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Commentary

The “Psychical” As Secondary and as Secret

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

Ralph Gregory
Ralph Gregory*
Affiliation:
Nashville 6, Tenn.
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Extract

If I miss not the tenor of points and counterpoints, a recent discussion in this journal has been a novelly natural transaction in behalf of a great question at which many philosophers have labored—What is the place of Mind? R. S. Lillie, an eminent physiologist has been working toward a philosophical justification of certain biological key-facts, and H. Heath Bawden, a pioneer naturalist in philosophy and psychology, has been urging a physiological counter-statement. Both are logical men of science and aim to rest on facts. Why do they define and value the “psychical” differently?

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Type
Article Commentary
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , January 1948, pp. 76 - 79
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1948

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References

1 Vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 202–226, and vol. 7 no. 3, pp. 314–36. His book, General Biology and Philosophy of the Organism, is a treatment of the same question at greater length.

2 Vol. 14. no. 1, pp. 56–67. His paper in The Psychological Review, vol. 53, no. 3, pp. 150–161, displays his main concept.

3 Student notes of his thought around 1900 make this clear. He elaborated a theory like that succinctly given by Dewey in his Logic, chp. 2. The psychical was recognized as a particular expression of natural evolution in his The Definition of the Psychical, vol. 3, pp. 77–112 of the University of Chicago Decennial volumes.

4 E.g., Mind, Self and Society, p. 338.

5 This discrimination has probably received its most useful clearing by the science of signs. Morris has given it special regard in his Signs, Language and Behavior, pp. 23–, and 49–.

6 Lillie's example p. 39 of his book. Cp. Bawden's interpretation of sentence writing, “The Presuppositions of a Behaviorist Psychology,” p. 186, The Psychological Review, vol. 25, no. 3.