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On making sense. An exploration of Wundt’s apperceptionist account of meaningful speech
Author(s) -
Kock Liesbet
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
journal of the history of the behavioral sciences
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.216
H-Index - 26
eISSN - 1520-6696
pISSN - 0022-5061
DOI - 10.1002/jhbs.21929
Subject(s) - historiography , positivism , epistemology , psychology , relation (database) , interpretation (philosophy) , empirical psychology , cognitive psychology , theoretical psychology , sociology , linguistics , philosophy , history , computer science , archaeology , database
In the wake of the critical reorientation in the historiography of psychology, a number of scholars challenged the one‐sided structuralist and positivist interpretation of Wilhelm Wundt’s work. This paper aims at contributing to these recent efforts, by providing an analysis of the way in which Wundt’s apperceptionism conditioned his account of the relation between thought and speech, and by extrapolation, of disorganized thought and speech. While Wundt’s pivotal role in the development of the psychology of language is relatively well‐known, discussions on this part of his theorizing tend to focus exclusively on his gestural or motor account of language. This obliterates the complex theoretical background of Wundt’s theory of language and speech, as well as its systematic place within his psychological system. Highlighting this neglected dimension of Wundt’s theorizing, however, could open up a new horizon of pressing research questions in the historiography of psychology.