Concept
Faculty psychology
Overview
Faculty psychology is the idea that the mind is separated into faculties or sections, and that each of these faculties is assigned to certain mental tasks. Some examples of the mental tasks assigned to these faculties include judgment, compassion, memory, attention, perception, and consciousness. For example, we can speak because we have the faculty of speech or we can think because we have the faculty of thought. Thomas Reid mentions over 43 faculties of the mind that work together as a whole. Additionally, faculty psychology claims that we are born with separate, innate human functions.
The views of faculty psychology are explicit in the psychological writings of the medieval scholastic theologians, such as Thomas Aquinas, as well as in Franz Joseph Gall's formulation of phrenology, albeit more implicitly. More recently faculty psychology has been revived by Jerry Fodor's concept of modularity of mind, the hypothesis that different modules autonomously manage sensory input as well as other mental functions.
Faculty psychology resembles localization of function, the claim that specific cognitive functions are performed in specific areas of the brain. For example, Broca's area is associated with language production and syntax, while the Wernicke's Area is associated with language comprehension and semantics. It is currently known that while the brain's functions are separate, they also work together in a localized function.
Additionally, faculty psychology depicts the mind as something similar to a muscle of the human body since both function the same way. The way of training a muscle is by repetitive and brutal training in order to adapt the muscle to the type of workout you’re putting it through. Therefore, by putting your mind through plenty of brain-exercising problems, your mind will also increase in knowledge. In fact, it is also called ”mental discipline”.“Mental discipline” is also the best way to train one’s mind intellectually because when you’re focused, you’re motivated to learn. For example, an athlete who works on their sprinting every day, by running the same distance every day. After a certain time, their body is gonna adapt to the energy and the effort they put into their training. Similarly, if a student were to read the same book weekly for an entire year. They will eventually have read the same book 52 times, and by reading this often, their mind will process the information quicker when they see the same words and will share a deeper understanding and meaning of the same book.
Some psychologists brand it as a fallacy due to it being outdated, but others think that it is a necessary philosophical standpoint with added things for the conclusions of experiments because of bias. Faculty Psychology is branded as a philosophy due to the advancements in science. The term ‘faculty’ has been abandoned by psychologists due to their thinking that is old-fashioned, though many psychologists still abide by this philosophy. Many psychologists have moved on to newer psychological philosophies based on the theories they came up with on the brain and how it works with the help of modern technology.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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In this stage it is a resultant from previous separate association and apperception processes. Then follows in the second stage of expression in speech, an analysis of that total idea into its parts, in which these parts are always put into close relations with each other. Such relations are called by grammarians subject and predicate, noun and adjective, verb and adverb, &c. The grammatical meaning of these…
Wilhelm Max Wundt, An Introduction to Psychology Translated from the Second German Edition
States what Faculty psychology is; the author is tied to Faculty psychology in the knowledge graph.
In proof whereof, we ourselves cannot know many things all at once, forasmuch as understand many things by means of many ideas. But our intellect cannot be actually informed by many diverse ideas at the same time, so as to understand by them; as one body cannot bear different shapes simultaneously. Hence, when many things can be understood by one idea, they are understood at the same time; as the parts of a whole…
Aquinas Thomas, Summa Theologica, Part I
States what Faculty psychology is; the author is tied to Faculty psychology in the knowledge graph.
This is done two ways. First, by keeping the idea which is brought into it, for some time actually in view, which is called CONTEMPLATION. 2. Memory. The other way of retention is, the power to revive again in our minds those ideas which, after imprinting, have disappeared, or have been as it were laid aside out of sight.
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume 1
States what Faculty psychology is.
Related ideas
- Empiricism
- Innatism
- Thomas Aquinas
- Phrenology
- Thomas Reid
- Theology
- Introspection
- Wilhelm Wundt
- Experimental psychology
- Broca's area
- Jerry Fodor
- Franz Brentano
Place in the tradition
Part of Mind.