Titchener’s structuralism

Edward Bradford Titchener (1867-1927) advocated an introspective approach to psychology he called structuralism. He chose this name because he believed the first task of experimental psychologists should be to discover the structure of the phenomena they were investigating, before concerning themselves with functions—following the example of biologists, learning anatomy in order to understand physiology. He agreed with his teacher Wundt that introspection must be used carefully and only under precisely controlled conditions. But he did not share Wundt’s distrust of the chemical element analogy, and even argued that the primary goal of experimental psychology was the introspective analysis of conscious experience into its most basic elements of sensation and feeling. It’s not surprising that he believed all conscious experience could be reduced to introspectively accessible sensory images—if only one knew how to introspect properly. For Titchener, introspection was no casual inner pondering, but rather a rigorous procedure that required careful training. Introspectors had to reduce all their mental contents into the most basic elements, while working hard to avoid what Titchener called the stimulus error—the imposition of meaning or interpretation on their subject.

Titchener estimated there are more than 43,000 distinguishable elements of sensory experience, more than 30,000 of which are visual, and 11,000 of which are auditory. He found just four specifiable elements involved in taste, and three in the sensations of the digestive tract. Titchener assigned the study of smell to one of his best early Ph.D. students, Eleanor Acheson McCulloch Gamble (1868–1933). In a densely packed doctoral thesis, published under the title “The Applicability of Weber’s Law to Smell,” Gamble struggled with the problem of how to define and measure the countless types of sensations we experience through our nose. In the end, Gamble was unable to isolate individual smells that could be considered elements the same way as visual shapes or auditory tones, but she was able to estimate a just noticeable difference for her roughly measured objective intensities of smells. Despite Titchener’s difficulties in classifying smell sensations and images, Titchener believed he had found an elemental sensory base for almost everything else he analyzed introspectively, including Wundt’s key process of attention. Attention, he argued, was a matter of the clarity with which something is imagined or perceived, accompanied by a vague sense of concentration arising from sensations of the tiny facial movements that occur simultaneously with a thought.

Source: Fancher, R. E., & Rutherford, A. (2017). Pioneers of Psychology: A History (5th ed.). W.W. Norton And Company