[Week 3] ARTICULATION

1. My Argument

 I want to argue that positivism is mankind's arrogance.  'Arrogance' means that 'looking down on someone, over-believing one's power and ability.' Human are believing and depending on the power of science too much and considering the world as something to be able to conquer. However, we can't prevent the storm perfectly and understand principles of the universe. Furthermore, we are afraid of natural disaster. These suggests that we can't conquer the world and nature with science and technology.


2. How I Found My Argument

 My first research question is 'Can human understand all secrets of the human's mind?' At first, I read a book titled as 'SNU Collected Lectures' and was impressed the mostly by the chapter about philosophy, especially positivism. Furthermore, in the 'Advanced English Writing' class, our textbook explained the limitation of Skinner's Behaviorism which tried to explain human's mind only with scientific method. From these contents, I begun to doubt the ability of positivism. Originally, I set my topic as 'Positivism is Human's Arrogance.' However, I thought that this topic was too abstract to set as research question and I targeted 'all things about the world' as 'understood subjects' in my topic. However, it was too extensive. So I shaped up my topic again as 'Can human understand all secrets of the human mind?'
 My research helped me to understand what is positivism exactly and how many psychologists studied human's mind by comparing two bipolar schools of psychology, Skinner's behaviorism and Freud's psychoanalysis. So, I can figure out the problems of behaviorism, which represents the positivism in psychology more easily.


3. Research Questions

I have following research questions now and I'll do these research during this class.

a) What is positivism exactly?      --->            (Done!)
b) Is Behaviorism a kind of positivism in psychology?
c) Behaviorism's influence
d) Positivism's limitations and Behaviorism's limitations
d) How should psychologist study human's mind?

< Freud (1856~1939)













Skinner(1904~1990)            >



4. Connection to the Harvard Sampler

In the Harvard Sampler, chapter one, 'The Human Mind', Author suggested behaviorism and psychoanalysis to explain how psychologists studied the human mind in the past and said that the cognitive-biological approach', which prevails today's methodology of psychology research appeared against behaviorism because it made a lot of errors. So, my topic - Can Human understand all secrets of human mind - is related to our textbook enough.