Workshop:

Emancipation and Collaboration: Interactions Between Philosophy and Psychology in Early Twentieth-Century North America

Unlike in Germany, there was no psychologism controversy in the United States. The institutional emancipation of psychology from philosophy in the late nineteenth century took place largely under the auspices of constructive cooperation, which reached its peak during the first third of the twentieth century.

The aim of this workshop is to explore the diverse connections between American philosophy and psychology from circa 1900 to the 1930s. Philosophical currents such as idealism (J. Royce, M. W. Calkins, W. E. Hocking ), neorealism (R. B. Perry, W. P. Montague, E. B. Holt), critical realism (C. A. Strong, D. Drake, R. W. Sellars), pragmatism (C. S. Peirce, W. James, J. Dewey), and operationalism (P. W. Bridgman) will be examined in relation to psychological schools such as structuralism, functionalism, behaviorism, and Gestalt psychology. The focus of interest includes, among other things, the relationship between perception and environment, the status of consciousness, the mind-body problem, and the role of purposes and interests in cognition. The publication of workshop proceedings is planned and will be submitted to de Gruyter, Berlin.

Date:

9-10 October 2026

Location:

Conference Center Erbacher Hof, Mainz

Program:

Friday, October 9

9:00 – 9:30
Matthias Neuber (Mainz)
Welcome

9:30 – 10:15
Gary Hatfield (Pennsylvania)
Russell and Behaviorism: Watson vs. Thorndike

This paper considers Russell’s engagement with psychology and behaviorism in two related streams. The first is the rise of objective methods, understood to be the use of behavioral observation, within especially American psychology. It pursues the question of whether introspection or self-report can be a legitimate basis for scientific research. Among psychologists, Watson said no, but Thorndike, a leading animal psychologist who used objective or behavioral methods, said yes. The paper follows a long thread in which Thorndike defends introspective methods. Russell develops some of the same arguments around 1920, and he joins Thorndike in denying that privacy and publicity exclusively describe (respectively) introspection and behavioral observations. Regarding Watson’s behaviorism, Russell initially found it to be more plausible than he had expected, but concluded that it couldn’t be the only psychology. In the Analysis of Mind, Russell connects his evaluation of Watson with E. L. Thorndike’s trial-and-error learning theory. Russell supports Thorndike’s law of effect over Watson’s law of frequency.

10:15 – 11:00
Lisa Kampen (Radboud)
Psychologism and the Self: Mary Whiton Calkins and Hugo Münsterberg on the Distinction Between Psychology and Philosophy

One of the recurring arguments in Mary Whiton Calkins’s (1863–1930) intellectual framework is her proposal for a division between the science of psychology and the discipline of philosophy. She stresses that “philosophy seeks to discover the ultimate or irreducible nature of any (or of all) reality, whereas a science limits itself to one group of facts” (Calkins 1910). This argument does not prevent Calkins from placing the self at the center of both disciplines, developing both a self-psychology and an absolute personalism.
In the first part of my lecture, I will draw a connection between Calkins’s argument for the division between psychology and philosophy and Hugo Münsterberg’s warning against psychologism. In 1898 and 1899, Calkins’s Harvard mentor Münsterberg published a series of essays in which he sought to teach “his pragmatic American audience a German philosophical lesson” (Stoffers 2003). I argue that these essays influenced Calkins’s proposal for the distinction between the two disciplines, but that Calkins made an important amendment to Münsterberg’s limitation of the psychological domain. Whereas Münsterberg sought to keep the self out of psychology, Calkins, drawing on her other mentors, James and Royce, was motivated to include the self in the empirical subject matter of psychology, while keeping it distinct from the metaphysical self of philosophy.
In the second part of my lecture, I will explore Calkins’s arguments for the distinction between a psychological self and a philosophical self, as well as the tensions that arise from this distinction. By attending to Calkins’s early arguments as well as her later work on religion and ethics, I argue that Calkins occupied a complicated position in attempting to apply Münsterberg’s German philosophical lesson to the American context. Even though she reiterates her distinction between psychology and philosophy in different forms throughout her work, she grounds her psychological self in philosophical commitments, while her philosophical self is informed by psychological observations.

