Edwin Boring Quotes (20 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

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Famous Edwin Boring Quotes

“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 Boring

Edwin G. Boring (1942) Sensation and Perception in the History of Experimental Psychology, Preface. p. xi

“The gift of professional maturity comes only to the psychologist who knows the history of his science.”

Edwin Boring

Cited in: David Ballin Klein (1977) The Unconscious: Invention Or Discovery? p. iii;
A History of Experimental Psychology, 1929

“It is not likely that the history of psychology can be written in the next three centuries without mention of Freud's name and still claim to be a general history of psychology… Perhaps, had Freud been smothered in his cradle, the times would have produced a substitute, It is hard to say. The dynamics of history lack control experiments.”

Edwin Boring

Cited in: Eric Shiraev (2010) A History of Psychology: A Global Perspective. p. 314
A History of Experimental Psychology, 1929

“[ Titchener ] always seemed to me the nearest approach to genius of anyone with whom I have been closely associated.… He was competent with languages, and could ad lib in Latin when the occasion required it. If you had mushrooms, he would tell you at once how they should be cooked. If you were buying oak for a new floor, he would at once come forward with all the advantages of ash. If you were engaged to be married, he would have his certain and insistent advice about the most unexpected aspects of your problems, and if you were honeymooning, he would write to remind you, as he did me, on what day you ought to be back at work.”

Edwin Boring

Source: Psychologist at large, 1961, p. 22–23: As cited in: Hergenhahn (2008;274)

“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.”

Edwin Boring

Source: "A history of introspection." 1953, p. 172 ; Cited in: Kurt Danziger, "The history of introspection reconsidered." Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 16.3 (1980): 241-262.

“[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.”

Edwin Boring

Source: A History of Experimental Psychology, 1929, p. 740; As cited in: John Nisbet, "How it all began: educational research 1880-1930." Scottish Educational Review 31 (1999): 3-9.

Edwin Boring Quotes about science

“The historical approach to understanding of scientific fact is what differentiates the scholar in science from the mere experimenter.”

Edwin Boring

Source: Psychologist at large, 1961, p. 3

“Broca’s famous observation was in itself very simple. There had in 1831 been admitted at the Bicêtre, an insane hospital near Paris, a man whose sole defect seemed to be that he could not talk. He communicated intelligently by signs and was otherwise mentally normal. He remained at the Bicêtre for thirty years with this defect and on April 12, 1861, was put under the care of Broca, the surgeon, because of a gangrenous infection. Broca for five days subjected him to a careful examination, in which he satisfied himself that the musculature of the larynx and articulatory organs was not hindered in normal movements, that there was no other paralysis that could interfere with speech, and that the man was intelligent enough to speak. On April 17 the patient— fortunately, it must have seemed, for science—died; and within a day Broca had performed an autopsy, discovering a lesion in the third frontal convolution of the left cerebral hemisphere, and had presented the brain in alcohol to the Société d’Anthropologie.”

Edwin Boring

Source: A History of Experimental Psychology, 1929, p. 71: As cited in: Hergenhahn (2008;248)

“Scientific truth, like puristic truth, must come about by controversy. Personally this view is abhorrent to me. It seems to mean that scientific truth must transcend the individual, that the best hope of science lies in its greatest minds being often brilliantly and determinedly wrong, but in opposition, with some third, eclectically minded, middle-of-the-road nonentity seizing the prize while the great fight for it, running off with it, and sticking it into a textbook for sophomores written from no point of view and in defense of nothing whatsoever. I hate this view, for it is not dramatic and it is not fair; and yet I believe that it is the verdict of the history of science.”

Edwin Boring

Source: History, psychology, and science. 1963, p. 68; Paper "The Psychology of Coutroversy", (1929)

Edwin Boring Quotes

“Leibniz foreshadowed the entire doctrine of the unconscious, but Herbart actually began it. Wundt was to appeal first to unconscious inference in order to explain perception, and then to apperception. Fechner was to take from Herbart the notion of the measurement of the magnitude…”

Edwin Boring

Source: A History of Experimental Psychology, 1929, p. 246 (p. 257 in 1950 edition)

“[ Gustav Fechner ] was troubled by materialism… His philosophical solution of the spiritual problem lat 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.”

Edwin Boring

Source: A History of Experimental Psychology, 1929, p. 269; Cited in: Robert R. Holt, ‎Sigmund Freud (1989) Freud Reappraised: A Fresh Look at Psychoanalytic Theory, p. 148.

“Psychologically attention is drainage, whatever it may be physiologically.”

Edwin Boring

p, 642
A History of Experimental Psychology, 1929

“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.”

Edwin Boring

Source: "A history of introspection." 1953, p. 174; As cited in: Danziger (1980;257)

“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.”

Edwin Boring

Edwin Boring, "Elementist Going Up", The Scientific Monthly (March 1953), p. 183

“Titchener interest lay in the generalized, normal, adult mind that had also been Wundt's main concern.”

Edwin Boring

Source: A History of Experimental Psychology, 1929, p. 407

“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!”

Edwin Boring

Source: History, psychology, and science. 1963, p. 128: As cited in: Hergenhahn (2008;254)

“I believe that robotic thinking helps precision of psychological thought, and will continue to help it until psychophysiology is so far advanced that an image is nothing other than a neural event, and object constancy is obviously just something that happens in the brain. That time is still a long way off, and in the interval I choose to sit cozily with my robot, squeezing his hand and feeling a thrill -- a scientist's thrill -- when he squeezes mine back again.”

Edwin Boring

Edwin Boring (1946). Mind and mechanism; Cited in: Melford E. Spiro (1992) Anthropological Other Or Burmese Brother?: Studies in Cultural Analysis.. p. 68

“So far as consciousness goes, one does one's thinking before one knows what he is to think about.”

Edwin Boring

Source: A History of Experimental Psychology, 1929, p. 397: Cited in: Jay M. Jackson (2013) Social Psychology, Past and Present: An Integrative Orientation, p. 28

“American psychology inherited its physical body from German experimentalism, but it got its mind from Darwin.”

Edwin Boring

Source: A History of Experimental Psychology, 1929, p. 494

“The experimental psychologist… needs historical sophistication within his own sphere of expertness. Without such knowledge he sees the present in distorted perspective, he mistakes old facts and old views for new, and he remains unable to evaluate the significance of new movements and methods. In this matter I can hardly state my faith too strongly. A psychological sophistication that contains no component of historical orientation seems to me to be no sophistication at all.”

Edwin Boring

Source: A History of Experimental Psychology, 1929, p. ix; As cited in: Baldwin R. Hergenhahn (2008). An Introduction to the History of Psychology. p. 5