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At the end of the nineteenth century, psychology was growing quickly as a discipline, as more and more universities opened new departments and research institutes. Because there were two importantly different versions of scientific psychology at the time, each university had to decide whether its psychology faculty would be Wundtian structuralists or Jamesian functionalists. This led to a fierce and often impolite debate between structuralists and functionalists in the 1890s and the first decade of the twentieth century. Because psychology was a new discipline at the time, much of the debate was published in what we now think of as philosophy journals (such as Mind and The Philosophical Review). Here we will consider three key entries in the debate: E. B. Titchener’s “Simple reactions” (1895) and “The postulates of a structural psychology” (1898a) and John Dewey’s “The reflex arc concept in psychology” (1896).

The names “structuralism” and “functionalism” appear for the first time in Titchener’s “The postulates of a structural psychology” (1898a). Titchener uses these names to make a straightforward argument by analogy with research in biology. In biology, one must first do anatomy, to see what the parts of the organism are; then one does physiology, to see how those anatomical parts behave. Only after these two steps is it appropriate to speculate about the function of these parts and processes. Structural psychology, Titchener’s new name for Wundtian atomistic psychology, respects this ordering; functional psychology, Titchener’s new name for Jamesian descriptive psychology, does not – it starts by speculating about what psychological entities are for, before knowing what psychological entities exist.

The debate between these two positions precedes the invention of their names, however. In “Simple reactions” (1895), Titchener recounts and defends the experimental results of Ludwig Lange, a researcher in Wundt’s lab. Lange had gathered evidence that experimental participants have slower reaction times if they attend as much as they can to the sensory stimulus (e.g., a flashing light), rather than attending as much as they can to their behavioral response to it (e.g., pushing a button). Several of the later attempts to replicate the finding failed to do so. On its face, this does not seem to be the sort of claim that would attract criticism, or the need for defense from that criticism. In fact, however, the experiments stand in for the whole of the structuralist research program. “The simple reaction-time is the interval elapsing between the mental ‘receiving’ of a sense-impression and the execution of a movement in response to that impression” (1895, p. 74). In structuralist psychology, all of the basic atoms of conscious experiences, as well as all of the unconscious inferences that are involved in perception and thought, exist in that interval. In Lange’s findings, for example, the atoms required for the two tasks are the same, except for the object of attention. Therefore, any differences in timing that occurs is because of differences in temporal duration between attention to stimulus and attention to response. So experiments like Lange’s are investigations of the temporal properties of the atoms of conscious experience, in this case two different forms of attention. This kind of experiment is the foundation of the structuralist approach. “The reaction method has been extensively employed for the determination of the duration and for the analysis of certain complex mental ‘acts’: cognition, discrimination, association, choice, etc.” (1895, pp. 77–8).

According to structuralists like Titchener, not just simple reactions but all mental activities have the following structure: first, there is a stimulus, caused by physical stimulation of receptors; then there is a linear series of mental acts; then there is a behavioral response. Suppose that there are two simple reactions, A and B, which differ only in that A requires the series of mental acts one, two, three, and four whereas B requires only mental acts one, two, and three. Then one can determine the duration of mental act four by subtracting the time it takes to perform simple reaction B from the time it takes to perform simple reaction A.

Although he mentions neither Lange nor Titchener, Dewey is directly responding to them in his “The reflex arc concept in psychology” (1896). Dewey describes the structuralist view of simple reactions as a “reflex arc.” (It is an arc because it begins in the body, ascends to the mind, and returns to the body.) He argues that the structuralist understanding of the reflex arc commits “the empiricist fallacy,” the assumption that the parts of something are prior to the whole. The empiricist fallacy, in other words, is nothing other than the Wundtian and structuralist claim that whole mental acts, like the reflex arc, are molecules composed of more elementary atomic sensations and feelings. In rejecting this, Dewey argues that all actions, from simple reactions to the most complex intelligent behavior, are organic circuits that cannot be understood by breaking them into parts. Out of context, a part of an action is devoid of meaning of any kind, a “series of jerks.” Furthermore, the division of a simple reflex into parts can only be done after the fact. Something can only be identified as a stimulus after one identifies the response. In other words, in an organic circuit, what the response is determines the nature of the stimulus. That is, a visual stimulus never results in mere seeing; rather it leads to seeing-in-order-to-grasp or seeing-in-order-to-identify or seeing-in-order-to-touch. So, the Wundtian and structuralist idea that different simple reactions are composed of the same parts, mixed and matched, is fallacious. This view is an important precursor of James Gibson’s ecological psychology (Chapter 10)

The back-and-forth between structuralists and functionalists did not end with a decisive victory, but simply fizzled out. Most American psychologists of the first ten years of the twentieth century considered themselves functionalists. In Europe, and especially Germany, functionalism found essentially no footing. The debate was effectively ended by the rise of behaviorism, a version of psychology that led the discipline into closer alliance with the natural sciences, and away from the humanities permanently.