11:00 – 11:30
Break

11:30 – 12:15
Michael Annacker (Bochum)
Willy-Nilly – the Real and the Given in C. I. Lewis

C. I. Lewis was one of the leading figures in American philosophy of science during the first half of the twentieth century. Until the late 1980s, the standard interpretation portrayed Lewis as a foundationalist whose commitment to the given underpinned his rejection of metaphysical realism. Renewed interest in pragmatism, however, has challenged this reading. Cheryl Misak, for example, argues that Lewis rejected foundationalism and favoured a form of natural realism characteristic of the pragmatist tradition.
I argue that both interpretations are plausible, yet both overlook Lewis's historical context and, consequently, miss his central philosophical aim. Rather than offering a new conception of concepts, Lewis sought to show that a pragmatist approach could reconcile three seemingly incompatible commitments: a Kantian framework for understanding the role of the aprior, a straightforward empiricist account of justification, and a pragmatist conception of genetical theory construction. It was this philosophical ménage à trois, rather than a redefinition of concepts, that lay at the heart of his project.

12:15 – 13:15
Lunch

13:15 – 14:00
Sander Verhaegh (Tilburg)
Logical positivism and American psychology

Logical positivism reshaped mid-twentieth-century American philosophy, fueling the rise of an analytic approach to the study of science and language. Yet its influence on American psychology appears less straightforward. Some historians have written about a ‘marriage’ or an ‘alliance’ between logical positivists, behaviorists, and operationists; others deny that U.S. psychologists were significantly influenced by the European émigrés (Koch 1964; MacKenzie 1977; Smith 1986; Kitchener 2004). This paper aims to find a middle ground between these accounts by examining it through the lens of the institutional split between philosophy and psychology. I argue that while (1) logical positivists built substantial working relations with psychologists in the 1930s and 1940s, when the two had institutional and intellectual motives to seek cross-disciplinary collaborations, (2) the two grew apart in the years after the war, when both fields professionalized and were increasingly incentivized to focus on intradisciplinary discussions.

14:00 – 14:45
Cornelis Menke (Mainz)
Experimental design, randomization and the Economy of Research: Charles S. Peirce and experimental psychology

Of the many ideas and fields of research that Charles S. Peirce is said to have founded or anticipated, pragmatism is arguably the most well-known. Given that Peirce worked as a practising scientist in various roles and fields of research, including geodetic studies, astronomy and experimental psychology, for over 30 years, and described himself as a 'man of science', surprisingly little is known about the relationship between his theory of inquiry and his practice as a researcher.

This relationship has been reexamined in recent years (e.g., T. L. Short), not least in light of his work in experimental psychology (C. Cristalli). These experiments—particularly those he conducted in 1883–84 with J. Jastrow—are renowned in the history of statistics for several experimental innovations and their experimental design (S. Stigler, I. Hacking). They are generally considered the first psychological experiments in America.

The talk examines the relationship between Peirce’s psychological research and his theory of research. It considers whether his psychological experiments were genuinely the first randomized experiments, as they are considered to be, and explores their relationship to Peirce’s theory of the ‘Economy of Research’, which he developed during the same period in the context of geodetic experiments with reversible pendulums, and which he continued to pursue until 1913.

18:00 – 19:30
Dinner

Saturday, October 10

9:00 – 9:45
Galen Strawson (Austin)
Real direct realism: Charles Augustus Strong

This paper considers the theory of perception of the neglected American philosopher and psychologist Charles Augustus Strong (1862–1940). It examines his direct realism, his (sober) enactivism, and his emphatic rejection of what later came to be known, following the work of Wilfrid Sellars, as ‘the myth of the given’. It explains the respects in which his directrealism is not any kind of naïve realism, but is, in the terms of his time, a form of critical realism. It argues that his general theory of perception is one of the best to be found in philosophy, is entirely open to integration with current neuroscientific work, and deserves careful study.

9:45 – 10:30
Claudia Cristalli (Tilburg)
Pragmatism's Psychology: From Functionalism to Values

Today, psychology textbooks introduce structuralism and functionalism as mutually exclusive movements at the origins of experimental psychology. This does not need to be (and was not always) the case. In fact, the Chicago school of philosophy emerging at the turn of the twentieth century saw functionalism as structuralism tempered with evolution and the environment (Angell & Moore 1896; Dewey 1896). I reconstruct this intellectual history, which highlights the porous boundaries between pragmatism (the philosophy) and functionalism (the psychology). Next, I follow the figure of Charles S. Morris into the first half of the twentieth century. His project to conduct a scientific study of values allows us to trace new connections between different schools of psychology, philosophy, and sociology.

