All The Way Up or All The Way Down? Some Historical Reflections on Psychological Continuity by John D. Greenwood

In this paper I chart the history of the development of theories of psychological continuity in the modern period. In providing the logical geography of competing positions, I distinguish between two forms of strong psychological continuity and discontinuity, between theories of strong continuity and discontinuity between cognitive and associative processes and between theories of strong continuity and discontinuity between human and animal psychology and behavior. I note that both forms of strong continuity and discontinuity have tended to be affirmed or denied together, and have only rarely and recently been decoupled, opening up new theoretical positions in the debate. While the historical trend in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was to extend explanations in terms of association “all the way up” to the highest human cognitive processes, some contemporary theorists have tried to extend cognitive explanations “all the way down” to encompass associative processes. I draw some tentative conclusions about the theoretical options in contemporary research on psychological continuity.

Philosophy Seminar Series
Date: Thursday, 21 January 2016
Time: 2pm – 4pm
Venue: AS3 #05-23
Speaker: John D. Greenwood, City University of New York
Moderator: Dr Qu Hsueh Ming

About the Speaker:

John D. Greenwood was educated at the Universities of Edinburgh and Oxford, and teaches in the PhD Programs in Philosophy and Psychology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His main interests are in the history and philosophy of social and psychological science. He is the author of Explanation and Experiment in Social Psychological Science (1989), Relations and Representations (1989), Realism, Identity and Emotion (1994), The Disappearance of the Social in American Social Psychology (2004) and A Conceptual History of Psychology: Exploring the Tangled Web (2014, 2nd ed.)

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