Hostname: page-component-7b7567c8c-7pwfn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-11-15T10:05:16.812Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

R-Systems Versus Psychological Spaces

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

Robert Francis Creegan
Robert Francis Creegan*
Affiliation:
Cumberland University.
Get accessRights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Certain traditional philosophic contradictions, pertaining to a postulated duality between mind and body, which at the same time is used to explain their functional unity, have been translated in contemporary thought into terms of certain contradictions, pertaining to a postulated duality between psychological worlds and the physical world, which at the same time is used to explain how one or the other somehow constitutes its contrary. Nevertheless, however unsuccessful hitherto, the more modern formulation of these connections at least provides a field within which progressive logical operations towards a non-contradictory synthesis are possible. Recently such an approach was developed in J. T. Culbertson's article, “A Physical Theory of Sensation”, which appeared in the technical scientific section of this Journal, vol. 9, No. 2, pp. 197-226. The present discussion concerns some of the problems suggested by that theory, which was so stated that it could very easily be converted into a statement concerning the structure of relations between any given psychological world and the physical world.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 9 , Issue 4 , October 1942, pp. 376 - 379
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1942

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

1 The present discussion follows not only from the article, but also from the Ph.D. dissertation (Yale 1940) of which the article was an adaptation, and from a series of discussions with its author.

2 K. Lewin. “Principles of Topological Psychology.” N. Y., 1936.

3 Thus the theory is as compatible with a Gestalt, or with a functional psychology, as it is with a reflexological system.

4 These certain patterns are the “trees” which mediate an R and its R system.

5 Including truths qua valuable.

6 Nor, in these cases, does the R-system correspond to the “common sense” stimulus-object. It is an isomorph of certain abstracted experience properties, only.