functionalism

An American school of psychology based principally on the University of Chicago at the turn of the 19th century. It owes something to William James but a great deal more to John Dewey, who has been described by E. G. Boring as the 'organizing principle' behind its emergence. Apart from Dewey, its principal advocate was James Rowland Angell, for many years professor of psychology at Chicago, who stressed the functional significance of adaptive behaviour and viewed mind as mediating between the environment and the needs of the organism. As E. G. Boring wittily put it: 'Functionalism represented the Philosopher's approach to a science that had rebelled against Philosophy'; it was often contrasted with Wilhelm Wundt's structuralism.

As an outcome of functionalism, experimental work on animal behaviour and its neurological foundations developed rapidly at Chicago, particularly at the hands of C. M. Child, G. E. Coghill, and J. B. Watson before he became a doctrinaire behaviourist. Indeed functionalism did much to lay the foundations of biological psychology as we know it today. The term functionalism is now more often used to denote functionalist theories of mind.

Functionalism emphasized learning by adapting to situations, and incorporating skills from largely unconscious learned behaviour. It introduced some evolutionary ideas into psychology because innate behaviour could be included. Consciousness was introduced when behaviour was not sufficiently functional to perform tasks unconsciously. Functionalism became swamped by behaviourism, which quite recently gave way to cognitive psychology.

(Published 1987)

— O. L. Zangwill

---