Home › Authors › Edwin Boring
Edwin Boring Quotes
1886–1968 United States
Edwin Garrigues Boring (23 October 1886 – 1 July 1968) was an American experimental psychologist, who later became one of the first historians of psychology.
United States Academics Psychologists Also known as: Edwin G. Boring, Edwin Garrigues Boring
Random Edwin Boring quote
14 quotes
American psychology inherited its physical body from German experimentalism, but it got its mind from Darwin.
The gift of professional maturity comes only to the psychologist who knows the history of his science.
David Ballin Klein (1977)
Titchener interest lay in the generalized, normal, adult mind that had also been Wundt's main concern.
The historical approach to understanding of scientific fact is what differentiates the scholar in science from the mere experimenter.
Psychologically attention is drainage, whatever it may be physiologically.
So far as consciousness goes, one does one's thinking before one knows what he is to think about.
p. 397: Cited in: Jay M. Jackson (2013)
Half the time I read Hayek's The Sensory Order with amazement at the extent of his reading and comprehension … he is right … most of the time.
He was troubled by materialism.
Introspection with inference and meaning left out as much as possible becomes a dull taxonomic account of sensory events which, since they suggest almost no functional value for the organism, are peculiarly uninteresting to the American scientific temper.
Sometimes I fear that, if Harvard does not give up trying to turn itself from an Institution of Learning into an Educational Institution, we may have a generation of professors whose duty it will be to disseminate information which they have not the time to acquire.
Edwin G. Boring (1942)
Introspectionism got its ism because the protesting new schools needed a clear and stable contrasting background against which to exhibit their novel features. No proponent of introspection a the basic method of psychology ever called himself an introspectionist.
His philosophical solution of the spiritual problem lay in his affirmation of the identity of the mind and matter and in his assurance that the entire universe can be regarded as readily from the point of view of its consciousness... as it can be viewed as inert matter.
A History of Experimental Psychology (1929)
Fechner laid down the general outlines of his program [psychophysics] in ZendAvesta, the book about heaven and the future life. Imagine sending a graduate student of psychology nowadays to the Divinity School for a course in immortality as preparation for advanced experimental work in psychophysics! How narrow we have become!
[William James, in the 1890s] began that metamorphosis of German psychology which was to alter the Teutonic worm of sensory content into the American butterfly of functional reality.
Topics Edwin Boring is quoted on
Works