding to it non-causal rational thought processes, the unfortunate widespread influence of associationist psychology and inductivist methods may be overcome and new social aspects of cognitive psychology may be opened.

Qualitative psychology of the Brentano school and its inspirations (another look at empirical qualitative research)

“…And although he was ultimately wrong in his dispute with the representatives of the Würzburg School (who subjected the thinking process to experimental research), the qualitative nature of mental phenomena was not negated in this dispute. Moreover, it was then possible to discover and describe qualities such as the imageless nature of thinking, goal-directedness, task-determination, and creative thinking (Hackert & Weger, 2018; Wettersten, 2019).…”

Languaging as Emergent Constraint-satisfying Self-organizing Activity

“…However, it has no way of showing that utterances are forms of mental process that are directed to posing and solving problems, finding solutions, exploring possibilities, testing hypotheses, and so on. If signs are determined by the workings of an internal 'language mechanism' to create psychological associations of signifiers and signified, they could not be manifestations of adaptive, intelligent human activity (see also Wettersten, 2019). Rather than the dead end of the associationistic psychological views of the sign as a pairing or an association of a form with a meaning (e.g., Adami, 2019;Bezemer & Jewitt, 2009;Saussure, 1971Saussure, /1915, intrinsic functional constraints on languaging activity are the work of a complex non-optimized system (the self) that draws on the available resources in contextsensitive ways in order to yield social and cognitive outcomes.…”