10:30 – 11:00
Break

11:00 – 11:45
Alexander Klein (Hamilton)
Why Can’t You See Your Own Eyes Move in a Mirror? Holt’s Experimental Psychology as Pre-History of New Realism

E. B. Holt’s dissertation, The Motor Element in Vision, earned him the PhD in 1901 for empirical research he conducted at Harvard’s psychology laboratory under Hugo Münsterberg. Later published in polished form as “Eye-Movement and Central Anaesthesia” (Langfeld 1946), the work seeks to explain why visual awareness is suppressed during voluntary eye movement (more precisely, during what today would be called voluntary saccades; Holt 1903). A pointed illustration of this phenomenon had already been documented in the psychological literature by the late 19th century: it is difficult, under normal conditions, to see your own eyeball move in a mirror. Holt’s dissertation project is to experimentally isolate this phenomenon and then explain why it occurs.

In this talk, I shall examine Holt’s experimental work, which is interesting for several reasons. Holt is a founding member of the New Realists, and an important influence (along with James) on Russell’s neutral monism. Although philosophers often think of New Realism and Russellian monism as quite conceptual, we will find that these movements have at least one important root in experimental psychology. In particular, I will show that Holt’s philosophical thinking about the relationship between consciousness and the body (as exemplified in later works like Holt 1912, 1914) took early shape in the context of his experimental work. Second, Holt’s interpretation of his own experiments explicitly appealed to Münsterberg’s “action theory” of consciousness, which is a step more radical than James’s better-known work. In James’s catch-phrase, “consciousness is motor,” the “is” is the is of predication, not identity (Klein 2025); but Münsterberg argued that contents become conscious in virtue of stimuli getting connected in the right way with motor discharge. Hence Holt’s experimental work can be understood as an important step in the radicalization of philosophical and psychological views associated with James’s early work on mind, moving such functionalist thinking down the path towards behaviorism.
Holt, Edwin B. 1903. "Eye-Movement and Central Anaesthesia." The Psychological Review: Monograph Supplements 4 (1):1-45.
---. 1912. "The Place of Illusory Experience in a Realistic World." In The New Realism: Cooperative Studies in Philosophy, edited by Walter T. Marvin Edwin B. Holt, William Pepperrel Montague, Ralph Barton Perry, Walther B. Pitkin, Edward Gleason Spaulding, 303-73. New York: Macmillan Company.
---. 1914. The Concept of Consciousness. New York: Macmillan.
Klein, Alexander. 2025. Consciousness Is Motor: William James on Mind and Action. New York: Oxford University Press.
Langfeld, Herbert S. 1946. "Edwin Bissell Holt: 1873 - 1946." Psychological Review 53:251-58.

11:45 – 12:45
Lunch

12:45 – 13:30
Uljana Feest (Hannover)
Gordon Allport and the Two Cultures of Personality Research

Recent approaches in personality psychology have re-discovered the individual person as an object of study, thereby raising the question of how this interest might be compatible with the typical understanding of science as aiming at generalization. This has also led to a revival of the nomothetic/idiographic distinction. It is not so clear whether and how these two distinctions map onto each other or onto the related dichotomy between quantitative and qualitative methods. In my talk I will attempt to shed light on these issues by laying out that Gordon Allport (1897-1967), an important figure in American personality psychology, was already grappling with related questions. While drawn to humanistic and idiographic approaches, such as those by William Stern, Wilhelm Dilthey, and Wilhelm Windelband, he was also immersed in the quantitative and nomothetic understanding of psychology at the time, which ended up gaining the upper hand in US psychology. I will provide a close reading of Allport and some of the philosophers that influenced him to make sense of his conviction that these two perspectives on personality are compatible.

13:30 – 14:15
Matthias Neuber (Mainz)
Tolman and the Realists

Along with Clark L. Hull and B. F. Skinner, Edward C. Tolman is considered one of the leading figures of neo-behaviorism in psychology. His relationship with the philosophy of his time was complex. He had connections to both operationalism and logical empiricism. Less well known are his connections to American realism of that period. In my talk, I will argue that Tolman was initially influenced by American neorealism (R. B. Perry, E. B. Holt), but that over the course of the 1930s he began to move in a direction closer to American critical realism (R. W. Sellars), which rivaled neorealism. It will become clear that this trajectory led Tolman to become one of the pioneers of the cognitive revolution in psychology.

19:00
Dinner
Restaurant Heiliggeist